[Illustration: MASK, BUCKLE, OR NOTCH HEAD, CULHAM, YORKSHIRE.] Norman masks are interesting, as they explain some odd appearances in later work. In many churches are faces scored with lines across the cheeks, regardless of the ordinary lines of expression, in a manner closely resembling the tattoo incisions of the New Zealand warrior. This appearance, however, is simply the too faithful copying of crude Norman masks, in which the lines are meant to be the semi-circles round eyes and mouth. Moreover, the Norman heads are most often the heads of animals grinning to shew the teeth, although their general effect is that of grotesque human heads. Iffley west doorway furnishes the best example. Here we have the well-known "beak head" ornament. The semicircle and upper portion of the jambs have single heads, not two of which are exactly alike, though all closely resemble each other. They are heads of the eagle or gryphon order, with a forehead ornament very Assyrian in character. The heads of the jambs are compound, being the head of a grinning beast, probably a lion, from the mouth of which emerges a gryphon head of small size. These are sometimes called "Cat-heads," and the gryphon head is sometimes considered (and perhaps occasionally shewn as such) a tongue. A fine doorway of beak-heads is at St. Peter's-in-the-East, Oxford, which church was probably executed by the workmen who were responsible for Iffley. [Illustration: BEAK HEADS, IFFLEY.] It is probable that the symbolism of this is the swallowing up of night by day or _vice versâ_. The outer arch of the Iffley doorway consists of zodiacal signs, and at the south doorway are other designs elsewhere mentioned in this volume, far removed from Christian intent. [Illustration: NORMAN MASK, ROCHESTER.] The grotesqueness of Norman work is almost entirely unconscious. The workers were full of Byzantine ideas, and the severe and awful was their object rather than the comic. They frequently attempted pretty detail in their symbolic designs, but in all the forms which have come from their chisels it is easy to see how incomplete an embodiment they gave to their conceptions, or rather to the conceptions of their traditional school. Norman work, beyond the Gothic, irrespective of the architectural peculiarities, has traces of its eastern origin in the classic connection of its designs. Adel Church, near Leeds, is peculiar in having co-mingled with its eastern designs more than ordinarily tangible references to ancient Keltic worship, but nearly all Norman ideographic detail concerns itself with old-world myths. [Illustration: GORGONIC MASK, EWELME.]