A medieval church building was first and foremost a space in which to perform the sacred drama of the Christian liturgy. Structure, scale, and decoration were all subordinate to the cultic requirements of Mass and Divine Office. Art historians have traditionally studied medieval buildings in terms of their styIistic or formal relationships to other buildings, presumably because of their deep-rooted visual orientation and because most liturgical historians from whom they might gain insights into the functional requirements of these buildings have been concerned primarily with words rather than with actions, with similarities of texts rather than with their performance content. Thus the primary raison d'étre of a medieval church has been ignored.

It is my concern to study liturgical actions and relate those actions to the physical structures which housed them. The major difficulty with this approach, particularly in the Romanesque period of European archtecture, is the paucity of information about liturgical practice. Furthermore, few extant churches have preserved their pre-fourteenth-century liturgical arrangements. Only in England are we fortunate enough to have well-documented evidence of bothliturgical practice and architectural plans from the Romanesque period, and thus it is to England that I have turned in my study of how architectural forms were built to accommodate liturgical requirements in the Romanesque period.

In such a study it is most useful to we well-documented information as to the liturgical practices before as we as during the period in question. By noting the changes which occurred between the two and then examining the buildings which were designed to house them, one can be reasonably sure that certain architectural anomalies or peculiarities resulted from liturgical requirements rather than from stylistic inspiration or from the whim and fancy of the master mason. The Regularis Concordia, written by St Ethelwold for the Council of Winchester (c.970), preserves for us the customs of Anglo-Saxon England which endured to the Norman Conquest in all of England and well beyond the Conquest in certain monastic houses, The Decreta Lanfranci, composed by Archbishop Lanfranc for his priory of Christ Church, Canterbury (c.1070), details the customs which the new Norman archbishop wished to implement for his new English subjects. A comparison of the cultic actions required in these two documents allows us to distinguish families of liturgical requirements with resultant architectural requirements (for liturgical families see Appendix I).