As the Gothic style develops in its secondary period (late thirteenth and beginning of fourteenth century) the windows increase in size, the pillars are fluted and the tracery of the windows becomes more and more complicated. The best examples of this particular Gothic still in existence are the choir of St. Paul at Liége and Notre Dame of Huy (begun in 1311).

bronze font in the church of st. bartholomew, liége (1107-1118).
The baptism of Christ.
St. Peter baptising Cornelius.
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GOTHIC CATHEDRALS

The most important and the best preserved Belgian churches belong, however, to the third period of Gothic, when clustered columns replace pillars, tracery becomes flamboyant and spires soar higher and higher above the naves. Brabant is especially rich in fourteenth and fifteenth century churches. Possessing its own quarries, it was independent of Tournai, and can claim an original style altogether free from Hainault or French influence. In this group must be mentioned Notre Dame of Hal; the cathedral of St. Rombaut, in Malines, begun in 1350 and whose flat-roofed tower was only finished in 1452; Ste. Gudule, in Brussels, the oldest of them all, with some parts dating as far back as the thirteenth century, a flamboyant porch and two flat-roofed towers similar to those of St. Rombaut; and, finally, the great cathedral of Antwerp, begun in 1387, with one of the highest towers in Europe and certainly the slenderest, whose various stories mark the transformation of style as they rise to end in a purely Renaissance spire.

collegiate church of sainte gudule, brussels.
(Thirteenth-fourteenth century).
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Ph. B.

Most of these romanesque and Gothic churches have no unity of style, owing to the long period covered during their building. From a purely architectural point of view, they lack perhaps the purity of some of their French and German rivals, but they are all the more interesting to the historian and bring him into close contact with the transformation of mind and manners from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.

In order not to split up our subject we have wandered from the civilization of the Middle Ages into the early Renaissance. Let us now go back to Notre Dame of Tournai, with her five pointed towers, and see what we may learn from her with regard to the intellectual and literary developments of the period. In the same way as the building of its choir, in the early thirteenth century, shows evident traces of French influence, so the use of French, among the upper classes and in the literature of the period, becomes more and more predominant.

During the first centuries of the Middle Ages, French influence in Flanders was particularly noticeable in the monasteries. Almost in every monastery Walloon and Flemish monks lived side by side, and it became necessary that their abbots should be able to make themselves understood by both sections of the community. Thierry of St. Trond was chosen by the monks of St. Peter at Ghent "quoniam Theutonica et Gaulonica lingua expeditus." Examples abound of bishops, teachers and preachers able to express themselves in Flemish and French. The "Cantilène of Ste. Eulalie," the oldest poem written in the French language, was discovered in the monastery of St. Amand together with one of the oldest German writings, the "Ludwigslied." The Clunisian influence tended also to spread the use of French in the northern districts.