With these few relics the tale of Norman architecture in Rouen is finished. From a short survey of this town alone, no one who had never seen Caen or Coutances would imagine that he was in the duchy which possessed a school of architecture that was developed into Notre Dame, on the one hand, in the Ile de France, and into Durham, on the other, in England. In our own island the architecture before the eleventh century, which it supplanted, known as the Anglo-Saxon, was a primitive Romanesque of purely Italian origin, as shown in Bradford-on-Avon Church, which was built by Ealdhelm in Wessex long before the Conquest. This is the only entire building of the earlier style that we have, though the towers of Earl's Barton, of Bywell, of St. Benets in Cambridge, remain to show its affinity to the styles of Italy and Western Europe, and of the Campaniles. Even when the Norman work first appears, it is not without a great deal of that Byzantine element which is expressed by a spreading cupola and a central lantern. But this early Norman building is very rare, and that is why the three churches I have just described in Rouen have a value that is scarcely realised by travellers who are in search for Gothic or Renaissance architecture only. They are somewhat difficult of access too, and little known, but they will repay a visit. They show the form of the Latin cross, with little in its eastern limb besides the apse, the choir beneath the central tower that replaced the Byzantine cupola, and a little vaulting in the aisles. Originally they had a flat ceiling for frescoes. This is a style that was neither that of Southern Italy nor that of Aquitaine. It may have been a distinctively national development of the Lombard schools of Pavia or Milan. But in any case, though purely local at first, it utterly supplanted the Primitive Romanesque that had hitherto been the common possession of Western Europe, just as, in later centuries, the pointed style utterly swept away the round arch in all its forms of expression. And in the coming chapters it is with the pointed arch that we shall have more and more to deal. To Italy, who imitated it helplessly, the Northern Gothic never became even remotely national in its expression. The native Southern Romanesque was there only appropriately replaced by the really Italian style developed in the Roman Renaissance. But in the North, where the early pointed arch had been at first only a memory of Paynim victories, or a trophy of early Saracenic work, the pointed style as a school of architecture was destined to triumph immediately it rose from the position of mere ornament to the necessity of a constructive feature. It was the problem of vaulting over a space that was not square, which gave the pointed arch its reason for absolute existence, its beauty of proved strength and adequate proportion. Some of the noblest forms of its development are to be found in the buildings we shall see later on in Rouen. [Illustration]