Unlike the vase, which is good both in design and workmanship, the early ivories of western Europe are rude and many of them even barbarous in manner and workmanship; but about the year 800 a sure result of the influx of Greek artists is to be seen, and the style advanced with a very evident progression, subject only to a short interval of deterioration at the end of the tenth century. After this brief check there followed a distinct improvement, impressed, however, with a feeling and type peculiar to the eleventh and first half of the twelfth century. We find the figures calm and, as it were, collected in design, but placed in stiff and unnatural positions, the draperies close and clinging and broken up into numerous little folds, ornamented also still more largely than before with small jewels or beads. The school of the lower Rhine kept itself to a certain extent free from these faults; their figures preserved more movement, their modelling was better, their draperies more natural and disposed with greater art. Christianity spread gradually though slowly over western Europe from the age of Charlemagne, and, as it spread, ivory was used more and more for the decoration of ecclesiastical furniture, especially of books and reliquaries. The adaptation of the large tablets given by the consuls has been already spoken of: and not only were the old diptychs still remaining in the seventh or eighth centuries applied to their new purpose for the public services of the church, but many new diptychs must also have been provided. Pyxes for the consecrated and unconsecrated wafers, retables or ornamented screens to be placed upon altars, holy water buckets, handles for flabella, episcopal combs, croziers, and pastoral staffs were made in fast increasing numbers. There is ample evidence, not only from examples which have been preserved down to our own times but from contemporary writers, of the large extent to which the employment of ivory reached in the Carlovingian period, from the end of the eighth to the middle of the tenth century. Eginhard, writing to his son, sends him a coffer made by a contemporary artist, enriched with columns of ivory after the antique style; Hildoward, bishop of Cambrai, A.D. 790, orders a diptych of ivory to be made for him in the twelfth year of his pontificate: an inventory of Louis le Débonnaire, in 823, mentions a diptych of ivory, a statuette, and a coffer; his son-in-law, count Everard, leaves in his will writing tablets, a chalice and coffer, an evangelisterium ornamented with bas-reliefs, and a sword and belt with similar decorations, all of ivory; Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, in 845, orders covers to be made for the works of St. Jerome with plaques of ivory, and also for a sacramentary and lectionary.