Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 7.djvu/231

 ANGLO-SAXON REMAINS IN IVER CHURCH, BUCKS. 155 that it soon died out, even in the smallest parish churches. But I am incHned to beheve — and I wish especially to take this opportunity of distinctly retracting my opinion to the contrary expressed in the History of Architecture — that one very important feature of the Norman style of England was bequeathed to it by its native predecessor. I allude to the enormous round piers, not in any sense columns, but cylindrical masses of wall with imposts, which are so charac- teristic of English, as opposed to Continental, Norman. I opposed Mr. Gaily Knight's view that they were a relic of Saxon practice, and rather considered them as a development of our Norman architects after their settlement in this country, chiefly on the ground that the very few Saxon piers remaining, as at Brixworth, and St. Michael's at St. Alban's, are square, and that in St. Alban's Abbey, where we find so much Saxon character retained, they are square also. But on further consideration, it appears to me that these instances — whose shape, in at least two out of the three, must have been influenced by the nature of the material, which could hardly have been worked in the round form — are not sufficient to establish a rectangular section as that typical of Anglo-Saxon piers, in opposition to the strong d priori probability that an insular peculiarity, so distinctive of our later Romanesque architecture, should be in truth a relic of its earlier form. EDWARD A. FREEMAN. P.S. With regard to the Saxon Avork at Iver, I have great pleasure in making some extracts corroborative of the view taken above from a letter which I have since received from the eminent architect by Avhom the restoration of the build- ing was effected. " The window," says Mr. Scott, " differs so entirely in section from any Norman one I ever saw, and the diff"erence is so far from being the result of poverty or rudeness, that I think it cannot fail to strike any observer as belonging to a style to which the eye is unaccustomed. It can hardly be said that such is the case with the carhest Norman works : we see in most works known to be early Norman no great diff'erence in stt/le from the pure Norman of more advanced j)eriods, excepting greater plainness and coarser work. They never strike the eye as belonging to a different style ; the casual observer calls the one plain, and