annual
bull-baiting on St. Thomas's Day. A good man, one George Staverton,
was once gored by a bull; so he vented his rage upon the whole bovine
race, and left a charity for the providing of bulls to be baited on
the festival of this saint, the meat afterwards to be given to the
poor of the town. The meat is still distributed, but the bulls are no
longer baited. Here at Wokingham there was a picturesque old town hall
with an open undercroft, supported on pillars; but the townsfolk must
needs pull it down and erect an unsightly brick building in its stead.
It contains some interesting portraits of royal and distinguished folk
dating from the time of Charles I, but how the town became possessed
of these paintings no man knoweth.

Another of our Berkshire towns can boast of a fine town hall that has
not been pulled down like so many of its fellows. It is not so old as
some, but is in itself a memorial of some vandalism, as it occupies
the site of the old Market Cross, a thing of rare beauty, beautifully
carved and erected in Mary's reign, but ruthlessly destroyed by Waller
and his troopers during the Civil War period. Upon the ground on which
it stood thirty-four years later--in 1677--the Abingdon folk reared
their fine town hall; its style resembles that of Inigo Jones, and it
has an open undercroft--a kindly shelter from the weather for market
women. Tall and graceful it dominates the market-place, and it is
crowned with a pretty cupola and a fine vane. You can find a still
more interesting hall in the town, part of the old abbey, the gateway
with its adjoining rooms, now used as the County Hall, and there you
will see as fine a collection of plate and as choice an array of royal
portraits as ever fell to the lot of a provincial county town. One of
these is a Gainsborough. One of the reasons why Abingdon has such a
good store of silver plate is that according to their charter the
Corporation has to pay a small sum yearly to their High Stewards, and
these gentlemen--the Bowyers of Radley and the Earls of Abingdon--have
been accustomed to restore their fees to the town in the shape of a
gift of plate.

We might proceed to examine many other of these interesting buildings,
but a volume would be needed for the purpose of recording them all.
Too many of the ancient ones have disappeared and their places taken
by modern, unsightly, though more convenient buildings. We may mention
the salvage of the old market-house at Winste