The matter lay, then, between France (I mean the actual centre of the Frankish monarchy, of which Paris was the focus) and Germany. The latter, however, had already made her great architectural movement, and was (and not without cause) becoming selfsatisfied with her achievements. She had generated a glorious style, and covered her land with monuments of which she might well be proud; while the part of France immediately under the royal power had not yet been able to erect structures of a magnitude worthy of her position as the great representative state of Western Europe. The immense influence gained just at this time by the French monastic establishments, as well as their schools of learning and science, and still more the increase of the regal power under the wise government of Louis VI., and by the annexation of the southern provinces through the marriage of his successor, brought about the commencement of the great building period in France, a little before the middle of the twelfth century, and the active genius of the people decided the rest. The consequence was that, though the refinement and perfecting of the Romanesque architecture went on uniformly in all the countries I have named, and though its transition into the Pointed style is as distinctly national in England and Germany as in France, the precedence as to the _time_ at which the grand advance was made must be unhesitatingly awarded, I will not say to _France_ (for some parts of it were particularly tardy), but to that district of France round Paris, the focus of the royal power--that portion of it, in fact, which was immediately under regal government, as distinguished from that of the great vassals of the Crown. We must further in justice admit that, though each country had its own transition, founded directly upon its own national and even local variety of Romanesque, each was also in some degree tinged and influenced by the early developments arrived at in the royal domain of France.