Everyone who comes
to the wonderful rock is informed that these two guns are English; but as
they have been there for nearly five hundred years, no one feels much shame
at seeing them in captivity, and only a very highly specialised antiquary
would be able to recognise any British features in them. Everyone, however,
who visits Normandy from England with any enthusiasm, is familiar with the
essential features of Norman and early pointed architecture, and it is thus
with distinct pleasure that the churches are often found to be strikingly
similar to some of the finest examples of the earlier periods in England.
When we remember that the Norman masons and master-builders had been
improving the crude Saxon architecture in England even before the Conquest,
and that, during the reigns of the Norman kings, "Frenchmen," as the Saxons
called them, were working on churches and castles in every part of our
island, it is no matter for surprise to find that buildings belonging to
the eleventh, twelfth, and even the thirteenth century, besides being of
similar general design, are often covered with precisely the same patterns
of ornament. When the period of Decorated Gothic began to prevail towards
the end of the thirteenth century, the styles on each side of the Channel
gradually diverged, so that after that time the English periods do not
agree with those of Normandy. There is also, even in the churches that most
resemble English structures, a strangeness that assails one unless
familiarity has taken the edge off one's perceptions.
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