How far the Norman style was distinct from the Romanesque of other parts of the north of France is a question which it would be curious, though difficult, to investigate. I think it might be shown that architecture, both in France and other countries of Western Europe, made a sudden forward start after the thousandth year of our era; possibly owing to the relief experienced at finding the futility of the prevalent fears that the world was to come to an end in that year. If such a simultaneous impulse did take place, it would be especially felt by a young and energetic race like the Normans, newly admitted into the Christian European family, recently reclaimed from the savage barbarism of Scandinavia, and grafted on to the old and comparatively civilised stock of France. Unlike, too, the other portions of France, Normandy had lost, in all probability, a large proportion of her ancient churches by the devastation of this very race while yet pagan; and nothing would be more natural than that, when Christianised, settled down, and instructed in the arts of their new neighbour, they would feel a special impulse towards repairing the effects of their own devastations, and would, while doing so, take a vigorous course in developing the manner of building in which they had been so newly instructed. I would not, however, wish to claim for the Normans any great degree of originality in architecture. Different districts of France each possessed their own local variety of Romanesque, though all clearly of one family; and Normandy, like the others, had its own variety, and that a vigorous one; and to ourselves the most interesting, as having been transplanted into our own country and become the parent of all our architectural developments. What was the form of Romanesque which prevailed in Neustria before it was overrun by the Northmen and transformed into Normandy, I think we have no means of judging,[14] the relics of its buildings being so few and fragmentary as to offer no distinct evidence; but just as the converted Northmen in the days of Canute were in this country the earnest restorers and builders of churches, so did those who had settled in France become the vigorous promoters of the art which they had once destroyed; while, by a remarkable coincidence, they were the means of bringing over in a succeeding generation to those of their own and kindred race in England the developments which they had generated under more favourable circumstances and guidance in the country which had for a century and a half adopted them into its own family. If, however, the more vigorous pursuit of the building arts in France dates, as I have conjectured, from the opening of the eleventh century, and was contemporary with the revived impulse in this country under Canute, it follows that the mode of building introduced by the Normans was not only to the English, but in reality, a _novum genus compositionis_.