An illustration of this fact is furnished by the rebuilding of Westminster Abbey under Edward the Confessor. He pulled down a small church which he found standing on the site, in order to erect one suitable in size and style to the ideas of the day. The style of his cathedral (but not its dimensions) soon became so much out of date that Henry III. pulled the buildings down in order to re-erect them of the lofty proportions and with the pointed arches which we now see in the choir and transepts of the Abbey; but the size remained nearly the same, for there is evidence to show that the Confessor's buildings must have occupied very nearly, if not quite, as much ground as those which succeeded them. At the beginning of the twelfth century many local peculiarities, some of them due to accident, some to the nature and quality of the building materials obtainable, some to differences of race, climate, and habits, and some to other causes, had begun to make their appearance in the buildings of various parts of Europe; and through the whole Gothic period such peculiarities were to be met with. Still the points of similarity were greater and more numerous than the differences; so much so, that by going through the course which Gothic architecture ran in one of the countries in which it flourished, it will readily be possible to furnish a general outline of the subject as a whole; it will then only be requisite to point out the principal variations in the practice of other countries. On some grounds France would be the most suitable country to select for this purpose, for Gothic appeared earlier and flourished more brilliantly in that country than in any other; the balance of advantage lies however, when writing for English students, in the selection of Great Britain. The various phases through which the art passed are well marked in this country, they have been fully studied and described, and, what is of the greatest importance, English examples are easily accessible to the majority of students, while those which cannot be visited may be very readily studied from engravings and photographs. English Gothic will therefore be first considered; but as a preliminary a few words remain to be said describing generally the buildings which have come down to us from the Gothic period. The word Gothic, which was in use in the eighteenth century, and probably earlier, was invented at a time when a Goth was synonymous with everything that was barbarous; and its use then implied a reproach. It denotes, according to Mr. Fergusson, "all the styles invented and used by the Western barbarians who overthrew the Roman empire, and settled within its limits." [Illustration: FIG 1.--WEST ENTRANCE, LICHFIELD CATHEDRAL, (1275.) (_See Chapter V._)] [Illustration: {SCULPTURED ORNAMENT FROM RHEIMS CATHEDRAL.}] CHAPTER II. THE BUILDINGS OF THE MIDDLE AGES.