chroniclers, you may find
the same spirit; and each town smote its own epic into stone upon the
walls of its cathedral. Every village, even, had its painter, its
carvers, its actors; the cathedrals that have remained are but the
standard from which we may imagine the loving perfection to which
every form of craftsman's art was carried. And their work gives us
such pleasure now because they had such intense pleasure in doing the
work themselves.

[Illustration: A MASON AT WORK, FROM A MISERICORDE IN THE CHOIR OF
ROUEN CATHEDRAL]

For the masons had gone to their new task with a will. Freed from the
thick and shadowy archways piled upon heavy piers, which had obscured
the old priestly and dogmatic Romanesque, the builders of the new
cathedral revelled in the new found Gothic of the people, and raised
their soaring arches to the sky, and crowned their pinnacles with
wreaths that flamed into the clouds. And upon every inch of wall they
wrote and wrought upon the living stone, "magistri de vivis
lapidibus," until every detail of the world of worshippers was
gathered up and sanctified by this expression of its new found
meaning, as a part of the mystery and the beauty of holiness.

It is significant of the democratic nature of this architectural
outburst, that the first communes signalised their liberty by the
earliest cathedrals, at Noyon, Soissons, Laon, Reims, Amiens, in the
capital of France, and in the capital of Normandy. It was early in
this same century (1203) that Normandy became part of the crown domain
together with Maine, Anjou, Touraine, Poitou, and Limousin. Before the
century was done, Languedoc, the County of Toulouse, part of Auvergne,
and Champagne were also included in the royal domain. More than this,
the Head of the Church himself had come in 1309 to live in Avignon,
and this movement had, no doubt, its effect upon religious sentiment
in the nation to whose charge St. Peter's representative committed
himself; for religion had of course the greatest part in a movement
that could never have been so widespread and so creative without its
powerful motives; but, even in spite of the immense impulse given by
the crusades, religion would never have got its opportunity at all, if
"politics" had not at the very moment been ripe for contemporaneous
expansion, if the people and the King had not simultaneously been
ready to give expression to a movement in which liberty and unity were
the greatest factors. Thus