THE DEVELOPMENT OF ARCHITECTURE IN ESSEX. 175
4. Absence of buttresses, any projection from the face of the
work having more the character of a pier than a buttress.
In the earlier examples of Norman doors, a stone lintel or arch
was introduced at the level of the springing, and the semicircular
head or tymphana, filled in with masonry, sometimes hatched as in
the north door of Tillingham Church.
The walls of our churches of this period were generally three
feet thick, and sometimes even thicker.
The quoins or corners of the buildings, especially of the churches,
were built square, either with Roman bricks or stone, and this is a point
to which I would specially direct your attention. If you come across
an ancient church with the nave and chancel walls carried up with
square quoins, you may infer that although the doors and windows
and roof have been altered, the walls themselves are of the Norman
period. Another feature of Norman work, but which requires con-
siderable experience to detect, is the mode of building the walls. They
seem to have been carried up in regular layers (I am now alluding to
walls built of pebbles and flints), so that the courses of pebbles can
be distinguished in the same way that we see the courses of bricks
in walls of that material. Rubble and pebble walls of a later period
seem to have been built in what is technically called "random work" ;
that is work where you cannot detect any regular coursed work. Of
course in many of these old Norman walls repairs have been carried
out which sometimes materially interfere with the original coursed
work.
There does not appear to have been, at any rate in Essex much
variety in the design of the old Norman church. Sometimes, but very
rarely, they were built in the form of a cross.
Sometimes the tower was introduced between the nave and the
chancel, as at Boreham. But more generally the church consisted of
a nave and chancel, sometimes with a tower at the west end, but
usually, I suspect, with a bellcot only, over the western bay of nave.
In this description of church there would probably be one or two, or
possibly three, semicircular headed windows at the west end, about
six inches wide and about two feet six inches high, with very slight
external reveal, but a very deep splay all round internally. On the
north and south sides would be, starting from the west end, a similar
narrow window, then a doorway, and then two other windows ; that
is, three windows and one doorway on either side. The chancel
would have two or three windows on either side, and one, two, or