ociety. It was the
Norman who began everything over again--the first fresh influence since
Rome.

The riot of building has not been seized. The island was conquered in
1070. It was a place of heavy foolish men with random laws, pale eyes,
and a slow manner; their houses were of wood: sometimes they built (but
how painfully, and how childishly!) with stone. There was no height,
there was no dignity, there was no sense of permanence. The Norman
Government was established. At once rapidity, energy, the clear object
of a united and organised power followed. And see what followed in
architecture alone, and in what a little space of the earth, and in what
a little stretch of time--less than the time that separates us to-day
from the year of Disraeli's death or the occupation of Egypt.

The Conquest was achieved in 1070. In that same year they pulled down
the wooden shed at Bury St Edmunds, "unworthy," they said, "of a great
saint," and began the great shrine of stone. Next year it was the
castle at Oxford, in 1075 Monkswearmouth, Jarrow, and the church at
Chester; in 1077 Rochester and St Albans; in 1079 Winchester. Ely,
Worcester, Thorney, Hurley, Lincoln, followed with the next years; by
1089 they had tackled Gloucester, by 1092 Carlisle, by 1093 Lindisfarne,
Christchurch, tall Durham.... And this is but a short and random list of
some of their greatest works in the space of one boyhood. Hundreds of
castles, houses, village churches are unrecorded.

Were they not indeed a people?... And all that effort realised itself
before Pope Urban had made the speech which launched the armies against
the Holy Land. The Norman had created and founded all this before the
Mass of Europe was urged against the flame of the Arab, to grow fruitful
and to be transformed.

One may say of the Norman preceding the Gothic what Dante said of Virgil
preceding the Faith: Would that they had been born in a time when they
could have known it! But the East was not yet open. The mind of Europe
had not yet received the great experience of the Crusades; the Normans
had no medium wherein to express their mighty soul, save the round arch
and the straight line, the capital barbaric or naked, the sullen round
shaft of the pillar--more like a drum than like a column. They could
build, as it-were, with nothing but the last ruins of Rome. They were
given no forms but the forms which the fatigue and lethargy of the Dark
Ages had repeated for six hundred years.