and thither on various missions, or to attend councils of the Church. The relations, ever becoming closer, which bound the higher clergy to the court of Rome, tended to make it obligatory for each prelate to journey at least once to the See of St. Peter; and those clerks who were intelligent or ambitious went to attend the monastic or episcopal schools distinguished for learning, for any priest who wished to rise must follow the lessons of the masters at Orléans, or Paris, or Angers, or Reims, or Bec, or Poitiers, or Cluny. The peasants and serfs now free, or half free, were no longer attached to the soil, and many of them wandered here and there seeking the work of clearing or cultivating land. These laborers who went from one place to another offering their services to the highest bidder formed a regularly recognized social class and are called in contemporary documents "guests" (hospites, habitatores) or "strangers" (convenae, advenae, pulvera, albani). Thus not only France, but all Europe, was in constant motion, and an idea discovered in one place, was not slow to make its way everywhere.

To the XI century belong the beginnings of the corporations or merchant guilds of the Middle Ages. In the cities the workmen of certain trades began to unite in brotherhoods of a religious character. Not being able to count on the protection of their feudal lords, they gradually came to acquire the habit of defending themselves, and for this end they often lived in the same street or quarter. Thus the workmen grouped together in the same section of the town according to their trade, commenced to form corporations at first directed and watched over by the officers of the bishop or lord. These corporations, little by little, became more independent until they acquired the power to elect their own chiefs and make their own rules, but this movement culminated only in the XII century.

Architecture in the XI century was weaker in the royal domain than elsewhere in France. Since there is extant of this period not a single monument of size, we are forced to judge of its progress and character as best we may from the few unimportant country churches that have come down to us.

Fortunately, these documents, though very few and small, are unusually well dated, and show quite clearly the development of the style during at least the last half of the XI century. They have also been studied and published with exceptional care, so that the chronology of this architecture offers less difficulty than that of many more important styles.

Before studying the school of the Ile de France itself, it is worth while to glance at the characteristics of certain of its near neighbors. There was a constant interchange of influence between the various schools of Romanesque France, and it is impossible to study intelligently the progress of any one without knowing something of what was going on next door. Now the

Ile de France lay geographically midway between Normandy and the South; and in fact its Romanesque architecture was half way between the styles of Normandy and of several of the Southern schools, and borrowed peculiarities now from one, now from the other of these two sources.

Of the features borrowed from the South the most important was the ambulatory, a construction which, we have seen, had been employed at Tours and Le Mans in the Carolingian era, but which never appeared in Normandy before the Gothic period. In the Ile de France itself the ambulatory does not occur before the XII century, but it was frequently employed during the XI century in the neighboring Southern schools. In Auvergne it became a regular characteristic of the local style, with the peculiarity, however, that the radiating absidioles are

even, instead of odd, in number, so that none is placed on the axis. In the school of Berry, there are one or two examples of XI century ambulatories, and still further north, in the département of Loiret, on the very edge of the French Romanesque style, there is an excellent example at St.-Benoît-sur-Loire. The primitive cathedral of Chartres seems also to have been supplied with an ambulatory.

Thus the tradition of an ambulatory was kept alive just outside the border of the Ile de France, and must have been perfectly familiar to the builders of the royal domain, when in the XII century they were ready to take up the motive and give it so surprising a development.

No school of architecture is more closely related to the Romanesque of the Ile de France than that of Berry, whose monuments, for the most part small, have been made accessible in large part through the systematic labors of M. de Kersers. The most striking peculiarity of the school is perhaps the treatment of the choir, which regularly consists of three aisles, each terminating in an apse. These aisles are separated not by piers but by round slender columns bearing arches (Ill. 154), arrangement which became so traditional that even where the side aisles are omitted a reminiscence of the usual design is preserved in arcades built along the choir walls. This peculiarity in the design of the choir is also frequently found in the Ile de France.

an

The second prominent characteristic of the churches of Berry is the use of the barrel vault, which was employed almost invariably in the choir and transepts, apparently from the very earliest years of the XI century. These barrel vaults were in the XI century semicircular; but at Pleinpied there is a pointed barrel vault in a church which appears to be authentically dated 1080-92, and in the XII century the pointed barrel vault was regularly employed in Berry. Now barrel vaults

1 The chronology of the monuments of Berry is not at all clear, owing to the unfortunate lack of documentary evidence. It is certain, however, that the school was advanced; if its monuments are small, they yet show skilful technique and execution. M. de Kersers has unfortunately not given the chronology of these churches the study it deserves. I do not hesitate, however, to follow him in assigning St. Aoustrille and other barrel-vaulted choirs to before the year 1050.