The Saxon Church at Bradford-on-Acon. 387 



in it qualities which might have been worked out under favourable 

 conditions into a style. It constituted a province of Austrasian 

 Eomanesque, but it was an autonomous province, whose alumni 

 dealt with the common stock of forms in independent fashion, and 

 held with tenacity to certain peculiarities which were their own. 



Saxon England stood outside the general development of 

 European architecture, but the fact gives it none the less of 

 interest in our eyes.^ 



These are the conclusions of Professor Baldwin Brown, and, for 

 the present at least, I think he has said the last word on the subject. 



In pursuing the study of Saxon architecture as a whole, as we 

 have done, we may seem to have wandered far from the more 

 definite study of this little monument of Saxon workmanship at 

 Bradford in particular ; but we have not done so, if we have been 

 led thereby clearly to understand the reasons which compel us to 

 disagree with Professor Freeman and those who saw in it the work 

 of St. Aldhelm's own time ; and to agree with those who, like 

 Professor Baldwin Brown, see in it a most valuable and precious 

 memorial of the great period of Church restoration under Edward, 

 Edgar, and Ethelred — the period included between the dates 950 

 to 1000 A.D., which was coincident with the activity of the greatest 

 genius of Saxon times, the foremost ecclesiastic and statesman of 

 his day, St. Dunstau, Abbot of Glastonbury and Archbishop of 

 Canterbury .2 



' "Anglo-Saxon architecture thus forms an autonomous province of 

 Austrasian Komanesque, i.e., it belongs to the German rather than to the 

 French connection. In many of its characteristics it is directly opposed to 

 the Norman work which was destined to supersede it. It has, at the same 

 time, its own individual features : some due to inheritance from the first 

 period of conversion, others of its own evolving ; and these it employs side 

 by side with those for which foreign prototypes, or, at any rate, foreign 

 parallels, can be found. The debt of our pre-Conquest builders to the lands 

 across the North Sea may be freely acknowledged ; while at the same time 

 full justice is done to the substantial amount of originality and boldness in 

 our native productions." — Op. cit., p. 69. 



■^ See Bishop Stubbs' appreciation of St. Dunstan, in his Introduction to the 

 " Memorials of St. Dunstan," in the Introductions to the Soils Series 

 (Hassall, pp. 1—34.) 



