ARCHITECTURE - Karatunov.net

CH. xxvn] ENGLAND NORMAN PERIOD 209thinks of the number of buildings done in so short atime, of the enormous scale of most of them, and comparesthem with the scanty population which even two hundredyears later is estimated at less than two million, and withthe few appliances and slender resources of the nth and1 2th centuries, one feels amazed at the enterprise ofthese Norman builders, who could not only conceive butactually carry out undertakings apparently so far beyondtheir means.It is not to be supposed that all the traditions of the Survivalf C.older English architecture suddenly disappeared : on the archi*contrary the Saxon mode of building went on for a long tecturetime side by side with the Norman, which was itselflargely influenced byit. Professor Freeman observes influencesthat Edward's dark cloister at Westminster is moreSaxon than Norman he traces the more Roman char-;acter of Saxon work in the vast round piers of Gloucester tectureand Durham, and derives the curious spiral channellingof the columns at Durham, Norwich, and Waltham fromclassical flutings1. Church towers continued to be builtlike those at Deerhurst and Cambridge. The castletower at Oxford is Saxon in character, and so is the towerof S. Michael's in the Cornmarket (Fig. 121) with itsbaluster shafts, placed mid-wall like those at Earl's Bartonand S. BeneYs at Cambridge. The crypt of S. Petersin the East at Oxford isvery like Wilfrid's Confessio atHexham and those at Repton and Ripon, and tracesmay still be seen of the two descending passages and thecentral tomb or relic chamber between them which existin the earlier structures. The square east end of theNorman churches at Romsey, S. Frideswide's, S. David'sand S. Cross speak of Saxon influence, and the same1Freeman's Norman Conquest^ vol. v.J. A. II. *4