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44*
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
and though only four new monasteries actually under the
authority ofthe great institution itselfwere founded in England
before uoo, this is no measure of the importance of its ex/
ample, or even ofits direct influence. The reforming movement
was, above all, Roman in spirit, using the word in the sense of
historic sentiment as well as more narrowly, and one ofthe ideas
for which the Roman name stood was magnanimity as ex/
pressed in the scale and ordered splendour of buildings. This
was not altogether a new thing in England in the late eleventh
century; the monastic reform movement of the tenth century
associated with St. Dunstan and St. Ethelwold shared this
ofmore than considerable
feeling and expressed it in buildings
size, though they were far surpassed by those that succeeded
and replaced them. In this connexion the changes made at St.
Augustine's abbey at Canterbury in the tenth and eleventh
centuries as shown by excavation, are
particularly interesting
(Fig. 101). The earlier St. Augustine's consisted of a series of
three churches set axially and dating from the earliest years of
Christianity in Saxon England and of great traditional sanctity
as associated with the saint himself. In order, from east to west,
these churches were St. Pancras, St. Mary's, and SS. Peter and
Paul, in the last ofwhich St. Augustine and his early successors
and the Christian kings ofKent were buried. To the west ofthe
church of SS. Peter and Paul an outer narthex and a further
western porch (making ultimately three in all) were added by
St. Dunstan, thus greatly increasing the splendour of the
ceremonial approaches to the church itself. The capitals from
this western extension show the consciously Roman sentiment
of the builders, being quite clearly an attempt to imitate the
antique Corinthian order. Later, in the time of Edward the
Confessor, the two churches of St. Mary and SS. Peter and
Paul were linked by a new building, an aisled rotunda, circular
inside and octagonal without. To make room for this building
the apse of SS. Peter and Paul was pulled down. After the
Conquest all this was swept away and a single unified build'
ing took the place ofthe two westernmost churches with their
tenth/ and eleventh/century additions. Only St. Pancras was