For the pedigree went back to the Battle of Hastings, and there was scarce room for more heraldry.

From week's end to week's end the silent nave and aisles remained empty; the chirp of the sparrows was the only sound to be heard there.

There being no house attached to the living, the holder could not reside; so the old church slumbered in the midst of the meadows, the hedges, and woods, day after day, year after year.
You could sit on the low churchyard wall in early summer under the shade of the elms in the hedge, whose bushes and briars came right over, and listen to the whistling of the blackbirds or the varied note of the thrush; you might see the whitethroat rise and sing just over the hedge, or look upwards and watch the swallows and swifts wheeling, wheeling, wheeling in the sky.

No one would pass to disturb your meditations, whether simply dreaming of nothing in the genial summer warmth, or thinking over the course of history since the prows of the Norman ships grounded on the beach.

If we suppose the time, instead of June, to be August or September, there would not even be the singing of the birds.
But as you sat on the wall, by-and-by the pheasants, tame as chickens, would come up the hedge and over into the churchyard.
Leaving the church to stroll by the footpath across the meadow towards the wood, at the first gateway half-a-dozen more pheasants scatter aside, just far enough to let you pass.