There are no buildings in this country with the characteristic forms of this church, or the distribution into nave and aisles, that belong to so early a period. A few rude structures there certainly are which may have been erected by Saxon architects, one of which occurs in our own district—the tower of Whittingham Church, Northumberland—characterised by a peculiar sort of quoining—consisting of long and short stones, placed alternately over each other—small round-headed apertures divided by a rude balastre, and the absence of buttresses. The term Norman may be safely used, if it be understood simply to designate a style which appeared in this country at the conquest, and prevailed for 125 years, during the Norman rule; but it is in reality Roman, and was derived from the imperial city by the architects who diffused it over Europe, with the religion to which these structures were consecrated. It flourished during the first thousand years of the Christian era, with long interruptions during the dark ages, but its rudiments maybe discerned at this day in the Temple of Peace at Rome, erected during the first century, and in the Halls of the Baths—those colossal structures in which the grandeur of thought and magnificent aims of the Roman people are most conspicuously combined. In these edifices we perceive the general arrangement of our Norman and Gothic churches—a wide central space arched over at top, with the vaults resting on pillars corresponding to our nave; between these pillars lofty arches open into as many vaulted apartments on either side intercommunicating by similar archways and constituting side-aisles. The roof of the side-aisles being considerably lower than that of the central vault, admits the insertion of lights in the main wall looking into the cave, which correspond with our clerestory windows. The general character of Holy Island Priory is Norman, or to speak more correctly, Romanesque. The West front is almost perfect—remarkably so when we consider that, in buildings of that period, this part has generally undergone a change, by the insertion of windows of a later style, leaving only the Norman door below to point to the real date of the structure. Here, we have a door of great depth and richness of effect from the number and boldness of the ornaments. On either side are plain semicircular blank arches—but not intersecting—and the whole were flanked by towers, one of which still exists. Of the nave, the southern portion as well as the south aisle, is entirely gone, but that on the north is tolerably complete. The piers, with their capitals, which bore up the arches, are of various patterns, channelled, lozenged, shafted, and shewing in their sculptured surfaces, and the various fretwork of the arches, that is, in the only decoration which the style admitted—the germ of that inexhaustible variety and multiplicity of ornament which was in the sequel to characterize the Gothic.