CHAPTER II

The Romanesque Style

C. IOOO-C. 1200

YET during these dark and troubled years the foundations of
mediaeval civilisation were laid. The feudal system grew, one
does not know from what roots, until it had became the frame-
work round which all social life of the Middle Ages was built, a
system as characteristic and unique as mediaeval religion and mediaeval
art, strictly binding lord and vassal, and yet so vague, so dependent
on symbolical gestures that we to-day can hardly recognise it as a
system at all. By the end of the loth century it had received its final
form* By then political stability too had been re-established in the
Empire. Otto the Great was crowned in Rome in 962. At the same
time the first of the reform movements of monasticism set out from
Cluny in Burgundy. The great abbot Majeul was enthroned in 965,
And again at the same time the Romanesque style was created.
To describe an architectural style it is necessary to describe its indivi-
dual features. But the features alone do not make the style. There must
be one central idea active in all of them. Thus several essential Early
Romanesque motifs can singly be tracedinCarolingian architecture*
Their combination however is new and determines their meaning.
The most significant innovations of the late roth century are those
in the ground plan—three above all—and all three caused by a new
will to articulate and clarify space. This is most characteristic.
Western civilisation was only just beginning to take shape, but
already at that early stage its architectural expression was' spatial, as
against the sculptural spirit of Greek and Roman art—and spatial in
an organising, grouping, planning way, as against the magic floating
of space in Early Christian and Byzantine art. In France the two chief
plans for the east ends of Romanesque churches were conceived;
the radiating plan somewhere near the future centre of the country
(probably at St. Martin's in Tours, begun after a fire in 997, dedica-
tions in 1014 and IO2O1), and the staggered plan at Cluny apparently in
1 But some French archaeologists attribute the same plan to the rebuilding of
Notre Dame at Clermont Ferrand in 946, and even claim it for an earlier build-
ing of St. Martin's, Tours, a building of about 915. The case is uncertain and would
require further investigations on the spot.
B.A.—3 15