hard. Analysed by the London County Council analyst it was pronounced by him the strongest he had ever seen. The bricks have been burnt in a very hot fire, and many of them are quite vitrified. There is no doubt whatever of their age, which has been accepted by such authorities as Mr. St. John Hope and the late Mr. Micklethwaite. I suspect the architect of this later period to have been a Frenchman. Brick vaults of the same sort were employed in the south of Normandy and in Anjou and Maine* at this time. Moreover, there is an unusual and remarkable symmetry about the design of the Penchester lodgings, a neatness and a logicalness of arrangement very un-English in character. On the ground floor are two main chambers which appear to have been guard-rooms, each entered by a door from the court, and lit by two trefoil-headed windows looking into the court. There was access from one of them into the lower part of the tower, which is placed quite symmetrically with relation to the rooms. The same arrangement is repeated on the upper floor, except that there both rooms have access to the upper room (a 

garderobe) in the tower, and each of those rooms had two windows, like those below, looking into the court. In the midst of the façade on the court side was a rectangular tower, containing on the ground floor a small vaulted chamber lit by a slit, to which access was obtained from the south guardroom. This may have been a prison or armoury. Above it, on the upper floor, was a lobby approached from outdoors to north and south by two symmetrical staircases, each starting from just without the door leading into the ground-floor rooms from the court. This lobby gave access to the two first-floor rooms, and is one of the best preserved pieces of the old work. I have been thus detailed in describing this building because when Wyatt built the cross-building up against it, dividing the courtyard in two, he broke down one of the staircases and entirely masked the original design, besides destroying some of the windows, so that I only by degrees discovered the original and very remarkable arrangement.
   * My informant is Mr. Ed. Dillon, F.S.A.