1. When Italy was overrun by the barbarians, Roman Collegia were everywhere suppressed.
2. The architectural college of Rome is said to have removed from that city to the republic of Comum.
3. In early mediæval times, one of the most important Masonic guilds in Europe was the Society of Comacine Masters, which in its constitution, methods, and work was essentially Roman, and seems to have been the survival of this Roman college.
4. Italian chroniclists assert that architects and masons accompanied Augustine to England, and later Italian and continental writers of repute adopt that view.
5. Whether this is proved or not, it was customary for missionaries to take in their train persons experienced in building, and if Augustine did not do so, his practice was an exception to what seems to have been a general rule. Besides, a band of forty monks would have been useless to him unless some of them could follow a secular calling useful to the mission, for they were unacquainted with the British language, and could not act independently.
6. Masonic monks were not uncommon, and there were such monks associated with the Comacine body; so that qualified architects were easily found in the ranks of the religious orders.
7. From Bede's account of the settlement of Augustine's mission in Britain, it seems clear that he must have brought Masonic architects with him.
8. Gregory would be likely to choose architects for the mission from the Comacine Order, which held the old Roman traditions of building, rather than those of a Byzantine guild, and the record of their work in Britain proves that he did.
9. In Saxon as in the earlier Comacine carvings, there are frequent representations of fabulous monsters, symbolical birds and beasts, the subjects of some of these carvings being suggested, apparently, by the "Physiologus," which had a Latin origin.
10. In the writings of the Venerable Bede, and Richard, Prior of Hagustald, we meet with phrases and words which are in the Edict of King Rotharis of 643, and in the Memoratorio of 713 of King Luitprand, which show that these writers were familiar with certain terms of art used by the Comacine Masters.[122]