XVII. Remarks on some early Churches in France and Switzerland, partly of the time of Charlemagne. Communicated by J. H. Parker, Esq., F.S.A.; in a Letter addressed to the Right Honourable the Earl Stanhope, President

Extract

In the series of letters I have hitherto had the honour of addressing to your Lordship, and of reading before this Society, I have confined myself to the topographical arrangement, merely following the order of my own actual tours in the English provinces of France, which were originally undertaken with a view of ascertaining whether there was any English character in the architecture of these provinces, or any marked connection between them and the architecture of England of the same period. I purposely omitted Normandy, as having been previously well described by Mr. Gally Knight and others, although that province is more familiar to me than any other part of France, and I have notes of many buildings there of which, to the best of my knowledge, no accounts have been published; but, as I fear that mere topographical descriptions of buildings are always rather dry and uninteresting, I propose on the present occasion to give some account of certain very early churches in different parts of France and Switzerland, which I have selected on account of their peculiarity, without reference to their topographical situation.