The Conquest was achieved in 1070.  In that same year they pulled down the wooden shed at Bury St Edmunds, “unworthy,” they said, “of a great saint,” and began the great shrine of stone.  Next year it was the castle at Oxford, in 1075 Monkswearmouth, Jarrow, and the church at Chester; in 1077 Rochester and St Albans; in 1079 Winchester.  Ely, Worcester, Thorney, Hurley, Lincoln, followed with the next years; by 1089 they had tackled Gloucester, by 1092 Carlisle, by 1093 Lindisfarne, Christchurch, tall Durham....  And this is but a short and random list of some of their greatest works in the space of one boyhood.  Hundreds of castles, houses, village churches are unrecorded.

Were they not indeed a people?...  And all that effort realised itself before Pope Urban had made the speech which launched the armies against the Holy Land.  The Norman had created and founded all this before the Mass of Europe was urged against the flame of the Arab, to grow fruitful and to be transformed.

One may say of the Norman preceding the Gothic what Dante said of Virgil preceding the Faith:  Would that they had been born in a time when they could have known it!  But the East was not yet open.  The mind of Europe had not yet received the great experience of the Crusades; the Normans had no medium wherein to express their mighty soul, save the round arch and the straight line, the capital barbaric or naked, the sullen round shaft of the pillar—­more like a drum than like a column.  They could build, as it-were, with nothing but the last ruins of Rome.  They were given no forms but the forms which the fatigue and lethargy of the Dark Ages had repeated for six hundred years.  They were capable, even in the north, of impressing even these forms with a superhuman majesty.

* * * * *

Was I not right in saying that everywhere in the world one can look in and in and never find an end to one’s delight?  I began to explore but a tiny corner of England, and here in one corner of that corner, and in but one thought arising from this corner of a corner, I have found these things.

* * * * *

But England is especially a garden of this sort, or a storehouse; and in nothing more than in this matter of the old architecture which perpetuates the barbaric grandeur of the eleventh century—­the time before it was full day.

When the Gothic came the whole of northern Europe was so enamoured of it that common men, bishops, and kings pulled down and rebuilt everywhere.  Old crumbling walls of the Romanesque fell at Amiens; you can still see them cowering at Beauvais; only an accident of fire destroyed them in Notre Dame.  In England the transition survived; nowhere save in England is the Northern Romanesque triumphant, not even at Caen.  Elsewhere the Gothic has conquered.  Only here in England can you see the Romanesque facing, like an equal, newer things, because here only was there a great outburst of building—­a kind of false spring before the Gothic came, because here only in Europe had a great political change and a great flood of wealth come in before the expansion of the twelfth century began.