The passion for cathedral building which had broken out even before this time conditioned the building of great organs in keeping with the size and splendor of the ministers. These large organs were all built on the hydraulic principle. In England we find a monster organ (described in verse by St. Wolstan) installed in Bishop Alphege’s church at Winchester about 980 A. D. It had four hundred pipes of bronze, twenty-six bellows and two manuals (for two players) of twenty keys (or rather levers) each, every key governing ten pipes. These pipes were probably tuned in octaves of different pitch or, perhaps, with fifths. The instrument required the services of some seventy men to pump the wind! William of Malmesbury mentions ‘a fair organ with pipes of copper, mounted in gilded frames,’ which St. Dunstan presented to his monastery in the chronicler’s native town. And in the _Vita S. Oswaldi_ we are informed that the Saxon Earl Elwin gave the Convent of Ramsay an organ of spiral form, having copper pipes, which ‘on feast-days emitted a sweet melodie and a clangour resounding a long way.’ Large organs were also installed in Cologne, and in the churches and monasteries of many other German and French cities during this century. The ‘clangour’ of the Ramsay organ mentioned by the chronicler we may take for granted, for in these instruments no special distinction of tone-quality was sought, power and sonority being the first essentials. II Prior to the tenth and eleventh centuries, with their monster instruments, the organ had been comparatively easy to play. But with the enormous increase in size and a correspondingly complicated mechanism the organist had to be somewhat of an athlete, so great was the actual physical exertion required to depress the broad levers which produced the tone (no actual keyboard existed before 1200 A. D.).[94] The clenched fist was used and originated the mediæval term _organum pulsare_, to ‘beat’ the organ. During this century and the succeeding one the compass of the organ was enlarged from one to three octaves, and progress in organ-building was also made in other directions. In the twelfth century the pipes were first divided into registers and stops, and the small ‘portative’ organs, easily carried, came into use. Not until a hundred years later did the balanced keys, _depressa lamina_, a genuine keyboard, appear in connection with the portative organs, and in the fourteenth century their use was general in the larger organs as well. Before the introduction of the keyboard, the performer had ‘beaten’ levers or pulled out stop-like sliders to produce the tone, and the great exertion entailed by the ‘beating’ of the levers in the great organs is supposed to have led to the invention of ‘mixtures’ some time after 1300.