 Can everybody hear, hands up those who can't hear me, you can, if I come a bit closer, is that better for those at the back, those who are using loops or whatever. Good evening everyone. One wet July day nearly six years ago, we had some spare time between appointments in Essex, so Vicki and I thought of visiting Clare Church just over the Suffolk border. On the way, we drove through Stoke by Clare. I'd been studying the usual documentary sources for music and organs in the late and medieval period for three years, reading inventories, church wardens accounts, wills and so on. I remembered reading something about this place, Stoke by Clare, so we stopped to take a look at the church. At first, it seemed a rather dull place. Its nave windows were garish 19th century examples, all yellow diagonal strikes with texts on them. But within a few minutes, we had made two very interesting and totally unexpected discoveries, and that's the beginning of why we are all here this evening. First, on the north side of the sanctuary, about eight feet up from the floor, were three sawn-off ends of what looked like joists. Then we noticed a curious opening to the west of this, that's left on the slide. At first, it looked like a window, and indeed that's what personal thought it was. But closer examinations showed that it had never been glazed, and that there were three steps up to it from behind. It was also high enough and wide enough for a person to pass through. Was it perhaps an access, an entry to what might have been a gallery further east? It seemed like it, because it still was at the same level as those sawn-off stubs. Then Vicki found the vestry key hidden in a choir pew, not well enough hidden. Once inside the vestry, we could see the back ends of the two outer joists. They were about five inches by four inches in cross-section, still embedded in the 25-inch thick wall between chancel and vestry, and strong enough to support a considerable weight. Above them was a ceiling with finely moulded oak beams, with a trap door in its far corner. On going back outside the church to look at its east end, we could see that there was indeed an upper room above the vestry. Although we couldn't get up there that day, here was an interesting mystery with two things in this church that may not have been correctly interpreted before. On coming back home, we soon found two early 16th-century inventories of the College of Stoke-by-Clair, which mentioned a standing organ among the three organs in the church. We knew this would be a reason for the joists we'd seen, had there been a gallery or perk here to support a high-upstanding organ. We knew that some research had been done in Suffolk, following the rediscovery in the 1980s and 90s of two important organ relics, dating from the middle of the 16th century. This included a reinterpretation of socket holes on the north side of the ruined chapel of Walberswick Church on the Suffolk coast. Three months later, on a bright November day, we went there and measured them. We went on to find similar evidence at nearby Covehive, where we also found what seemed to be an opening to give access to a gallery or perk, just like the one at Stoke-by-Clair, but much higher up. On the same day, we were able to visit the upper story of a north-east building attached to the Chancellor of Dennington Church. Here, we found what was clearly a hole for the organ's wind trunk, just at the right height to pass directly into the organ's sunboard and pipes, 13 feet and 4 inches above the floor. This was the first definite evidence we had seen that supported our developing theory. This was, and still is, that later medieval organs were often placed on a perk on the north wall of the sanctuary, with their bellows housed up a room or loft behind it in an attached north-east building. This would be a sensible place to house organ bellows. They can make creaking noises, and they're visually distracting to operate. This idea meant that we could also begin to suggest practical reasons for buildings that are usually dismissed with vague descriptions, such as the priest's room or the abode of an anchorice. Not usually both. Back in Sophica a year later, we visited Cran Cratfield Church, well known for its extensive church wardens accounts. Vicki opened the doors leading into the West Hall tower, and this is what she saw. It is as certainly as it's possible to be at present half of the perk that supported the organ of the sanctuary of that church. Cratfield's accounts mentioned that an organ was purchased in or by 1497, and that its casework and perhaps frontpikes were painted and gilded soon after. Later accounts include a payment in about 1576 of four shillings for taking down the case, and presumably for that respectable sum, moving it elsewhere and setting it up in the church. Doing this freed the north sanctuary gallery to be moved to the tower to house the clock mechanism instead, and it saved a long climb up the tower to wind it up. The style of construction of the lower parts of the gallery structure fits perfectly into the system of socket holes we'd seen at Warberswick. Its floor joists also go into the wall in the same way that we'd seen at Stokeby Clare. So now it seemed clear that there really was evidence in secret places in churches just waiting to be found. This hard physical evidence could bring documents to life, amplify and explain them. It was evidence that also provoked many further questions. We seemed to be looking at things that had not been explained before. And it was about this time in late 2012 that we found out about your society's research award scheme. So we applied for one and received what became the first of three grants at the end of April 2013, and the hard work really began. Our use of the word unsung in the title is alas literally as well as figuratively true. The medieval Latin church's music came to an end abruptly and violently in 1548. Since then there have been more than 450 years for us to forget that there was an intimate connection between the architecture of churches and the music they were designed to shelter. This amnesio is a collective one. On the one hand, few architectural historians write or talk about music. It's even impossible to write whole books about councils or colleges without actually referring to their chief activities. On the other side, even the best known music historians seem never to consider the practical implications of the music they are discussing. Neither the daily professional lives of its practitioners nor how medieval music's architectural setting evolved. But why did the music stop and become lost to our collective memory? At Christmas 1547, preparations were being made for the forthcoming Book of Common Prayer under the guidance of Archbishop Thomas Cranwell. Among decisions made then was to push a fierce statute through Parliament. This was to order the surrender of Latin service books from every church and cathedral and to have them all delivered to sheriffs and bishops. Huge fines for non-compliance and large payments to informers were key to the success of what must have been a traumatising command. Countless church wardens accounts include payments for carrying piles of books away from churches to be given up. This operation was carried out from summer 1548 onwards when these altar and choir books were destroyed by being burnt or cut up into pieces. This terrible Holocaust ended 1500 years of Latin music throughout England and Wales. What was there to destroy? From around the year 1300 onwards church people had been obliged to provide at least nine Latin books for use in choir and sanctuary. Later medieval inventories show that most churches, colleges and cathedrals possessed many more. In fact up to 40 such books and volumes seems to be quite common even in modest churches. So this destruction of mostly handwritten and often illuminated parchment books must have encompassed, we estimate, a total of around 200,000 books. Of this total music books formed at least two thirds. A mere handful escaped the conflagration. The best known music volume which did survive was an illuminated choir book. A presentation copy compiled for Henry VI's new college at Eaton around 1490. But this survives only to less than two thirds of its original extent and this is a crying shame. Because its surviving index shows that it contained originally a nationwide sample of the best of the fully developed polyphonic English music of the late 15th century. It's not boasting but plain fact that this music completely outclasses all other European music of the period. We've recently learned there were prototype blast furnaces at Rivo Abbey. If these had been allowed to come into operation in the late 1530s they would have sparked off an industrial revolution 200 years earlier. In just the same way what would English music which was already the admiration of continental masters have achieved if left to develop longer. It's only during the last 15 or 20 years that we've been capable of singing and recording music from the Eaton Choir Book. And that shows what a long and deep trough the famous and cherished English chorus edition has been through for the last 500 years. So English music was not allowed to rise to even greater heights of expertise. And even worse the mass destruction of its Latin music resulted in any mention of church music being almost entirely missing from later Edwardian, Marian and Elizabethan inventories and accounts. We wonder if this absence and the long subsequent silence have misled scholars into thinking there wasn't any widespread practice of music in the later medieval church. Such an idea is however light years away from the truth. Another reason for our collective amnesia is what one might call the long shadow of 19th century misapprehensions. When restoring councils in English churches, most Victorian churchmen followed continental tridential models, forgetting that they were dealing with buildings designed for the English Salisbury units and other local rites. In addition there was a fatal flaw in the chosen Victorian medievalising model. With continental 16th century counter reformation policies had come a complete clear out of councils in favour of the primal status of the altar. Choirs, organs and rude screens were removed. There were so many changes made then that even in an otherwise iconic building such as Chartres Cathedral the Chancellor does not remotely represent its medieval state. By contrast English churches were not affected by these counter reformation changes. The almost total neglect of councils for three centuries in the British Isles has meant that evidence can still be found in them. At least where it has not been eradicated by 19th century restoring architects. We have investigated, survey, measured and photographed nearly 10% of the surviving English medieval churches during the last six years. What have we found? What were medieval chances really like? I think the first thing we have to say is that we have been very surprised at just how many signs of their medieval design views were waiting to be discovered. But they needed to be searched for. Some signs now seem obvious but we had just not understood their significance. Other signs were obscured by previous interpretations. One simple instance of this is the absolutely ubiquitous door from outside into the Chancellor. Everyone knows this as the priests in the singular door but very few have said why it is there or realised who actually did use it. In fact it was there because this was the access for all who worked in the Chancellor and those represented the ordained ministry in all its varying degrees. Here worked boys of age six and upwards who were learning to carry the incense boat and to sing. Here were young candle bearers, adolescent clerks, senior holywater clerks, sub-deacons and deacons. Here were older laymen, professional singers and choir directors. Among the ordained priests here were cantorists or chantry priests and auxiliary stipendry priests. In charge of all these were the parishes vicar or rector or the colleges dean or warden. All these people were there in any numbers that any particular church could manage to support. There were also those who kept the sacrifices and the vestries clean and tidy and guarded the treasuries. These were all tonsured men and boys, those who were ordained to work in the Chancellor. After the clerks' entry door the most common surviving features, though not now visible everywhere, are ceremonial washing places. Now called piscinas, they were used at various times during the mass and called lavatories. No doubt because the priests would say silently, lavabo inter in a centez manus mei o sicum darbo al teori tuum. I will go before the altar and wash my hands in innocence. The niche were also used for holding the chalice brought in by the deacon at the start of the service, until it was placed on the altar at the offertorium at the start of the canon of the mass. This is why there is a shelf in many piscinas, or why the bold drain is often much smaller than the opening, or why the drain is offset. They are also to be found in sacristias where they have not been turned into mere vestries. Most in frequency of survival or restoration come the fixed seats on the south or epistle side near the altar. These are what the Victorians call cedilia, but they are just referred to as seats in medieval documents. They were used by the various celebrants in the sanctuary during the singing of the epistle, during other lessons or the short homilies given at the sanctuary's step. By contrast, choir stalls as their name implies were not primarily seats but places to stand, to sing, often for several hours a day. On an ordinary day it takes at least two and a half hours to sing the eight offices, with a further three quarters of an hour for an ordinary or ethereal mass. Each additional lady or requiem mass would take another hour or so. This adds up to around four hours and often more each day. On Sundays and feast days services are longer and more complex, with some litanies in processions as well. The daily offices consist of a mix of canticles, hymns and psalms. All 150 psalms are sung every week. All these were sung by heart. Having been learned as a young boy for whom knowledge of the Psalter and basic canticles was a prerequisite for entering the singing choir. Here a six-year-old boy began his career sitting on a bench or form in front of the higher choir stalls. So he entered education, just like many of us I imagine, when we started at school, or those years ago, in the first form. There is the first form. Between the choir stalls and the sanctuary was a step into the space across the chancel between the outside talk store and the door into the sacristy or vestry on the opposite side of the chancel. Chancel workers gathered in this space once robed and ready to process either into the choir stalls or into the sanctuary, depending on their functions. The various openings in the choir stalls allowed for entry into them or for coming out in groups to sing written polyphonic music around the central lectern or for one person to sing a lesson in the centre of the choir. With evil services but not at all static and in smaller churches there were no doubt many and various jobs to be done by the choristus, as that's the people who work in the chancel. Not only singing but also for instance ringing bells of various sizes, ringing up veils or chasubles or large candlesticks at the consecration. And this then is the workplace of the clerks in Holy Orders, which is still, as we just heard, the official title of a professional priest. Choir stalls are graded. From the lowly first form there is a step to the second form and then one more step up again to the stalls of the highest, third or senior rank. These upper stalls have hinged seats which are now called misericords but the reason for their mobility is not only to give them enough room to move into them and stand to sing comfortably in them. One also has to be able to turn eastwards to acknowledge the altar or on entering and leaving the choir to bow in due deference towards the senior clergy standing in the western return stalls. And the same gradation of due and decent order was also designed into the floor levels of the chancel. This is very often been obscured by 16th century and then 19th century alterations. Starting just west of the choir or rude-screen doors there are one or two steps up into the space between the choir stalls. Going eastwards of the stalls there is another step up to the gathering place between the doors and then a third step up into the sanctuary. Around the altar there may be a small further step. The altar pace of wood, stone or brick is a small carpet over it in front of the altar. The altar itself was a fairly large and thick slab of fine stone with a profile on its ends and front. Its back was set partly into the east wall of the sanctuary. Its front being supported on a high plinth or pillars. Behind the altar were various tables or a single long re-table. Tables were either shallow, carved and painted niche with paintings inside them or were knotting a Malabastor scenes. All these were painted and gilded and fixed to the wall under the east window. When altars were removed and broken up these tables were destroyed as well and a whole genus of English art was lost. There were other normal chancel finishings but some of these are now less easy to see. Many were demolished or deliberately bricked up and plastered over by order of the out-of-control Geneva bishops of Elizabeth's reign. These included the Easter sepulchers which were used for the burial and resurrection rites of the last three days of Holy Week. They also seem to have played a part in the feast of Corpus Christi celebrated in June towards the end of the church's ceremonial year. There were also lockable cupboards called stops lined with fine wood. They were used to store the books and handbells that were used every day at the various altars and in the choir. Now we come to the two most important matters that designers of chancels would have been particularly keen to get right. They knew very well what was going to be performed in them so they took care to design their lighting and their acoustics. We now tend to think of windows as vehicle sustained glass or so they should be but only to the extent that they can still function as windows that let in light as well. Many Victorian chancels are so dark with dull hue and glass that it's impossible to read music in them even in broad daylight without the lights on. As you see in those pictures. As a result we have not appreciated the significance of the gradual increase of size of chancel windows as time went on. The daily variations in the performance of the liturgy were set out in the handbook called the ordinal. This comprised the psalms, canticles, antiphons and lessons proper to each day using a system which became too complex to commit to memory. Ordinals would therefore need to be used by those who stood in the western choir stalls and the first larger windows installed in chancels are indeed to be found there. These windows sometimes included low sections often still with their shutters. They were placed so as to give as much light as possible for the two day break offices, matins and lords. Those parts of the mass that varied from day to day made it vital to have good lighting in the sanctuary as well. A late medieval altar was therefore lit not only by the east window often enlarged for the purpose but also by new larger northern and southern ones too. At this time lectins in the form of eagles began to appear in churches. The most expensive of these were made from imported brass and were placed in the north part of the sanctuary to support large illuminated gospel volumes. These and their wooden counterparts used with the epistles on the south side also needed lighting from larger side windows so that the deacons and sub-deacons could see to sing their respective texts. Histories in the 19th century altered the roofs of chancels quite drastically. They removed their ceilings and very often replaced their structures with spindly softwood rafters. But originally they were curved resonant ceilings carefully proportioned and lined with wood or plaster and then decorated. Acoustically valuable and ornamental cellures were also installed over altars and the room. These and the ceilings helped singers to perform long and complex services with the relaxed awareness of their job required. During the 14th and 15th century chancels were very often built as double cubes. We have studied those carefully but I'm afraid there's no time to discuss that this evening. The later medieval period saw a widening out of chancels to accommodate even more ceremonial at additional side altars and doing this tended to dull down their acoustic response but it actually suited the new different style of sung polyphonic music. Clearer acoustics now would tend to help singers because they now needed to hear easily of the various musical lines sung by the others. Nor is the time this evening to discuss our surveys and studies of choir screens, parclote screens and rudelots in any detail. Or their former platforms and balustraves and the lights that the balustraves carried. Or the golgathors or the light size crucifixes that hung from eyes or hooks in the chancel archers. All these would, like so many aspects of our work, require another few lectures. So here are just a few brief observations. We've investigated the internal structures of rude and other screens and measured mortise holes in their upper beams so that we can reconstruct their missing upper structures. We've also measured their lower entry-dolls and their lost steps noting where they start. Those that are wider and easier of access on the east suggest to us some theories over their liturgical use by those who worked in the east in the chancel and sanctuary. However, to put all transverse screens into the same category as rude screens would be to misinterpret them because any analysis of their practical functions shows that they had many and varied forms. There might be simple division screens with a few oil lights maintained by a nimble person able to negotiate steep steps only 18 inches wide or even less, and a platform only about three feet across. Or they might be large structures with wide-excess staircases that supported platforms up to twice that width. One would also need to differentiate clearly parochial rude screens with their dooms above them on the west side of a central tower from choir screens placed on the east side of the same tower. An eastern screen might have supported a platform for the collegiate organ if the arch was high enough. Or it could have been a place from which singers sang in antiphony with those below. Perhaps this possibility led one of two late 19th century writers to suggest that organs were always on rude screens. A host of other authors have since copied this idea without thinking through the practical implications of such a sweeping and therefore misleading statements. Developed late medieval polyphonic music required the intensive musical and intellectual training of boys. Their choir presence was often therefore reserved for singing at high altamasses or the masses and vestments of our lady performed in her chapels. In school boys were naturally taught Latin and its concomitant grammar and rhetoric, giving them a universal language for any career path they chose to take later on. They also learnt to play the organ, the instrument of the composer players who wrote down the best of their improvisations. Two century later the sons of Handel, Bach, Haydn and Mozart families and many others were still being taught in much the same way. By the 15th century many colleges at first, just bands of clerks and priests linked by their liturgical life had become fully fledged teaching institutions. It has been calculated that by the start of the 16th century there was a free grammar school for every 7000 of the population and such schools were to be found everywhere throughout the land. I said just now that priests and clerks in colleges were linked together and it seemed to me that the word college must have originated as something like co-ligory to attach or link together. Collegiality started in Anglo-Saxon minsters long before the establishment of the parochial system. It's meaning for us only as a place of higher education is a much later post medieval idea. You may think that this linking idea is only a theory but in fact there are at least two signs of this older meaning still in medieval councils. First it's clear that plenty of people were involved in working in them. You only have to see how many seats there are if you count and total up all the choir stalls, the cedilia and the stone benches around the walls and councils and side chapels. Second we've found a visible sign of this community in very many churches where it can also be shown that music and liturgy were taken seriously. I'm referring to what we've come to call downgrading I think their real significance, string courses. The significance of these first came into our consciousness with a visit I made to the former collegiate church at Wingham halfway between Canterbury and Sandwich in Kent. The string course in the castle here caught my eye because it seemed to be entirely carved from Bethesdon marble. Using even relatively local marble seemed a bit excessive for what we had always understood to be a sort of builder's level, a practical but otherwise unimportant ornament. So on returning home I googled string course. Here I found that such string courses are still part of the architectural language of orthodox churches where they symbolise the girdle of Christ that binds together a community of priests and believers. We reasoned that because the catholic western orthodox east had been the same church until the great sism of the 11th century, this ornament must once have been a shared symbol. And indeed we went on finding that these so-called string courses were anything but level. Instead they snaked their way around window sedilia and Easter sepulchers in almost every one of the 200 also collegiate chances we have surveyed. And in fact they could be seen in other chances too where there is also evidence of numbers of singers and clerks. This suggests to us that these places were also collegiate in some less strict or perhaps simply undocumented sense. What should we now call these no longer humble symbolic stones? A girdle course or a binding course perhaps? By the latter part of 2013 we were benefitting from the support of the society and able to spend more time in each place. This made it possible among other activities to persuade church wardens to take us into places they were sometimes hesitant to allow us to see or even haven't visited themselves. One striking example of this was on our second visit to Causton Church in Norfolk. We finally persuaded a very reluctant church warden to unlock a small building on the northeast side of the Chancellor and this turned out to our great surprise and joy to be a perfect chartery chapel, complete with its painted ceiling, an altarpace and the remains of frescoes. It was not a figure at all, even in detailed books about that famous church. On one of our return visits to Soakby Clare we were able to visit the college buildings there, now a school, in company with their consulting architect. In those parts of the college house that are documented to have been rebuilt under the wardenship of Matthew Parker, we saw that the same kind of moulded oak beams with leafed stockchampers we had found in the vestry and other parts of the church. There is now no doubt that the east end of the church at Soakby Clare was the college chapel, at least from the time that the church itself had been rebuilt to its present form in the late 15th century. It's just two minutes gentle walk from the college building. This nearness and the special ceiling beams and the position of the standing organ and its access were vital clues for understanding the real situation there. Investigating the architectural and musical archaeology at Soakby Clare, carefully on the spot produced a reinterpretation of the church building and the college. Now we will look rapidly at four case studies to see what new light can be shed on even some well-known buildings. For at least four 19th century architects, as well as some 20th century historians, the collegiate estate church at Shottersbrook has been a model building. It was copied by Benjamin Ferry, written about by Butterfield and Mitchell, and restored by George Street, a fellow of the society. However, not all its secrets have yet been revealed, we think. It was built in the 1330s with a dual purpose as both a very small estate church, that is the present nave with its font, and as a college and perpetual chantry for the soul of William Trussell. This double role makes the church in fact anything but a normal parish church. The collegiate part comprises the majority of the building, the transep chapels with the founders' tunes in the north, and the singing chancel and sanctuary. These have appointed barrel roof structure, which was originally sealed with plaster. There is also some later perpendicular work of uncertain date. The chancel itself is a fine example of original 14th century work, but there is one important alteration where the symmetry of its windows is broken on its north side. Its north-east window, that's on the extreme left, has been blocked up and a doorway pierced through the wall below it. If an external two-story building was built here at the same time as the perpendicular alterations, perhaps around 1425-50, then this would have been created for the same reasons as the one at Stoke-by-Clare. Such an addition would be fully consistent with changes in musical practices, including an accelerating installation of organs that took place during the 15th century, together with a typical rapidly increasing acquisition of additional vestments, books and ornaments. One might think it's strange that such a building could have disappeared so completely, but we'll now look at two places where this certainly did happen. The hunting hills of southeastern Leicestershire hide a remote, but very fine and unexpectedly large collegiate chapel. Its definitive foundation also dates on the early 14th century, where a charter was drawn up by Roger Martevel, descendant of the family that had held the manna since the conquest. He was Chancellor of Oxford University and later Bishop of Salisbury. As many prelates were to do during the following two centuries, he made plans for the salvation and education of his local folk. Architecturally, the chapel reached its ultimate form in the later 15th century, when it was remodeled with the new flat wooden ceiling and larger east and west windows. Nicholl's history of Leicestershire is always invaluable, but here it is crucial as a description of things no longer visible. A comparison with the view of the north side of the chapel now with his 1792 engraving will make this clear. This is what Nicholl's wrote. Between the tower and the Chancellor there's a small room separated from the tower by a pointed doorway, which is now and has long been walled up. Between this room and the Chancellor on the east side of the doorway is a piscina. In this room also opens a door cased with plates of iron, now much corroded with rust, leading up the stone steps into the loft where the clock is encased. A joining to this loft or chamber is another loft over the small room first mentioned. Out of this chamber was a small circular window into the Chancellor now walled up. Here then we have a documented example of a now missing two-story building, though this time it's sandwiched between the north side of the Chancellor and a tower, also now gone. There are two significant clues as its original designed purpose in Nicholl's on-site testimony. The first is that the door to the stairway from the lower room, a sacristy with a piscina is cased with plates of iron. This reinforcement indicates that up those steps there were precious things to protect. Second, what Nicholl's calls a small circular window into the Chancellor is still to be seen. It's not in line with a site with the altar being placed just behind an arch brace of the roof, but it is on a potential site line to the singers on the south opposite side of the choir. So a possible reason for the window might be that the person who raised the bellows of an organ placed in an upper room, just like at Stoke by Clare or Dennington, could see when the singer's opposite stood up to sing. He could then put some wind into the organ so that the organ player could give them the note to start a canticle, him or some. If so, it's the analogue of similar windows such as the one at Wingham College in Kent again, which also gave a view from the upper bellows room or loft to the opposite choir stalls below. The town and the adjoining rooms at Noseley were demolished earlier in the 19th century and the whole church was scraped and tidied up as late as the 1890s. Without John Nicholl's estimable, thorough and very antiquarian on-site investigations, the historical musical and archaeological value of this remarkable building would have been very seriously impoverished. The well-known tourist church at Stratford is another dual-purpose design. It's college having been founded by John of Stratford in the 1330s when he was Bishop of Winchester. He had been brought up in his name town and would have been a product of its already well-established town grammar school there. Thomas Borsall, Dean of the College, completely rebuilt the Chancellor from around 1491 to about 1521, the time of the compiling of the Eden Choir Book. His Chancellor is clearly designed to provide optimum conditions for the performance of complex polyphonic liturgical music. It's well lit by five sets of large windows and, like nosely, it has a flat-boarded oak ceiling. The church building is a larger version of Shottersbrook in its layout with the central tower and lateral transept chapels. And as at Shottersbrook, there is a blocked doorway on the north side of the Chancellor. Although in this case, it's placed further down just east of the medieval choir stalls. Almost over this doorway is the bust of William Shakespeare who's buried nearby in the sanctuary. This privilege came about through his purchase of new place and its attendant vectorial rites. These had been acquired at the destruction of the college in 1547, of which his father was a witness. This elaborate doorway once led to a substantial building attached to the north of the Chancellor. As far as we could ascertain on the spot, it measured around 20 feet six inches wide by 25 feet long from north to south. The watercolour by Thomas Gertan shows that it comprises three stories rising about 25 feet to the height of the Chancellor's parapet. Here were the storerooms of the college and properly the practice and school room and the dormitory for the singing boys whom the college charter ordained should sleep in the church. Once the college had, as usual, been despoiled, the lower part of this large building was turned into a charnal house. This explains the otherwise rather curious admonition on Shakespeare's graze slab, which warns off anyone who might think of mixing his bones in the charnal house along with those of the hoi poloi. Constant reuse of graveyard space and the consequent digging up of bones reminds us of the conversation between Hamlet and the gravedigger. Since this grave was unmarked, as all external graves were until the 1660s, Hamlet would not have known whose it was. So he was forced to ask, receiving, as we all know, the answer that it was Yorix. If you look carefully at the slide you might see him. This now lost building very probably housed the bellows of the organ too. And if so, the organ itself would have been on a gallery accessible directly from the choir stalls and roughly where Shakespeare's bust is now. The windows behind the bust now are not original, as you can see by comparing these photographs taken before and after alterations made after the death of William Morris. Was there, as it knowsly, a small window, somewhere in the now vanished solid walls behind Shakespeare's bust, placed so that the bellows' razors could see when a cantor on the extra seat in front of the southern choir stalls rose to sing. We will probably never know. Despite Morris' society for the preservation of protection of ancient buildings, having taken an interest in and trying to halt the vicar's rebuilding proposals, much of the stonework inside and outside north of the castle has been very heavily reworked. On our mentioning to a knowledgeable friend that we were intending to survey Saul in Norfolk, he remarked, ah yes, that huge church with the hole in it. We didn't understand what he meant at first, but now I think we do. This church poses two major puzzles to which we're now going to suggest possible answers. First, why are there so many choir stalls in such a remote and rural place? We know that the church is large because it achieved its present form as the result of a building competition between six local landed families, including a branch of the Belins, but there are as many choir stalls here as there are at Stratford on Avon. Also, most unusually for a parish church, there's an outside clerks doorway on the north side of the castle. There is a large area of land to the north of the church that is and always has been part of the cartilage of the church. Although possible crop marks in aerial photographs are not conclusive, we wonder if there were once collegiate buildings here. It would not be surprising if they are long gone because later enclosures and boundary changes have led to the disappearance of all but a tiny handful of buildings around the church. However, establishing a chartery college of clerks and priests was certainly being a very attractive option for the wealthy local families. The building for storage accommodation of the sort that we always provided at Stratford and Noseley, as well as entirely separate college housing. A geophysical ground survey here might unlock these enigmas. The second major puzzle it saw is that there are no signs of at all of any stairway access to the loft over the screen that undoubtedly closed the choir at its western end. There's ample evidence for a large structure here. The curve of its eastern curving is still visible, high up on the north side of the chancel arch. There are two cut-off wooden upstands which rise above the screen's dado. Mortices at its extreme low ends suggest the possibility of a wooden structure which extended westwards from the screen. There are also large northern and southern natural transep chapels funded by the same local menorial families. Altars here are likely to have been thought of as private. So their chapels would have been screened off all the way across their western edges, one bay down the present nave. A large wooden platform with its own staircase could have spanned the crossing to incorporate the western screens of these natural chapels. Such a large structure would have been able to support not only an organ which we know to have been somewhere in the building, but perhaps also the root figures as shown with a doom above. The present pews certainly contain enough medieval parapet carving. There's actually about 72 feet of it to go all the way round such a structure. An organ at Saul could have been placed either centrally to speak into the castle as at newer condunter or placed to one side as in some contemporary Flemish churches. There is no room for a sizeable organ anywhere in Saul's castle. Such pulpitum still exists at for instance Carlisle and Hexham. We now think that there were similar structures now entirely missing in quite a number of churches. The clue to their one-time presence is that there are no stone spiral staircases or other fixed access arrangements. The highly unusual access arrangements at Topnes reminded us that there must have been various ways of reaching organ and choir or root lofts in the past. Many other internal medieval furnishings including organs are missing as we have seen and we have surveyed many places where external buildings are also now missing just as they are at Shottersbrook, Nosley and Stratford and we need to ask ourselves why they were built in the first place and under what circumstances they were abandoned. Current sustainability problems mean that more than ever we need to go well beyond just admiring empty medieval churches. If we have a deeper knowledge of them as busy places of daily work we can imaginatively put working boys, clerks and priests back into these churches. Then we can understand much better how they were designed, how they were equipped and why they needed to be adapted to accommodate liturgical, musical and social changes. Alterations have always been made to churches but some present day adaptations are deeply worrying from musical and archaeological points of view. The wisdom of the Venice Charter is in danger of being replaced by the ignorance exemplified in the recent painting of the Chancellor at Shot. Unfortunately we have seen the results of similar ignorance in England too. Three books, the first of which is now well underway will be the result of our initial research but there is much yet to be discovered by other researchers. It was Professor Peter Williams who started all this work in 2008 and supported us so strongly in carrying it out. Very sadly he is no longer in this world to see its fruits but he said and insisted that our work must be progenitive. We hope it will be. You will find out much more about our work and our future lectures some of them anyway on our website. But especially we must say thank you all for helping us to embark on this very exciting adventure. Thank you.