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until the art of carving was overlooked in the Dark Ages. 
In England the few Anglo-Saxon Churches remaining show 
no ornaments of foliage, and the crosses no more than a rough 
outline of grapes and tendrils. The Norman buildings, however, 
of the many Religious Orders were decorated in parts by carvings 
inspired by examples from the vegetable kingdom. 
This became marked at the close of the Norman period, 
from A.D. 1175 to A.D. 1200, when designs based on Roman 
models were common on capitals. Even at that early date the 
■carvers or masons living in England were influenced by their sur¬ 
roundings, and here and there on capital or corbel the young 
fronds of the bracken fern can be recognised as they uncurl in the 
early spring, and the large arrow-headed leaves of the cuckoo- 
pint, or wild arum, as carved in the spandrels of the triforium of 
Wells Cathedral. 
It belongs rather to the architect to follow the changing 
style from A.D. 1200 to A.D. 1275, the century in which foliage 
and sometimes flowers were freely used for ornamentation in our 
Cathedrals and Churches, but in nearly all of them the marked 
characteristic of the period is the conventional, rather than the 
naturalistic treatment of the plants used as models. Although 
the foliage was thus altered in passing through the hands and 
mental vision of the masons it is possible to easily recognise from 
their distinctive but conventionalised shapes the clusters of 
rounded leaves inspired by the campanula (the blue bell of Scot¬ 
land), the common plantain of our gardens and the trefoil. The 
vine leaf, of course, is twisted over capital and boss, carrying 
on its symbolical meaning from the time of the Early Fathers, 
and another leaf constantly met with is that of the Holy Herb, 
now known to us as the Yellow Avens or Herb Bennet. 
For many centuries this plant was looked upon by the 
monks and herbalists as a potent plant to protect human beings from 
the influence of evil spirits, and to cure their bodies of many ills, 
earning thereby the name of ITerba Benedicta. The small leaves 
in Nature are deeply cut into three rounded lobes, but in the 
conventional carving they are shown nearly separated into three 
leaflets. It can be seen amongst the fancy sculptures decorating 
the arches and columns of an arcade in the Elder Lady Chapel of 
Bristol Cathedral. A three-leaved decoration was much favoured 
in all religious buildings in the South of England at this period, 
because the three lobes were suggested by, or emblematic of the 
Holy Trinity. 
The only flower that seems to have been used at this period 
is the Rose, which was early associated with Christ the Saviour, 
and became so common in English buildings as an emblem of the 
kingly power of the Tudor Sovereigns. The south doorway of 
