From the time of Charlemagne the production of works of art in precious and common metals was an ever-increasing industry, lapsing during the second Dark Ages, beginning with new and unexampled vigour with the great religious revival of the first years of the eleventh century. It is impossible to form an adequate estimate either of the magnitude of the product or the degree of concrete beauty that came in these many lines of art out of the Middle Ages. For five hundred years craftsmen were busy over all that is now Rhenish Prussia, Holland, Belgium, France, and England, with the Scandinavian countries, Italy, and Spain in only a less degree, in producing an infinite number of exquisite things for an infinite number of churches; metal work of every kind and for every conceivable purpose--sacred vessels, crosses, crosiers, reliquaries, shrines, tombs, and screens; woven tapestries to hang the walls of châteaux and cathedrals; embroidered and jewelled vestments for an unending series of bishops, priests, altars; illuminated volumes whose every vellum page was a work of art and whose bindings were studded with jewels; carved wood and ivory in endless designs and for endless purposes; stained glass, enamels, tiles. Every church, abbey, and cathedral was by the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War as full of works of consummate art as the private museum of a modern millionaire, and were you to gather together the treasures of ecclesiastical crafts in the Cluny, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Metropolitan in New York you might have about as much as at that time might have been found in a provincial cathedral of the second class or a minor monastery. In France the sculpture has been largely, and the glass partially, saved; in Flanders many of the pictures; in England a good proportion of the churches themselves, but the rest is gone, utterly and irrevocably, and we can hardly more than dimly imagine from a Gloucester candlestick, an Ascoli cope, a Shrine of St. Sebald the nature of what has been taken from us.