TWILIGHT AND DAWN 1PROM THE 6lH TO THE IOTH CENTURY

for Ramiro I of Asturias—the only surviving early mediaeval exam-
ple of such a building. It has a low vaulted cellar or crypt, and above
this the hall proper, now the nave of the church. This is reached by
flights of outside steps leading to porches in the centres of both the
long sides of the building. On the east and the west there were
originally open loggias, communicating with the main room by
arcades, of which one, as has been said before, survives. The present
choir is in fact one of the loggias blocked up towards the outside.

In British pth- and loth-century architecture one would look in
vain for such subtleties. Where buildings are preserved complete or

nearly complete, we can see
that their ground plans were
just as elementary. At Bradford-
on-Avon (fig. 10), e.g., the nave
has no aisles. The chancel is
accessible from the nave only
by a narrow door with crudely
worked joints. The porches on
the north and south sides are
also separated from the main
10. BRADFORD-ON-AVON: rnnm Comnartmcnt is added

AN ANGLO-SAXON CHURCH room, compartment is aaaea

*J-AN. to compartment, very much as

in the Visigothic churches of

Spain. Anglo-Saxon decoration is just as elementary. The craftsmen
who worked the Ruthwell Cross in Bede's time seem superior to
those who, one or two generations before the Conquest, decorated
the tower of Earl's Barton. The only structural part of its decoration
is the emphasising of the three stories by plain string courses (pi. vra).
All the rest, the wooden-looking strips arranged in rows vertically
like beanstalks, or higher up in crude lozenge patterns, is structurally
senseless. Yet they are in a similar relation to CaroKngian architecture
as Asturian decoration was to the Muslim style. But while the day-to-
day proximity of Arab to Spanish civilisation created the mixed
idiom of Naranco and the Mozarabic style of the loth century, the
British builders reduced the Romanising motifs of Carolingxan
decoration to ungainly rusticity* The so-called long-and-short work
up the edges of Earl's Barton tower, and so many other contem-
porary English towers* is another indication of the rawness of the
minds and the heaviness of the hands of these late Anglo-Saxon
architects, if architects they can be called*