252 THE ESSEX NATURALIST
prepared and tempered for months. Within the last century cement
mortar has taken the place of lime mortar chiefly owing to quick-
ness and ease of preparation; it has no other considerable merit,
either of appearance or in use. 
There are many traditional arrangements of bricks in courses
or "bonds" as these arrangements are called, but of the eleven
known to be in use the principal practical bonds are the so-called
English bond and Flemish bond. In the former, a course entirely
of ends (headers) is followed above and below by courses entirely
of sides (stretchers); in the latter, headers and stretchers alternate
in each course, care being taken that a header shall come over the
middle of a stretcher in the course below, and so on.
I may say that I have never seen Flemish bond in Flanders,
where English bond is almost universal; Flemish bond was not
much used in Essex until late seventeenth century, when pre-
sumably large-scale immigration of Flemish refugees had ceased.
The names seem particularly unfortunate.
Prior to the fifteenth century no systematic bond was recognised
although a rather complicated arrangement of three headers and
two stretchers seems to occur at Little Wenham Hall.
It may be convenient to remember that the transition from 2in.
to 21/2in. bricks and from English to Flemish bond both occurred
about the Restoration in 1660, when mortar joints also became
thinner. A century previously, about 1550, the expansion of
England's material greatness, what we should now call an increase
in standards of living, gave rise to building and new brickwork in
the land. William Harrison, writing in 1577 of his village of Rad-
winter in Essex, said that the old men remembered that "in their
young days there were not more than two or three chimneys in
most uplandish towns". Shakespeare, ever apt at introducing
features of the social life of his own or recent times (no matter
what the period of the play), makes one of his characters say "he
builded a chimney in my Father's house" and again, a carter in
King Henry IV refers to the "new chimney" of a Rochester inn.
These new chimneys, and other extensive use of brick, expanded
greatly the amount of brickmaking in England, but it is highly
unlikely that bricks were made in large commercial brickfields as
we know them today; rather each builder set up a small kiln near
the site of each building work, although there may have been small
kilns quasi-permanently in use near large towns.
Many devices of brick architecture came to full flower in Eliza-
beth's reign; for example, the diaper pattern produced by specially
selected dark headers in a regular arrangement, usually large
diamond patterns over a chimney or end-wall. This first appeared
in the late fifteenth century and is well seen on Little Leez Priory,
Layer Marney Hall, and Sandon Church and on many other