At Rayleigh, a place that was once accessible by water, there are mounds which indicate the position of a royal castle. This was demolished, and by royal licence the stones were used for building both the church at Rayleigh and Hadleigh Castle. A THAMES BAWLEY. When there is not any trace of an old building that is recorded in history, and the site of which is certain, many people have a vague and unformulated theory that it has somehow decayed away. This may be true of a wooden structure, but brick and stone do not alter much in a thousand years. When there is no castle in a site so marked on the Ordnance Survey it is because some one has deliberately carted it away. Until very recent times little in the way of preserving ancient buildings was practised except in the case of churches. A castle or old manor house, once fallen into disuse, was as a matter of course used as a quarry for building materials. It has always been so. Hillah is built of the bricks of Babylon. The Crusaders' castles of the Palestine coast are of material taken from the temples of Tyre and of ancient remains, and many a stone garden roller and mounting block in some remote village in rural England has been a mile D stone set up by Imperial Rome or a part of some monastic house that incurred the displeasure of Henry VIII, and many an old garden rockery contains hewn stones that proclaim their ecclesiastical origin and I have seen a font used as a trough in a farm-yard by an honest farmer who would have been most indignant had you accused him of sacrilege. |