378 By Rev. H. J. DuUnfield Astley, M.A., Litt. D., &c. 



" Of the three building epochs just indicated," says our author, 

 " there is no doubt that the two really prolific ones were the first and 

 last ; for the central or Danish period, though not a wholly barren 

 epoch, certainly cannot have been one of great productiveness." 



Accordingly, after the detailed survey of the existing monuments, 

 which takes up the greater part of the book, we find that of the 

 one hundred and eighty-three examples enumerated, fourteen are 

 assigned to A, six to B, twenty-five to B or c, and the rest to c, in 

 one or other of its subdivisions. Class A includes Jarrow, Wear- 

 mouth, Esconibe in Durham, as well as the Saxon Cathedral at 

 Medehampstead (Burgh or Peterborough), the foundations of which 

 were discovered and explored not many years ago, by our late 

 lamented member, Mr. Irvine, who was also one of the first to 

 exhibit drawings of this Church before the Association. But it 

 does not include Bradford-on-Avon, which is placed by our author 

 under class c 1, i.e, between 950 and 1000, which would about bring 

 it to the period when Ethelred, or rather Dunstan, is said to have 

 restored Aldhelm's abbey, both of which we must therefore con- 

 clude to have been destroyed by the Danes. 



But it is no mere dependance on documents, or the vague 

 statements of chroniclers on which the Professor relies to justify 

 his conclusions ; it is the study of the buildings themselves which 

 has enabled him to assign them to their approximate place in the 

 scheme of Saxon architecture, with as sure a hand as that with 

 which Dr. Petrie or Dr. Evans assign the monuments of Egypt, or 

 Canaan, or K^nossos, or Mycense to their approximate dates. 



With regard to the details of building, let us take one instance, 

 that of the pilaster-strips which are supposed to be derived from 

 timber-construction. 



Professor Baldwin Brown does not deny what Sharon Turner 

 first pointed out, and what his successors have repeated ad natiseam 

 that the earliest Saxon buildings were of wood,^ and that 



' So were some of the latest. Greeiistead, in Essex, couies under period 

 c 3 : but there was a special reason for its construction. This structure 

 belongs to the blockhouse, not to the half-timber system of construction, and 

 its date is recorded, viz., 1013. — Dugdale's Monasticon, vol. iii., p. 139: see 

 Arts in Early England, vol. ii., p. 40. 



