ESSAY ON NORMAN ARCHITECTURE

The characteristics of the old Norman or (as Sir Christopher Wren calls it) the Saxon Architecture, are great solidity, heaviness, and rude simplicity, better adapted to castles, walls of cities, and other places of defence, than to the purposes of habitation, magnificence, or religious worship. It seems indeed to be copied from the Roman style in that degenerate state to which it was reduced under the later emperors; for it seems but natural that the Franks¹ in Gaul, the Saxons in England, and other barbarous nations in the several countries which had made a part of the Roman empire (when they were once settled there, and found leisure to apply themselves to the arts of peace) should imitate those many monuments which were every where before their eyes, and especially (as they themselves were now become Christians) such as had been long consecrated to the uses of religion, and were filled with the miraculous relics and representations of those saints who were the

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