"The thirteenth century was so prolific in religious architecture as to leave little scope to those which followed. But even had the growth of great religious monuments been less rapid at this period, the wars which convulsed France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would have paralysed such undertakings as the building of great cathedral churches. The religious buildings actually completed in the fourteenth century are rare; still rarer are those which date from the fifteenth. In those stormy days enterprise was confined to the completion of unfinished churches, and the modification, restoration, or enlargement of twelfth and thirteenth century buildings. It was not until the close of the fifteenth and opening of the sixteenth century, when France was beginning to recover its former power, that a fresh impulse was given to religious architecture; even then, however, the Gothic tradition persisted, though in a corrupt and bastard form. Many of the great cathedrals were finished, and a number of small churches, which had been destroyed during the wars, or had fallen into decay through long neglect, consequent on the poverty of the community, were either rebuilt or restored. The movement was, however, presently arrested by the Reformation, when war, fire, and pillage again destroyed or mutilated most of the newly completed religious buildings. The havoc wrought by this last upheaval was in its nature irrevocable, for when order once more reigned at the close of the sixteenth century, the Renascence had swept away the last traces of the national art; and though superficially the system of construction which prevailed in French churches of the thirteenth century still obtained, the genius which had presided at their construction was extinct and its memory despised."[18] [18] Viollet-le-Duc, _Dictionnaire raisonné de l'Architecture française_, etc., vol. i. [Illustration: 69. CHURCH OF ST. OUEN AT ROUEN. CENTRAL TOWER AND APSE, SOUTH FRONT]