tower is so small in quantity that it can hardly be treated as an exception to the third group. Professor Baldwin Brown, in his valuable monograph on Saxon ecclesiastical architecture, has provided strong arguments for the influence of Teutonic Romanesque architecture on our Saxon builders.[43] It has long been the fashion to suppose that the decorative detail at Barton-on-Humber and other kindred churches is an imitation of timber construction in stone; the rudeness of treatment makes the supposition excusable. But we can hardly grant that Saxon builders could have imitated a system of construction which was not at any rate general till a much later date; and it is much more likely that the work at Barton is copied roughly and clumsily from a type of decorative work which, in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, was common in the Rhenish provinces and in the districts of Northern Italy architecturally related to them. It is unquestionable that the double opening with mid-wall shaft found its origin in the same provinces. Northern Italy doubtless exercised its influence on Germany; Germany, in turn, influenced the Saxon masons. In three other cases at least German influence is more than probable. It is certainly responsible for the double-splayed window-opening; it probably affected the simple type of capital which was developed into the cushion capital of later days; the unfaced rubble masonry and thin walling of Saxon churches are found commonly in early Romanesque German churches, and are the antithesis of the faced rubble and thick walling of Normandy and the Romanesque buildings of France; while the position of the western tower in the Saxon plan is a further German feature.