TJbLE KUMANESQUE STYLB C, IOOO-£, I2OO
writing, experienced in painting, excellent in the science and art 01
bronze founding and in all architectural work/' Similarly we know,
e.g., of Aethelwold, the great English bishop, that he was a "theoreti-
cus architectus", well versed in the building and repairing of monas-
teries, of Benno, Bishop of Osnabruck in the nth century, that he
was "an outstanding architect, a skilful planner ('dispositor') of
masonry work'*. We also possess the plan of about 835 for St. Gall,
which has been mentioned before, and was obviously the sender's—
that is a bishop's or abbot's—conception. Such and many similar
contemporary references justify the view that, while actual building
operations were of course at all times the job of the craftsman, the
designing of churches and monasteries in the early Middle Ages may
often have been due to clerics—at least to the same extent to which
Lord Burlington was responsible for the design of his villa in Chis-
wick. After all, during those centuries nearly all the literati, the
educated, the sensitive were clerics.
The same tendency towards an elementary articulation which the
new ground plans reveal can be found in the elevations of the I ith-
century churches. At St. Michael's, Hildesheim, the system of alter-
nating supports, the rhythm o£abbabba(a representing square
piers and b columns), serves to divide up die long stretch of wall, and
ultimately the space enclosed by the walls, into separate units. This
system became the customary one in Central European Romanesque
architecture. In the West, and especially in England, another equally
effective method was developed for achieving the same aim. It had
been created in Normandy early in the nth century. The Normans
by then had lived in the North-West of France for a hundred years
and from being Viking adventurers had become rulers of a large
territory, clear-minded, determined and progressive, adopting
French achievements where they saw possibilities in them—this
applies to the French language, suppler than their own, to feudalism
and to the reform of Cluny—and imbuing them with the energy of
their native spirit They conquered Sicily and parts of Southern Italy
in the nth and I2th centuries and created an eminently interesting
civilisation there, a blend of what was most advanced in the adminis-
tration of Normandy and in the thought and habits of the Saracens.
In the meantime they had also conquered England, to replace there
by their own superior mode of life that of die Northern invaders
who had come before them. The Norman style in architecture, the
most consistent variety of the Romanesque style in the West,
18