[117] Sermo beati Bedæ in natale sancti Benedicti Abbatis. [118] There is a much easier explanation than this. Lombardy was at that time part of Gaul--Cisalpine Gaul. The Comacines appear to have gone to France with Charlemagne; see Chap. V. (Leader Scott.) [119] Dr. Raine of Durham believed, on the authority of the Chronicles of Symeon of Durham, that the churches of Monkswearmouth and Jarrow were rebuilt by the monks of Durham after 1075, and that the church of Wearmouth could not have been built on the same site, because in the account of the House at Wearmouth, 1360, the old church is mentioned incidentally as used for a barn or storehouse (Parker's Introduction); but allowing that to be the case, it is by no means improbable that the old doorway was retained and removed to the new church. [120] "Ibi œdificia minaci altitudini murorum erecta multi proprio, sed et cœmentariorum quos ex Roma veriunt allequant ut qui Hagulstadensem fabricam vident, ambitionem romanam se imaginari jurent."--_Malmesbury, De Gest. Pontiff._ I. iii., f. 155. [121] This is a decidedly Comacine form of building. All the earliest apses of Italian churches have these perpendicular shafts. At S. Piero in Grado they show signs of having been originally covered with marble. (Leader Scott.) [122] Merzario, _I Maestri Comacini_, Vol. I. chap. ii. pp. 87-89. CHAPTER IV THE TOWERS AND CROSSES OF IRELAND The saints or early missionaries seem to be as closely connected with the first church-building in Ireland as they were in Gaul, Normandy, and England; only by some curious circumstance, Ireland became christianized and built her churches some centuries earlier than England and Normandy. It is my conviction that in casting off the legends connected with saints, we have also cast off much real history belonging to the early missions. Now, the preceding chapter shows that it is precisely to these first missionaries that we are indebted for the imported architecture of the pre-Norman date in England, and presumably also in Ireland. This architecture has been an enigma and a stumbling-block to archæologists for ages; because while rejecting everything connected with the saints as legend, they also reject the only reasonable hypothesis of the genesis of these first stone buildings, which sprang up in a country as yet only accustomed to build in wood or earth.