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492
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
are hard to date exactly and many of their carvings, vigorous
but crude, may be later products subject to a considerable pro-
vincial time-lag.
In the graphic arts, as opposed to architecture, the Norman
Conquest made comparatively little break.The reforming infiuence
which had created the Winchester style was already
losing its impetus. Normandy had its own school ofilluminators
and Norman books soon at
appear Durham and Exeter,
but the Norman School owed much to England, and Anglo-
Saxons had been working in Norman scriptoria such as Mont"
St.-Michel. The Norman artists used harder outlines, which
never equal the expressive touch of the Winchester style at its
best, and had a liking for stronger, contrasted colours, greens,
yellows, and reds. They filled the trellis-work of their initials
with climbing figures, men hunting or being pursued by fan'
tastic beasts; there is a fierceness, sometimes brutality, in their
imaginings which had not appeared in Anglo>Saxon art; but
their fluttering draperies and twisted poses recall Anglo-Saxon
models, and the two schools easily amalgamated (PL 94 ). In
sculpture the same strange beasts of this age of dragons soon
appear. Normandy seems to have had a less-developed practice
in stone-carving, but the capitals in the crypt and on the outer
arcades of the
transepts
at Canterbury, which must almost
certainly precede the consecration of 1127, show Norman
fancies
interpreted with a new and very considerable skill (PL
95 a). They provided stylistic types for a whole school ofsouth
ern carving, of which Romsey and Christchurch still have
notable examples. Moving northwards, Henry Ts foundation
at Reading was another centre, more Anglo-Saxon in the
cat's masks as in some
wiriness of its interlaces, gripped by
Winchester initials; here beakheads were employed as voussoir
ornament, and it may well be at Reading abbey that this char
Leominster in
acteristically English motif was popularized.
Herefordshire, a cell ofReading, provided a local centre for the
diffusion ofthe Reading style, and a local sculptor oforiginality and force gave to Herefordshire carving, in churches such as
and Shobdon and on fonts such as those at Castle
Kflpeck