Page:Cambridge Medieval History Volume 3.pdf/603

560 group on the Liège font. Thus the traditions of the bronze workers were handed on to Dinant, which in turn inherited from Huy and became the chief European centre for bronze working.

It is impossible here to give a separate account of the many Romanesque schools of art, or even of architecture, which flourished between the Carolingian Renaissance and the emergence of Gothic art in the twelfth century. In Italy, Germany, and France there was constant effort and practically continuous development towards one unforeseen end, the formation of the highly specialised type of art which we call Gothic. All three countries contributed valuable ideas to the commonwealth of art and continuously reacted on one another. The master impulse in architecture was that by which the builders set themselves to explore the possibilities of vaulting and the interaction between vaulting and planning. This may have been brought about in part by the desire to guard against fire, but it was fed by the gradual spread of Byzantine customs over the West.

In western Europe during the Carolingian age the churches were planned in various forms. The central type of plan, varieties of which are the circle, the polygon and the equal-armed cross, is represented by the Palatine chapel at Aix-la-Chapelle. St Germigny, near Orleans, is a square with apses projecting on every side. The large abbey church of St Croix, Quimperlé, of the eleventh century, is circular with square projections in the four directions.

Simple churches of this fashion were built in England. At Hexham one of these was built by Wilfrid, and King Alfred built another at Athelney. Several later Saxon churches had a big tower forming the body of the structure with an apse opening from its east side and another extension towards the west; such "tower churches" must have been simplifications of the central type. The close association of the central tower, the western version of the Byzantine dome, with the idea of the church has not been fully worked out, but it led to a general insistence on the central tower, or lantern, in Romanesque churches. Beneath these towers, at the crossing of the central span and the transepts, the choirs were placed.

The monk Reginald, one of the Durham chroniclers, describes the "White Church" (the cathedral) at Durham built by Bishop Aldhun in 1099 thus: "There were in the White Church, in which St Cuthbert had first rested, two stone towers, as those who saw them have told us, standing high into the air, the one containing the choir, the other standing at the west end of the church, which was of wonderful size. They carried brazen pinnacles set up on top, which aroused both the amazement of all men and great admiration." The still earlier abbey church at Ramsey, built about 970, was cruciform with a central tower, and at the west end a smaller tower. Again, when in the description of the Confessor's church at Westminster we are told that the domus principalis arae was of great height, it possibly means the choir with the lantern tower, and that the