Excerpt from The English Village Church: Exteriors and Interiors Ichurch institute, the community house and even the club room itself. The holding of fairs and the sale of merchandise within, or around churchyards, occasionally encroached on the porches of the very building itself and while such proceedings were deemed improper by ecclesiastical pronouncement, yet the church was the in uence which dominated to _a great degree the playing and the bargaining of the parishioners. In certain churches dancing in the nave undoubtedly took place at rare festival seasons and, in the troublous times or when fires occurred, the parishioners were allowed to store wool and grain or chests of valuables and even household goods within the church, paying, of course, a small amount for the privilege. The church sometimes became the place of safety for valuable papers and records or deeds, these being stored in the strong chest, and in those fierce days when limbs were lopped off and life taken for comparatively trivial offences by a cruelly severe state, the church on the contrary bore perpetual witness to the spirit of mercy by insisting on all her consecrated churches and churchyards being regarded as hallowed ground and a safe sanctuary, under defined limits, for all wrong-doers, and Doctor Cox in his very interesting and instructive book, The English Parish Church, from which the above is paraphrased, goes on to say, there was probably not a single parish church in the whole length and breadth of Eng land which has not exercised at some time or another in its history, the privi lege of sheltering a fugitive and in eventually substituting banishment from the realm in the place of loss of life or limb. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."