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Article THE EARLY BUILDERS. ← Page 2 of 4 →
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The Early Builders.
Roman Conquest ; Thirdly : From the Norman Conquest to the great extension of building in the thirteenth century ; and Fourthly : From the thirteenth century to 1717 . It seemed to me then , and I do not see anything to the contrary clearly yet , that all turned upon the introduction of Roman builders , masons , artificers , casmentarii , call them
what you like , into England . No doubt when Augustine came there were according to Bede , two Roman-built churches in Canterbury , but Augustine is stated somewhere to have brought Masons with his mission from Rome . As regards the Roman occupation , there is no possible doubt but that the Collegia and the Lapidarii of the legions raised great works ; and Eumenius , the panegyrist , in a well-known passage , paints in
glowing terms the prosperous condition of the British artificers in the fourth century . My friend Bro . Rylands says that they came not from Rome but from Gaul ; but even supposing that to be so , which I , for one , am not quite prepared so fully to admit , the Gaulish Masons had originally
come from Rome . If it were worth while , which it really is not , I could produce many passages from early writers , such as Eddius , Richard Prior of Hagulstadt ( Hexham ) , and Bede himself and others , to prove the introduction of Masons from Rome . Of Wilfrid , Bishop of Yorkfor instanceit is expressly said : " De Roma quoque et Italia ,
, , et Francia , et dealiis terris , " & c , that he brought " c £ ementarios , " and kept with him " alios industries artifices secum , " and brought them into England . *
Benedict Bishop , Bede tells us , went to Rome four times , and though he is also said to have sent for " artificers " from Gaul , and thence introduced the art of glassmaking , it is much more likely that such artificers came from Rome than from Gaul , only then semicivilized .
Some confusion has arisen from the use of the term " Romanum opus" " more Romano , " as if it must mean that it was work done by Roman masons ; whereas , the expression probably only means work done after the kind then prevalent in Rome and in Italy . When I said that the legend of Albanus went back to 286 , 1 merely
meant to point out that that was the date of his Martyrdom ; some writers put it a little later . There is no contemporary evidence , so far , I admit , of the statement of the Gild Legends ; but there is nothing " a priori" unreasonable in the assertion and belief that he was a man of learning and culture , and the head of a Collegium at Yerulamium , and who , on his conversion to Christianity , suffered the
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.
The Early Builders.
Roman Conquest ; Thirdly : From the Norman Conquest to the great extension of building in the thirteenth century ; and Fourthly : From the thirteenth century to 1717 . It seemed to me then , and I do not see anything to the contrary clearly yet , that all turned upon the introduction of Roman builders , masons , artificers , casmentarii , call them
what you like , into England . No doubt when Augustine came there were according to Bede , two Roman-built churches in Canterbury , but Augustine is stated somewhere to have brought Masons with his mission from Rome . As regards the Roman occupation , there is no possible doubt but that the Collegia and the Lapidarii of the legions raised great works ; and Eumenius , the panegyrist , in a well-known passage , paints in
glowing terms the prosperous condition of the British artificers in the fourth century . My friend Bro . Rylands says that they came not from Rome but from Gaul ; but even supposing that to be so , which I , for one , am not quite prepared so fully to admit , the Gaulish Masons had originally
come from Rome . If it were worth while , which it really is not , I could produce many passages from early writers , such as Eddius , Richard Prior of Hagulstadt ( Hexham ) , and Bede himself and others , to prove the introduction of Masons from Rome . Of Wilfrid , Bishop of Yorkfor instanceit is expressly said : " De Roma quoque et Italia ,
, , et Francia , et dealiis terris , " & c , that he brought " c £ ementarios , " and kept with him " alios industries artifices secum , " and brought them into England . *
Benedict Bishop , Bede tells us , went to Rome four times , and though he is also said to have sent for " artificers " from Gaul , and thence introduced the art of glassmaking , it is much more likely that such artificers came from Rome than from Gaul , only then semicivilized .
Some confusion has arisen from the use of the term " Romanum opus" " more Romano , " as if it must mean that it was work done by Roman masons ; whereas , the expression probably only means work done after the kind then prevalent in Rome and in Italy . When I said that the legend of Albanus went back to 286 , 1 merely
meant to point out that that was the date of his Martyrdom ; some writers put it a little later . There is no contemporary evidence , so far , I admit , of the statement of the Gild Legends ; but there is nothing " a priori" unreasonable in the assertion and belief that he was a man of learning and culture , and the head of a Collegium at Yerulamium , and who , on his conversion to Christianity , suffered the