RECORDS OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE.

PREFACE.

THE commencement of the Eighth Volume of the RECORDS OF BUCKINGHAMSHIRE gives a tangible proof that the Architectural and Archæological Society of the County has been doing some practical work since its formation. The ponderous folios which were required by a past generation to embrace a county history of acknowledged authority cannot be expected to be reproduced in an age so busy and restless as our own. It is all the more important therefore that the isolated articles which appear in archæological publications should be distinctly of merit either historically or archæologically; that each Society's object should be to secure papers in its journals from those best acquainted with different districts, so that in time valuable contributions may be brought together to form a continuous history of the particular County which the Society represents. It is of much consequence to bear in mind that antiquaries of undoubted learning who have compiled their histories. during the last century were for the most part imperfectly acquainted with medieval architecture. They lived before the Gothic revival and were preoccupied in their tastes with the spirit of the renaissance, so that even down to the early part of the present century there were but few amongst the well informed who could distinguish the different styles of Gothic architecture, and still fewer who could single out the successive periods during which these styles flourished and declined. Besides this,

archæologists of a past generation were absolutely unacquainted with the proofs from the river drifts and cave dwellings of the antiquity of man, and therefore the wide field of prehistoric enquiry was unattempted. Whilst attention might be given to the weapons and ornaments found in the opening of a barrow and classifications might be made through these excavations connecting the former with races living on the borders. of historic periods, the implements of palæolithic man in the river drifts or the skilful bone carving of the cave men or the objects scattered in all directions over these islands, whether on the hills or in the valleys, clearly proving the presence of vast populations in the neolithic age, were either undiscovered or unperceived. recent biography of Pengelly reminds us of what this century has learnt from the opening of ossiferous caverns such as those in Devonshire, and how completely the discoveries made have revolutionised previous conceptions as to the date when man made his first appearance on our globe.

The

One of the greatest defects of our County history, without reflecting on its author, for the reasons which may be gathered from the previous observations, is that Lipscomb supplies so meagre and often so inaccurate an account of the architecture of the parish churches. The church is for the most part the only building in the parish the history of which is the primary guide to the history of the district in which it stands. We want to trace its earliest features. We may or may not have been told who was its founder, whether it was built by a Lord of the Manor for his retainers, or whether it was originally reared by the monks for the parish in which they held the great tithes, or the church of a priory, the cell of some religious house. We need to know in detail the points in its history, the font, the arches, the windows, the screens, each is significant of the past. And what a