y well known for its wealth and importance, they form good
indications of the taste of the ancient "city fathers." In 1448 this body
equipped six hundred men, fully armed, for the royal service, and in 1459
they were proud to receive the _Parliamentum Diabolicum_ which Henry VI.
called together within shelter of their walls, and turned to the use of a
public prosecution against the beaten party of the White Rose: hence its
name. One of the private houses, at the corner of Hertford street, bears
on its upper part an effigy of the tailor, Peeping Tom, who, tradition
says, was struck dead for impertinently gazing at Countess Godiva on her
memorable ride through the town.

[Illustration: SPIRE OF ST. MICHAEL'S, COVENTRY.]

The great variety in the designs of windows and chimneys, and the
disregard of regularity or conventionality in their placing, are
characteristics which distinguish old English domestic architecture, as
also the lavish use of wood-carving on the outside as well as the inside
of dwellings. No Swiss chalet can match the vagaries in wood common to the
gable balconies of old houses, whether private or public: one beautiful
instance occurs, for example, in a butcher's stall and dwelling, the only
one left of a similar row in Hereford. Here, besides the ordinary
devices, all the emblems of a slaughter-house--axes, rings, ropes, etc.,
and bulls' heads and horns--are elaborately reproduced over the doors and
balconies of the building, and the windows, each a projecting one, are
curiously wreathed and entwined. This ingeniousness in carving is a thing
unknown now, when even picture-frames are cast in moulds and present a
uniform and meaningless appearance, while as to house decoration the eye
wearies of the few paltry, often-repeated knobs or triangles which have
taken the place of the old individual carvings. The corn-market of
Coventry, the former Cross Cheaping, is another of the city's living
antiquities, as busy now as hundreds of years ago, when the magnificent
gilded cross still standing in James II.'s time, and whose regilding is
said to have used up fifteen thousand four hundred and three books of
gold, threw its shadow across the square. Even villages of a few hundred
inhabitants often possessed market-places architecturally worthy of
attention, and sometimes the covered market, open on all sides and formed
of pillars and pointed arches, supported a town-hall or rooms for public
purposes above. The cross