Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

probably not have been as popular as the Specimens, for the influence of Normandy was not, yet,
much felt in British architecture. Norman, as an historic style of the eleventh century was never
greatly in demand though there were some startling exceptions, notably Thomas Hopper’s
Penrhyn Castle, Gwynedd, begun in about 1821 for George Hay Dawkins. 94 In the 1840s the
medieval buildings of Normandy began to exert an influence when the (half-French) architect A
W N Pugin had ‘the laudable courage’ 95 to put a Norman roof on the church of St Marie’s Rugby
in Warwickshire, but not until the 1860s did this amount to a significant movement among
British architects. 96 The British investigation of Norman architecture in the 1820s and 1830s was
most immediately effective in contributing to the pressure within France to conserve and restore
buildings devastated by war and revolutionary iconoclasm. It was also instrumental in creating
an antiquarian network in France similar to and indeed at first explicitly modelled on, that of
England and Scotland.
If there was something grudging in Stendhal’s remark that ‘Notre archéologie nous est
venue de l’Angleterre, comme la diligence, les chemins de fer et bâteux à vapeur’. [Our
archaeology came to us from England, like the diligence, the railways and the steamer.] 97 It was
no more than the truth. In a footnote to his history of the church of St Wandrille, E H Langlois
praised the great tradition of antiquarian draughtsmanship in Britain in a list that began with
Wenceslas Hollar and went down to the present day to include A C Pugin and John and Henry
Le Keux. Writing in 1972 Pevsner seems to have been surprised that the works of Carter, Milner
and the other English antiquaries, so ‘minor in scale and value’ should have made ‘an impact on
France, stronger than their quality and extent would make one expect’. 98 One is reminded of
Whittington’s criticisms of Lenoir.
The situation the French antiquaries faced was desperate. They had to deal not only with
the devastation of the Revolutionary period, but with a post-war environment in which many
94
For reasons why neo-Norman was never widely embraced see Mowl, ‘The Norman Revival’.
95
Ecclesiologist, 9 (1849), p.370.
96
See Stamp, ‘High Victorian Gothic and the Architecture of Normandy’. Britton and Pugin’s Antiquities of
Normandy was re-edited by Richard Phené Spiers and republished in 1874, when it seems to have received more
attention from architects.
97
Quoted without a source in Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers, p.91.
98
Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers, p.16.
130