Although interesting to English antiquaries, the specimens of Saxon art are so insignificant as hardly to deserve much notice in a universal history of the art, and one or two examples will suffice to explain the peculiarities of the style. The tower of Earl's Barton in Northamptonshire contains in itself more undoubted Saxon characteristics than any other specimen yet described : its angles, as shown in Woodcut No. 563, are constructed with that peculiar form of quoin known as "long and short," while its faces are ornamented by long pilaster-like slips connected by semi-circular arches, or more frequently by straight-lined cross-bracing very wooden in its character. An image should appear at this position in the text.564. Windows Earl's Barton. (From Britton The windows (Woodcut No. 564) are formed by gouty balusters, looking very much as if they were of wood turned in a lathe, and the whole arrangements bear out that character. Even more characteristic of the style than this, is the doorway under the tower of the church at Monkwearmouth in Durham (Woodcut No. 565). There seems no doubt but that it is part of the church which Benedict Bishop erected there in the 7th century. According to the chronicles, when he was enabled by the liberality of King Eegfrid to found a monastery there, he went, in 674, to Gaul to procure masons who could erect it in the " Roman manner," meaning evidently thereby, in stone instead of wood, for anything more unlike Roman art than that can hardly be imagined, and, as he visited Rome several times, he must have known what the art really was. The upper part of the pillars here is evidently copied from turned posts in wood, and except the arch there are few traces of Roman influence in the design. The twined serpents with birds' beaks, on the right doorpost, are, as we know from manuscripts of that age, singularly characteristic of the style, but not, so far as I know, found elsewhere engraved in stone on a church door. Though quaint and interesting to the antiquary, it must be confessed there is neither grace nor beauty in any feature of the style, nor an approach to grandeur of dimensions in any example which has been spared to the present day.
Had any great conventual church or cathedral survived we might perhaps be forced to modify this opinion ; but the only one of which we know anything is that which was erected at Canterbury by Archbishop Odo in the years 940-960, to replace the older church of St.
Augustine.[1] Even this, however, we only know from the description
- ↑ This has been restored, as far as the materials admit, by Professor Willis, in his "Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral," published in 1845.
