in painting. The nature of these two quite different arts has
been described in the first volume of this book,1 and the reader
will find therein an account of the recurrent clashes and of their
occasional attempted amalgamations; now, however, in the
Winchester manuscripts we come for the first time to some-
thing that is a just and lucid compromise between them,
a formula revealing the united elegancies of both. It is an
achievement of such significance that it must rank above every-
thing else in this book. What we are going to learn about it is,
firstly, that it is English-born; and, secondly, that its influence
outlives the Saxon period. In fact, Winchester illumination is
the first really English thing in English art.

We must stress first of all its laboured beginnings, and the
original impetus that was due to the revival of classicism under
the West Saxon kings of the house of Alfred the Great, who
died in 899. As was explained in the first volume, after Alfred
had defeated the Danes, the classical tradition was in the ascen-
dant in southern England, and barbaric art was to a large
extent relegated to the distinct and outlandish provinces of
Northumbrian and Viking art. This generalization needs, of
course, some qualification, because the Christian expression of
barbaric art to be seen in the many surviving manuscripts of
the Hiberno-Saxon Church was not condemned, nor, presum-
ably, were such of these manuscripts as happened to be in the
south English libraries put out of sight; and the fact is that the
barbaric art they represent did have, as we shall see, some
influence on the development of the Winchester style; but the
point is that barbaric art, which did not, like classical art,
include naturalistic drawings of people and scenery and build-
ings, consisted principally of extravagantly stylized human
beings and soulless spreads of animal-pattern and interlace; and
after the wars with the Danes that kind of decoration became
so closely associated with the invaders, the enemies of Christen-
dom, that classical art was correspondingly identified in the
eyes of the court at Winchester with surviving Christian civiliza-
tion and was therefore elevated by the West Saxon kings to the
rank of a national English style. Thus, when Queen Ælflæd of
Wessex (d. 916) ordered a stole and maniple to be embroidered
for Frithestan, Bishop of Winchester (enthroned 909), her
needle-women worked in coloured silks figures of Saints and

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