360 On the Date of the Ecclesiola at Bradford-on-Avon. 



Firstly, the tradition of pilasters and of blind arcading had never 

 been lost since the classical period. There is no century from the 

 fifth downwards in which both of these features do not occur, more 

 or less frequently, though it is true that the sporadic forms de- 

 veloped into an epidemic about the eleventh century. The models 

 were to be found somewhere, during all the time, now here, now 

 there, but especially in and about Eavenna. The form of capital 

 used in the arcade at Bradford-on-Avon occurs in the famous 

 Binbirderek 1 at Cons tan tinople,where I have seen it myself : Eivoira 

 gives the date as 528. But this is a simple form which might 

 readily occur to any ordinary mind ; nor indeed is the multiple 

 pilaster, like a bundle of reeds, a very recondite form. It is very 

 well seen in details in the sixth century Churches of Agia Sophia 

 at Constantinople and Salonica. Horizontal ribbing, reminding 

 one of the vertical ribbing at Bradford-on-Avon, occurs on a pillar 

 in Monkwearmouth Church, which Sig. Eivoira himself dates in i 

 the seventh century. 



My leading point, then, is that Aldhelm might easily have not 

 only heard described, but actually seen, those peculiar features in 

 Church building which are "calumniated" at Bradford-on-Avon.; 

 In fact he needed not to have gone outside Borne 2 for his ideas. I 

 should, perhaps, except the double-splaying of windows : I have 

 not material to guide me on this point ; but it does not seem very 

 important ; and we have so few buildings of the seventh .and eighth 

 centuries extant that its absence may well be due simply to the 

 " imperfection of the record." 



Eivoira speaks of the fine though somewhat stumpy tower of 

 Earl's Barton as the swan song of Anglo-Saxon architecture, be- 

 longing to the eleventh century, and a further development of the 

 nearly contemporary tower of Barnack. But its leading feature 

 is found at Toscanella, in the 8th century, and most unmistakably 

 in the memorial chapel at Lorsch, in Germany, of Louis the Saxon 

 (A.D. 876 — 881), from which it might quite well have been copied ; 

 so that there was no reason, constructive or developmental, why 



1 The great cistern called the Thousand-and-Oue Columns. 

 2 e x g., the Rotondo of St. Petronilla. 



