and not to Constantinople, as their common
ecclesiastical centre. It is not surprising that, as soon as
differences between the ritual of the Eastern and the Western Church
sprang up, a contrast between Eastern and Western architecture should
establish itself, and that the early structures of the many countries
where the Roman Church flourished never wandered far from the Roman
type, with the exception of localities where circumstances favoured
direct intercourse with the East. The architecture of the Eastern
Church, on the other hand, adhered quite as closely to the models of
Byzantium.

[Illustration: FIG. 166.--TOWER OF EARL'S BARTON CHURCH.]

The style, so far as is known, was for a long time almost, if not
absolutely, the same over a very large part of Western Christendom,
and it has received from Mr. Freeman the appropriate designation of
Primitive Romanesque. It was not till the tenth century, or later,
that distinctive varieties began to make their appearance; and though
that which was built earlier than that date has, through rebuildings
and enlargements as well as natural decay, been in many cases swept
away, still enough may be met with to show us what the buildings of
that remote time were like.

The churches are usually small, and have an apsidal east end. The
openings are rude, with round-headed arches and small single or
two-light windows, and the outer walls are generally marked by flat
pilasters of very slight projection. Towers are common, and the
openings in them are often divided into two or more lights by rude
columns. The plan of these churches was founded on the basilica type,
but they do not exhibit the same internal arrangement; and it is very
noteworthy that many of them show marks of having been vaulted, or at
least partly vaulted; and not covered, as the basilicas usually were,
by timber roofs. Even a country so remote as Great Britain possessed
in the 10th century many buildings of Primitive Romanesque character;
and in such Saxon churches as those of Worth, Brixworth, Dover, or
Bradford, and such towers as those of Earl's Barton (Fig. 166),
Trinity Church Colchester, Barnack, or Sompting, we have specimens of
the style remaining to the present day.

By degrees, as buildings of greater extent and more ornament were
erected, the local varieties to which reference has been made began to
develop themselves. In Lombardy and North Italy, for example, a
Lombard Romanesque style can be recog