THE RUTHWELL CROSS. 5 
thought to be later, can be classed as experimental, and were 
borrowed from existing models. The principal motives are 
seen in some contemporary local work, as the Ormside Cup, 
St. Cuthbert’s coffin and coins. Certain Anglian monuments 
(as Hackness, Urswick) can be shown on historical grounds 
to be earlier than the Danish conquest. Others have been 
taken from Norman walls, where they were used as building 
material; the style by then being extinct. No Anglian frag- 
ments are known at abbey or church sites which were first 
founded after the Norman conquest. 
As to typological development, I have tried to shew that 
the Anglian cross must have been designed, late in the 7th 
century, from materials accessible in the Tyne and Wear 
valleys; that it travelled in every direction, during the 8th 
century, throughout the area then Northumbrian; that in the 
gth century its art followed the decadence of the nation, and 
at the Danish conquest passed naturally through transitional 
forms, providing material for the design of the Viking Age 
in Britain and influencing styles of art abroad. 
Against all this there stands the linguistic argument, 
which suggests a later development. The difficulty is not 
unique ; for example, in Manx monuments, typologists like Dr 
Schetelig seem to date changes about a century earlier than 
Philologists like Dr Brate. The typologist is tempted to 
believe that his materials are the more complete and his 
method not less scientific; but no doubt the antinomy is one 
which is not insoluble. 
In the middle of the 12th century an artist designing a 
cross at Ruthwell, if he were English or continental, would 
have illustrated the newer art of his time. A Scot would have 
elaborated the interlacing and key-pattern of such stones as 
the famous cross-slab at Nigg, or carved the figures of St. 
Andrews. A Manxman would have made a Norse cross; and 
an Irishman, one of the colossal Monasterboice type. None 
of these would have gone back to the old Northumbrian art 
and literature, reproducing them with exactitude. There are 
medizval forgeries of charters, and modern reconstructions 
of antiquities; but if the history of monumental art was as 
we have traced it, the Ruthwell Cross cannot be a “‘ fake ’’ of 
