Page:A History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 2.djvu/220

204 204 AUCHITECTURE OF SCOTLAND. Part II, applied in so masterly a manner that the beauty of the art makes up for the smallness of dimensions, and renders it one of the most interesting churches in Scotland. David I. seems to have been the first king who gave an impulse to the monastic establislmients and to the building of laro-er churches. His endowment of the great border abbeys, and his general patronage of the monks, enabled them to undertake buildings on a greatly ex- tended scale. The churches of Jedburgh and, Kelso, as we now find ^f^»^. Vj'i^... 634. Pier-areb, Jedburgh. them, belong either to the very end of the 12th or beginning of the 13th century. They display all the rude magnificence of the Norman period, used in this instance not experimentally, as was too often the case in England, but as a well understood style, whose features were fully perfected. So far from striving after novelty, the Scotch archi- tects were looking backwards, and culling the beauties of a long- established style. The great arch under the tower of Kelso is certainly a well-understood example of the pointed-arched architecture of the 13th century, while around it and above it nothing is to be seen but