"It is certain that Alcuin was trained in Hiberno- Saxon calligraphy, so that we may be surprised to find that the writing which, under Charles the Great, he developed at Tours, bears hardly a trace of the style to which he was accustomed. En revanche, in the ornamentation and illumination of the great Carolingian volumes which have come down to our times, we find those constant, persistent traces of English and Irish work which we seek for in vain in the plainer writing. "This minuscule superseded all others almost throughout the empire of Charles the Great, and during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries underwent very little modification. Even in the two next centuries, though it is subject to general modification, national differences are hardly observable, and we can only distinguish two large divisions, the group of Northern Europe (England, North France, Italy, and Spain). The two exceptions are, that Germany, both in writing and painting, has always stood apart, and lags behind the other nations of Western Europe in its development, and that England retains her Hiberno-Saxon hand till after the Conquest of 1066. It may be noted that the twelfth century produced the finest writing ever known--a large, free and flowing form of the minuscule of Tours. In the next century comes in the angular Gothic hand, the difference between which and the twelfth century hand may be fairly understood by a comparison of ordinary German and Roman type. In the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries the writing of each century may be discerned, while the general tendency is towards complication, use of abbreviations and contractions, and development of unessential parasitic forms of letters.