ork.

Next we must bear in mind that every stone would, if possible, have a
mystic signification. For some reason or other this notion makes the
modern man impatient; but this impatience does not alter the facts, but
only obscures their explanation. Everybody knows that the three eastern
lights mean, as they did to St. Barbara, the blessed Trinity; but few
people recognize that all numbers, whether in beams, pillars, sides,
arches, or decoration had a well recognised symbolism, which had come
down, hall-marked by St. Augustine and St. Bernard, to the building and
worshipping generations of those and much later days.

What was done at Witham we cannot now fully tell, for everything has
perished of the upper house. The monks' church would be of stone, and
probably was very like the present Friary Church. The cells certainly
would be of wood in the second stage, for they were of "weeps," as we
have seen, in the first. This part of the Charterhouse we have concluded
stood in a field now called "Buildings," but now so-called without
visible reason.

Round the present Friary Church there were the houses of the original
inhabitants, a little removed from their foreign intruders; not quite a
mile away, as at Hinton, where the two houses are thus divided, but yet
something near three quarters of that distance.

When the inhabitants were removed to Knap in North Curry and elsewhere,
they took their old rafters with them or sold these. Their walls seem to
have been of mud and wattle, or of some unsaleable stuff, and these, no
doubt, served for a time for the lay brethren, after a little trimming
and thatching. But their church had to be looked to before it could
serve for the worship of the _conversi_. The old inhabitants (near two
hundred, Mr. Buckle thinks, rather generously), were still there up to
Hugh's time, and if their church was like their houses the wooden roof
was much decayed and the walls none of the best. Hugh resolved upon a
stone vault of the Burgundian type, followed at the Grande Chartreuse,
and he therefore had to thicken the walls by an extra case. The building
was next divided into three parts, with doors from the north and west,
so that men might seek refuge in the Holy Trinity from the dark of the
world and its setting suns. The stone roof is supported upon small
semi-octagonal vaulting shafts, ending in truncated corbels. This
fondness for the number eight, which reappears markedly at Lincoln, has
to do