Fig. 231.—Plan of Chapel at Greensted, Essex.
Fragments of Saxon crosses are frequent. They are usually covered with that plaited ornament so frequent in the illuminations of the period.
In proof of their early age, we often find them imbedded, as mere material, in Norman walls. In St. Peter’s, at Northampton, I found the base of one of the Norman columns to be wrought out of a piece of one of these crosses; and at Jarrow there are several portions of them built into the tower, which was itself erected in the reign of the Conqueror.[13]
Though this form of architecture spread over a period of some 470 years, we have little or no means of classifying it into distinct divisions of date. It would seem that the system of rapid change which characterises the centuries succeeding the tenth had not then commenced, and that much the same manner of building pervades long spaces of time.
On a conjectural view of the case, one would look, perhaps, for the following divisions:—
1st. From the arrival of Augustine to the earlier devastations of the Danes.
2nd. From the time of Alfred to that of Dunstan.
3rd. The period of the general establishment of Benedictine rule up to that of the devastations of the Northmen under Sweyn.
4th. That from the accession of Canute to the Norman conquest.