The Historical Growth of the English Parish Church by A. Hamilton Thompson

This small book is intended to be a companion and complement to the writer’s book in the same series on The Ground Plan of the English Parish Church. In that book the growth of the ground plan is treated with necessarily scanty reference to the circumstances to which, directly or indirectly, that growth is due. Some attempt is made in the present volume to supply an account of the historical conditions amid which our parish churches were built, to say something of the builders, and to remove the popular idea, still current even among educated people, that our architecture is mainly due to the profuse benefactions of the religious orders.