This is the only entire building of the earlier
style that we have, though the towers of Earl's Barton, of Bywell, of
St. Benets in Cambridge, remain to show its affinity to the styles of
Italy and Western Europe, and of the Campaniles. Even when the Norman
work first appears, it is not without a great deal of that Byzantine
element which is expressed by a spreading cupola and a central
lantern. But this early Norman building is very rare, and that is why
the three churches I have just described in Rouen have a value that is
scarcely realised by travellers who are in search for Gothic or
Renaissance architecture only. They are somewhat difficult of access
too, and little known, but they will repay a visit. They show the form
of the Latin cross, with little in its eastern limb besides the apse,
the choir beneath the central tower that replaced the Byzantine
cupola, and a little vaulting in the aisles. Originally they had a
flat ceiling for frescoes. This is a style that was neither that of
Southern Italy nor that of Aquitaine. It may have been a distinctively
national development of the Lombard schools of Pavia or Milan. But in
any case, though purely local at first, it utterly supplanted the
Primitive Romanesque that had hitherto been the common possession of
Western Europe, just as, in later centuries, the pointed style utterly
swept away the round arch in all its forms of expression. And in the
coming chapters it is with the pointed arch that we shall have more
and more to deal. To Italy, who imitated it helplessly, the Northern
Gothic never became even remotely national in its expression. The
native Southern Romanesque was there only appropriately replaced by
the really Italian style developed in the Roman Renaissance. But in
the North, where the early pointed arch had been at first only a
memory of Paynim victories, or a trophy of early Saracenic work, the
pointed style as a school of architecture was destined to triumph
immediately it rose from the position of mere ornament to the
necessity of a constructive feature. It was the problem of vaulting
over a space that was not square, which gave the pointed arch its
reason for absolute existence, its beauty of proved strength and
adequate proportion. Some of the noblest forms of its development are
to be found in the buildings we shall see later on in Rouen.

[Illustration]

[Illustration: MAP D.

ROUEN

SHEWING WALLS OF THIRTEENTH CENTURY]

CHAPTER VI