the Cotswolds, out of which half-a-dozen small rivers break to mingle with the Thames. Bibury, one of these little-known Cotswold villages, "lying down in the winding valley beside the clear Colne," was described by Morris as "surely the most beautiful village in England." Churches, houses, barns, the dry walls of the fields, are all alike built of the golden-grey limestone underlying the soil. Hardly a village is without a beautiful church, generally dating back to the thirteenth century. Broadwell, the parish next but one to Kelmscott, has a tower and spire built by the same masons as those who built the tower and spire of Oxford Cathedral, and on their smaller scale equal in beauty. At Langford, a mile off, part of the church dates from before the Norman Conquest. The parish church of Burford on the Windrush, a sumptuously decorated building of less ancient date, is an epitome of the whole civic life and art of the later Middle Ages. Much of the domestic building of this region is little inferior to the churches either in age or architectural beauty. The most splendid example is the tithe barn at Great Coxwell, a noble structure of the middle of the thirteenth century, "unapproachable in its dignity, as beautiful as a cathedral, yet with no ostentation of the builder's art," its hundred and fifty feet of grey roof raised on a forest of orderly set oak timbers. It was always upheld by Morris as one of the finest buildings in England or in the world. The grey pointed arches over the Thames, on the solitary highway leading south out of the Royal Forest of Wychwood, are as beautiful now as when, six hundred and fifty years ago, they received their still surviving name of the New Bridge. A little further off, under the feet of the Cotswolds, is Chastleton, the finest and most complete of all surviving Jacobean
