§ 4. During the religious revival under Dunstan and his fellow prelates, the reformers looked once more to the continent for inspiration. Gaul, however, was no longer a possible source. Between England and the French kingdom which was rising on the ruins of the Neustrian monarchy, lay the Danelaw of Gaul, the province of Normandy. Access to the old current of religious tradition, denied on that side, was unimpeded on the side of the Low Countries and Germany, where, along the Rhine, the Austrasian kingdom still pursued its existence under the powerful sway of the Saxon emperors who had superseded the house of Charles the Great. It was from monasteries in this district that the restoration of the religious life in England was most powerfully helped; and with such help, came inevitably architectural influence. If we are to look anywhere for the immediate origin of such well-known features of pre-Conquest architectural detail as "long-and-short" work or strip-work, it is to be found in the early religious buildings of the Rhine provinces. Their ultimate origin was, no doubt, Italian; but during this period, English building indicates no such close communication with original sources as existed during the period of Gallo-Roman influence. The era of German influence lasted but a short time, and examples of it, though familiar from the peculiar details of their masonry, are comparatively few. The builders of the period immediately preceding the Conquest seem to have been thrown more upon their own resources, and to have abandoned German details gradually in favour of a more simple fashion of building. Certain German features, however, which had been imperfectly developed during the period of revival, persisted in their work; and the closest parallels to the English towers of the eleventh century, so common in Lincolnshire and parts of Yorkshire, are to be seen in western Germany, and in that part of Italy where German influence was most powerful.