GIVEN THAT Eric Fernie has always shown an interest – not universal among medievalists – in the modern, this contribution to a volume in his honour offers an investigation of the concept of innovation, or novelty, in Romanesque architecture in England. Three approaches suggested themselves, namely a review of the place of what has been regarded as innovatory in English Romanesque in the historiography of medieval architecture; an investigation of what appears to have been picked up as an innovation worth repeating in England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; and finally, as a preliminary to this, a look at the written sources from the eleventh and twelfth centuries which make claims for novelty or originality in English architecture, a small group of texts that has frequently been invoked to show the impact of the post-Conquest building boom on contemporary observers. In the event, this written material proved sufficiently fertile to provide the whole matter of the paper, and while this by no means pretends to be a comprehensive survey of all the relevant contemporary references, by examining the contexts in which they appear, it enables a number of conclusions to be drawn about their nature and their aims.