TWILIGHT AND DAWN FROM THE 6TH TO THE IOTH CENTURY
seems primitive to us, but descriptions seem to indicate that large
churches reflected more faithfully early Italian magnificence. Eddius
in his Life of Wilfrid calls Hexham a building "columnis variis et
porticibus multis suffultum, mirabili longitudine et altitudine", and
Ripon also "variis columnis et porticibus suffultam", and Alcuin
speaks of York as possessing thirty altars, and again many columns
and arches, beautiful ceilings and many porticus, whether these mean
outer colonnades, or galleries, or aisles, or indiscriminately all of
them.
Yet what survives or has been excavated does not bear out such
accounts- Churches appear small throughout the country, more
Mediterranean in form in the South-East, more original in the North.
At Canterbury and elsewhere in Kent apses were, it seems, usual, in
Northumberland and the neighbouring counties there are long,
narrow unaisled buildings, for instance at Monkwearmouth and
Jarrow, founded in 674 and 685, Chancels are separate, and the effect
of the interiors is of a tall, tight gangway leading towards a small
chamber. Externally masonry is rude and primeval. Geographically
between the two regions lies Brixworth in Northamptonshire, the
only partly preserved aisled basilica, built with the use of Roman
bricks probably in the 7th century.
Amongst the Franks of present-day France and the West of
Germany the position was very much the same. There are a few odd
Merovingian survivals, small in scale and of debased Roman and
Early Christian forms (St. Jean Poitiers, Baptistery Vcnasquc, etc.),
and there are plenty of descriptions of buildings seemingly much
more ambitious and accomplished—for instance, of the 6th century
in Gregory of Tours* s History of the Franks. A change which we can
follow from buildings still upright or which can be reconstructed in
our minds with some certainty came only with Charlemagne,
heralded perhaps by a few major enterprises of his father, Pcpin the
Short. Charlemagne had grown up illiterate; he never wrote with
ease. But he had a conscious programme of educating his people or
peoples to a conception of Roman urbanity and Roman grandeur
in a new Christian guise. Hence he gathered round his person the
flower of European scholarship and poetry, men from England,
Spain, France and Italy—all ecclesiastics, of course. Hence he built
for himself palaces with hall, chapel and large ranges of rooms, all as
clearly organised in their relative positions as the palaces of the
Roman emperors on the Palatine, and all connected by vast
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