“In 1077, Paul, a monk of St. Stephen’s, Caen (the Abbaye-aux-hommes), was elected Abbot, through the influence of Archbishop Lanfranc, whose kinsman he was.” In these words we have the origin of St. Alban’s Cathedral; and not of St. Alban’s only, but of all the mediæval architecture of our land, whether Romanesque or Gothic. Before the Norman conquest we had a native style of our own; a kind of primitive Romanesque, of which remains survive at Jarrow, Wing, Worth, Deerhurst, and elsewhere, as well as in the crypts of Ripon, Hexham, and Repton. But the invasion of the Normans changed all this. The primitive indigenous Romanesque of England was thrown aside in favour of the far more advanced Romanesque of Normandy. From the great monastery of St. Stephen, Caen, came Lanfranc, the first, and Anselm, the second Norman Archbishop of Canterbury. When Lanfranc set to work to rebuild Canterbury Cathedral, he made it in length and breadth and height an exact copy of the church of St. Stephen, Caen. What Lanfranc did at Canterbury, the Walkelins did at Winchester and Ely, and Abbot Paul at St. Alban’s. They set to work to rebuild their churches on the vast scale, and with all the improvements, of the Romanesque architecture of Caen and Normandy. St. Stephen’s, Caen, is therefore the link between the architecture of Normandy and that of England; it is the mother-church of all the cathedrals of our land. More than this: Lanfranc and Anselm were by birth, not Normans, but Italians; Lanfranc was born at Pavia, Anselm at Aosta. Paul was a kinsman of Lanfranc. All three, then, came from the great plain of Lombardy; and it was through such scholars and theologians as these that the architecture of Lombardy found its way into Normandy. For the architecture of Normandy is in character mainly Lombardic. Therefore, just as Canterbury and Winchester and St. Alban’s are the offspring of St. Stephen’s, Caen; so St. Stephen’s itself is the child of S. Ambrogio and S. Eustorgio, Milan; S. Stephen, Verona; S. Sophia, Padua; and other ninth- and tenth-century churches of Lombardy and the neighbourhood. [Illustration: RAMRYGE’S CHANTRY.]