ENGLISH PARISH CHURCHES

dignitaries of their guilds and the fraternities to which they belonged,
built the stately town halls of England, the Netherlands and the
cities of the Hanseatic League. They also built the halls of the London
city companies, and they built the parish churches with their guild
chapels. In designing them they felt that they were working for
themselves and their equals; that was a more intimate connection
between architect and building than had existed before. It gives its
own peculiar atmosphere to the Late Gothic parish church. The largest
of them are no less lofty than cathedrals and abbey churches. The

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39. ST. NICHOLAS, KING'S LYNN, NORFOLK, 1414-19.
tallest of all mediaeval spires in Europe is that of UlmMinster, which
is a parish church. St. Mary Redclifie in Bristol covers a larger area
than many a cathedral. Prosperous small towns such as Lavenham in
Suffolk and dozens of others had parish churches in which the whole
local population could assemble, and the villagers from the neigh-
bourhood still find accommodation. York has (or had before the
Second World War) twenty-one surviving mediaeval churches
besides the Minster.
Where existing churches were not entirely pulled down, they
were enlarged, aisles were widened, naves heightened, new aisles or
chapels added to the old, and the result is the picturesque, happy-go-
lucky irregularity of pkn and elevation of most English parish
churches. However, while such churches may reflect most truly the
history of their towns from the Anglo-Saxon to the Tudor age, they
do not really reflect the aesthetic vision of any one period. What the
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