There are no grounds for the suggestion that these medallion drawings were intended as designs for stained glass. There is much similarity of style in stained glass paintings and manuscript illuminations during the twelfth to the fourteenth century in England, just as in the early Byzantine manuscripts the same design serves for a miniature painting and a colossal wall-mosaic. The same simplicity of drawing and flatness of composition were preserved in both classes of art, and there is nothing exceptional in the fact that these miniatures of Saint Guthlac might have served as excellent motives for a glass-painter[91]. _Pontifical of St Dunstan._ The _Pontifical_ of Saint Dunstan (Brit. Mus. _Cott. Claud._ A. 3), executed in the early part of the eleventh century, is a magnificent example of decorative art, both in its noble designs and richness of colour. Though no gold is used, the greatest splendour of effect is produced, especially in a large miniature representing Saint Gregory enthroned under an elaborate architectural canopy, with prostrate figures at his feet of Archbishop Dunstan and the Benedictine scribe of this beautiful manuscript; see Westwood, _Irish Manuscripts_, Pl. 50. _Byzantine decadence._ The beauty of the best English manuscripts of the twelfth century is a remarkable contrast to the once splendid Byzantine school of illumination, which by this time had sadly degenerated from its former vigorous splendour, and had become weak in drawing, clumsy in pose and inharmonious in colour. The English school on the other hand, all through the twelfth century, was making rapid advances towards a perfection both of design and technique which culminated in the Anglo-Norman style of the latter part of the thirteenth century, which for beauty of all kinds remained for a long time quite without rival in any European country. _Canute a patron of art._ _Feeble colouring._ To return to the Anglo-Saxon school of manuscripts in the eleventh century, it should be observed that the Danish King Canute, unlike his destructive predecessors, did all that he could to encourage literature and art in England. With a view to fostering the production of fine illuminated manuscripts he introduced into this country, and especially into the royal and monastic libraries of Winchester, a large number of Roman manuscripts with the usual illuminations of the debased classic type. This, no doubt, helped to encourage the production of miniatures in outline such as those in the _Utrecht Psalter_[92]. Another variety of Anglo-Saxon manuscript illumination, executed during the first half of the eleventh century, consists first of all of a pen drawing in brown outline; to which subsequently the artist added with a brush narrow bands of blue or red laid on in a thin wash as a sort of edging to the brown outlines, apparently with the object of giving roundness to the drawing[93].