e, nor silence, but crowded
congregations, clapping--or otherwise--the popular preacher; or fighting
about the election of a bishop or a pope, till the holy place ran with
Christian blood. The deep-hearted Northern turned away, in weariness and
disgust, from those vast halls, fitted only for the feverish superstition
of a profligate and worn-out civilisation; and took himself, amid his own
rocks and forests, moors and shores, to a simpler and sterner
architecture, which should express a creed, sterner; and at heart far
simpler; though dogmatically the same.

And this is, to my mind, the difference, and the noble difference,
between the so-called Norman architecture, which came hither about the
time of the Conquest; and that of Romanized Italy.

But the Normans were a conquering race; and one which conquered, be it
always remembered, in England at least, in the name and by the authority
of Rome. Their ecclesiastics, like the ecclesiastics on the Continent,
were the representatives of Roman civilisation, of Rome's right,
intellectual and spiritual, to rule the world.

Therefore their architecture, like their creed, was Roman. They took the
massive towering Roman forms, which expressed domination; and piled them
one on the other, to express the domination of Christian Rome over the
souls, as they had represented the domination of heathen Rome over the
bodies, of men. And so side by side with the towers of the Norman keep
rose the towers of the Norman cathedral--the two signs of a double
servitude.

But, with the thirteenth century, there dawned an age in Northern Europe,
which I may boldly call an heroic age; heroic in its virtues and in its
crimes; an age of rich passionate youth, or rather of early manhood; full
of aspirations, of chivalry, of self-sacrifice as strange and terrible as
it was beautiful and noble, even when most misguided. The Teutonic
nations of Europe--our own forefathers most of all--having absorbed all
that heathen Rome could teach them, at least for the time being, began to
think for themselves; to have poets, philosophers, historians,
architects, of their own. The thirteenth century was especially an age
of aspiration; and its architects expressed, in buildings quite unlike
those of the preceding centuries, the aspirations of the time.

The Pointed Arch had been introduced half a century before. It may be
that the Crusaders saw it in the East and brought it home. It may be
that it origin