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446
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
the abbey of Jumieges and the cathedral at Rouen had the aisle
returned round the central apse. This latter plan seems to be
especially associated with the central regions ofFrance and, inx
deed, the first example known in England, Battle abbey, near
Hastings, begun in 1070/1 and finished within the lifetime of
the Conqueror, was colonized by monks from Tours, who are
recorded to have personally supervised the building. It is rex
markable that there seems to be no sign of any regional dis/
tribution ofthese two types ofplan, and at Canterbury the two
great contemporary monasteries, Lanfranc's Christchurch and
the new St. Augustine's, provide examples of each.
Structurally the most characteristic ofthese build'
important
ings is their immense massiveness as compared with^ earlier
churches. This is marked in
especially England, possibly
for
economic reasons. The extraordinary
outburst ofbuilding may
well have made for a shortage ofskilled labour and so tended to
increase the dependence on rubble as against wrought stone.
Walls and piers were built of a core of rubble faced with cut
stone, and the unribbed vaults of the great crypts
are also made
in a sort of concrete technique of small stone and mortar
brought to a tidy finish with a mortar rendering. Very consider^
able skill and a realization of the flexibility of this method of
vault building appear quite early in these crypts, which, being
generally of the apse and ambulatory form, rise gave to conv
plicated shapes in the compartments of their vaults, notably at
Winchester and Worcester.
The two great buildings which were begun in the last years
of the eleventh century, Tewkesbury abbey and Durham
cathedral, though they are both highly individual works, may
be taken to
represent two aspects of the architecture of the
twelfth century. At Tewkesbury the monks were put in
possession of their new quarters in noi, and this means pre'
sumably that at least a large part
ofthe eastern end of the church
must have been usable by that date. It was, as we know now,
built with an eastern limb designed internally in four storeys,
consisting of a giant order of cylindrical piers surmounted by
arches embracing both the opening into the aisle and above it