1066


Cathedral, Trier, Romanesque, 1039-1066.

St. John's Chapel, Tower, London, Romanesque (Norman), shortly after 1066.


Part of a Catacomb at Quesnel in France; the entire plan may be seen in the Memoires de l'Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres, vol. xxvii. We learn from the descriptions of travelers, both ancient and modern, that there is scarcely a country of the world where excavations, of the kind that have been described, do not exist. This excavation presents much analogy with the Catacombs; not that it appears to have been a cemetery, but from its origin, the form of the excavation, and from the uses which it served at different epochs. In early times a quarry from which the inhabitants drew stone, in the ninth and tenth centuries where they took refuge from the incursions of the Normans with their furniture and cattle, and for this purpose they excavated cells of ten, twelve, and thirteen feet long and wide, vaulted into the tufo: the entrances were almost always in some neighboring church. At the present day these places, which formerly received, and still remain, the name of Territorium sanctae liberationis, serve to assemble the young girls of the neighboring villages. They bring here their work during the long winter evenings, and here keep the watch, which always finishes by dancing; so that, in all times, these retreats of men have been from time to time a theater of fear, labor, and pleasure. The number of these monuments, differing from the nature of the ground, time, and customs of the several people, are infinite. Those now given have been selected because they give the most just idea of a place of sepulture, subterranean, public, and religious.
Seroux

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