I am, however, rather anticipating my history, and must fall back upon a somewhat earlier period; for, though Canterbury Cathedral was probably the first church erected in England after the Norman Conquest, it was nevertheless by no means the first Norman church; for it was in a Norman minster that the Conqueror had, full four years before the works at Canterbury were begun, received at the hands of an English archbishop the crown of England. You will remember that as early as 1013 Ethelred and Emma, the parents of King Edward the Confessor, had fled with their children from the fury of King Sweyn to the court of Richard le Bon, duke of Normandy. It followed that the education and tastes of the future king were Norman; and long subsequently, after he ascended the throne, England so swarmed with Normans as not only to excite discontent but to give occasion to civil war. It was, then, natural that, when King Edward determined (about 1050) to refound the Abbey of Westminster, he should adopt for his new work a Norman rather than an English design. We accordingly find it spoken of by William of Malmesbury (writing in the following century) as “That church which he, the first in England, had erected in that mode of composition which now nearly all emulate in its costly expenditure.” Matthew Paris,--a century later,--says that Edward “was buried in the church which he had constructed in that new mode of composition from which many of those afterwards constructing churches, taking example, had emulated it in its costly expenditure.” These notices by men of whom the one knew most, and the other might have known all, of the Norman churches in England, are sufficient to prove the Confessor’s church to have been not of Anglo-Saxon but of Norman architecture; and, as they thought, the earliest of its style in this country. Whether that erected by Earl Harold at Waltham, and consecrated in 1060, was in the same style, we cannot ascertain. His proclivities were certainly not Norman, yet he may have adopted the fashion just coming into vogue, though we find that other churches built nearly as late, and some even subsequent to the Conquest, still retained the older and more national character. The church built by the Confessor at Westminster is thus described by a contemporary writer:-- “The house (_domus_) of the principal altar, constructed with very lofty vaultings, is compassed round with squared (stone) work uniformly jointed: the aisle[17] around the building itself is shut off by a double tier of arches from either side, the continuity of the work being firmly consolidated in every direction.