d as you stand
there, the midmost apse is the Norman building, that on your left is
of the ninth century, and that on the right of the fourteenth. This
Norman flat-buttressed and round-arched apse is directed to the east
of summer, while the new church in the same place points to the east
of winter, and is almost at right angles to the older one. The corbels
outside, beneath the roof, are carved with the hairy-bearded faces of
conquered Franks and Saxons, who were thus set up to the perpetual
derision of their clean-shaved Norman victors. The idea is as old as
the Temple of Agrigentum in 600 B.C., where the conquered Africans
hold up the weight of the building, and recalls the barbarity of the
primitive Sagas, which relate how the bleeding heads of enemies
themselves were placed around the temples of the Norsemen.

The nave goes back into some private property beyond the churchyard,
in which a forgotten tomb lies mouldering behind the railings. In the
grass to the right of the old apse you can see a pointed arch
springing from a capital, which shows how the surrounding soil has
risen since the thirteenth century. This old building is all used as
the vestry of the new church, through which you must pass to see the
interior of the ancient buildings. Once within them, you will find
nearest to you the fourteenth-century work of which a fragment showed
outside. Then comes the Norman chapel, that recalls the work in the
abbey of St. George's de Boscherville. Beyond that again is the
ninth-century "Saxon" buildings. The archaic quality of the decoration
is very notable in the capital that represents the adoration of the
Magi, and indicates the relative importance of the personages by the
size in which each is carved, just as is done in the Egyptian
sculptures.

[Illustration: APSE OF THE OLD CHURCH OF ST. PAUL]

With these few relics the tale of Norman architecture in Rouen is
finished. From a short survey of this town alone, no one who had never
seen Caen or Coutances would imagine that he was in the duchy which
possessed a school of architecture that was developed into Notre Dame,
on the one hand, in the Ile de France, and into Durham, on the other,
in England. In our own island the architecture before the eleventh
century, which it supplanted, known as the Anglo-Saxon, was a
primitive Romanesque of purely Italian origin, as shown in
Bradford-on-Avon Church, which was built by Ealdhelm in Wessex long
before the Conquest.