THE ELMLEYS. 147

was added to Elmley Castle by Order in Council), 464. Acreage of the united parish, 2,846. Employment of the people, entirely agricultural; and the productions of the soil are wheat, barley, beans, peas, turnips, cabbage, mangolds, apples, and pears. The Rev. Hugh Bennett is the vicar and the Bishop of Worcester is patron of the living; value, £230; church accommodation, 300; free seats, 280. A capacious church attests the former importance of the place; it has a chancel, nave with aisles, and tower, chiefly Perpendicular work. There are splendid seventeenth century monuments to the Savages and others, illustrating the costume of the period; an octagonal font, with dragons at the base, symbolical of evil powers subdued by the waters of baptism, and on the basin the five wounds of Christ, the Tudor rose, the Beauchamp arms, &c. The middle-age sculptors likewise indulged their imagination to a considerable extent in the grotesque gargoyles which adorn the tower and porch. Much has been recently done in repairing the church: the chancel was restored by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in 1863; the nave had been renovated a few years previously, and many unsightly things swept away. In the churchyard is a curious sun-dial, on a stone column, having sculptured on one side the arms of the Savage family, and the other faces ornamented with deep diagonal incisions.

Near the church, in the park, is the handsome mansion of Lady Pakington (widow of the late Colonel Davies, M.P. for Worcester, but now the wife of Sir John Pakington).

There are still to be seen some very interesting ruins of a chapel at Netherton, now used as a coal-house. Among its fragments are beautiful Norman doorways and an Early English bell turret in good preservation. On the tympanum of one of the doorways is sculptured the conventional dragon, volant, but apparently broken-backed, as though St. George had so bethwacked it as to disable the monster for life. Enough remains of the little chapel to form a guide for its restoration. The tradition is that the ruinated place was last