THE MEDIEVAL CATHEDRALS 419 their growth from the spoken Latin of the late Empire. Sometimes this art of the eleventh and twelfth centuries is called "Later Romanesque," to distinguish it from the building of the earlier Middle Ages. But inasmuch as the earlier architecture may be readily distinguished as either basilican or Byzantine in style, we shall for the sake of con- venience and brevity reserve the term Romanesque for the I architecture of western Christian Europe from about the .year 1000 on. For three hundred years before that date
- there had been no architectural activity worthy of note
in the West. After that date the building which we call j Romanesque was not merely an imitation or even a contin- uation of Roman architecture; much of it was experimental, I progressive, full of variety, and marked by new features. {Beginning with the eleventh century, too, Romanesque j architecture in the West abandoned the round plan and i chiefly built churches with long central naves and side I aisles. Most of the round buildings of the preceding period |were replaced by these larger edifices in the new style and (were themselves henceforth used as baptisteries where they ! survived at all. Some use was still made of the dome, and jeven large churches were sometimes constructed without | aisles, but on the whole the early Christian basilica was the type from which the Romanesque developed. The new churches, however, differed in a number of 1 respects from the basilicas which we described in the eighth ! chapter. For one thing they were usually dis- Cruciform tinctly cruciform in plan, with transepts. The plan nave and aisles were often much longer than in a basilica, owing to their being continued beyond the transepts to 1 form a spacious choir. The semicircular protuberance or lapse at the east end of the church now has a diameter equal to the width of the building, so that the two side aisles meet there in a curved ambulatory behind the high altar which iwas placed at this curved end of the choir. Sometimes be- yond and surrounding this ambulatory are a series of sec- ondary apses or radiating chapels. These additions of a choir and transepts about tripled the space covered by the
