Bernard for its leading spirit," in which those 1200 religious houses were linked and subordinated with almost feudal elaboration. Each house, like an ancient Greek colony, owed obedience to the parent home from which it had been sent forth, and at the head of all was Citeaux-the mother in whose memory every church of the order in all the world was "founded and dedicated in the name of the same saint, Mary the Queen of Heaven and Earth."

The history of Byland brings out this system with especial distinctness. Savigny, the parent house of Furness and Calder, adopted the rule of St. Bernard, or, more correctly speaking, of St. Stephen Harding, for itself and its dependencies. From that moment Byland was a Cistercian monastery. In 1142 our Abbot Gerald had attended a chapter at Savigny, and successfully claimed exemption from filial duty to Furness, which had been to him, as we have seen, so unnatural a parent. But, in 1150, the abbots of Calder and Furness again renewed their claim, and this time it was Aldred, Abbot of Rieval, who, by appointment of the Abbot of Savigny, acted as judge, and decided finally in favour of Byland. One result of this organisation, overriding as it did all distinctions of nation and tongue, was certainly to infuse into

English architecture a continental element. Mr. Street (in a paper in The Church and the World, first series) has not failed to notice the evidences of foreign influence in English monastic architecture. But, taking Fountains as his example, he has sought to explain this by the personal relations of its abbots with Clairvaux. He points out, for instance, that Murdac, Abbot of Fountains, was first a monk at Clairvaux, then Abbot of Vauclair, and was finally sent by St. Bernard to Fountains, while his successor had also been previously Abbot of Vauclair; and accordingly he says, "We see features of detail which would be perfectly consistent with the architecture which these abbots saw everywhere around them when they were at Clairvaux or Citeaux, but which were new and strange to English art." Mr. Street's opinion on the purely architectural point may, I suppose, be taken as conclusive; but if so, the fact thus established illustrates, not an accidental feature in the history of one abbey, but a chapter in the archæology of monasticism which inseparably links it with the study of English art.

The remaining features of special interest at Byland are-besides the size of its cloister courtthe majestic proportions of its round-headed windows and its remarkable western façade. This part of

the church was certainly the last to be erected; and it is even possible, as has been suggested by Mr. Walbran, that it formed no part of the original design. The centre includes a trefoiled door surmounted by three pointed windows, and above these again the remains of a large wheel window said to be twenty-six feet in diameter. The west door of the south aisle is round-arched, with plain capitals; that of the north aisle pointed, with mouldings of the same date as those of the central entrance; and it is noticeable that the capitals of the shafts of the latter are plain on the south side and sculptured on the north.

Within two miles of Byland is a scene which calls up memories and visions as alien from those of medieval monasticism as any that be conceived. In the pretty village of Coxwold are three cottages which occupy the site of Shandy Hall, where the Sentimental Journey was written and Tristram Shandy finished. Here, while a third century of neglect and decay was completing the desolate record of the failure of asceticism, Laurence Sterne was day by day sitting down "alone to venison, fish, and wild fowl, or a couple of fowls or ducks, with curds, strawberries and cream, and all the simple plenty which a rich valley under Hambledon Hills can produce,"