IN ITS BREADTH OF SUBJECT MATTER, this collection of essays written in honour of Professor Eric Fernie is representative of his own scholarly concerns, which extend well beyond the boundaries of medieval European architecture, a field to which he has contributed with particular brilliance. Even so, the spectrum of topics covered in the book does not aim to encompass the totality of Eric's interests, excluding as it does, perforce, comic-book illustration, or science fiction.

We are grateful, in the first instance, to Eric's family for raising the idea of this collection, whose theme of ‘architecture and interpretation’ was devised by Sandy Heslop, and to Pamela Tudor-Craig for encouraging the project in its very early stages. Our contributors have responded with remarkable patience and good grace to various requests. We would also like to thank Nicola Coldstream, Peter Draper, Karin Kyburz, Zoe Opačić, and Christopher Wilson for their assistance with the book in various ways, as well as Jocelyn Anderson, who prepared the index. Publication has been made possible by generous financial support from the Research Committee of the Courtauld Institute of Art; the School of World Art Studies, University of East Anglia; a Stroud Bursary from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain; and the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society.

IT IS READILY OBSERVED that people take their architecture with them. In the process of colonizing North America, unmistakably northern European styles and techniques of building were transported across the Atlantic. Further south, it was the architectural traditions of the Iberian Peninsula that were exported to Latin America. We can interpret this as a desire on the part of the emigrants involved to make a new home by replicating the essentials of their old one, or (less cosily) to imprint their culture on recently acquired territory. The two motives are clearly not mutually exclusive, and though they do not appear to sit very comfortably together it can be argued that familiarity and control are two sides of one coin. That said, it is rarely the case that the architecture of a colony is exactly like that of the homeland, and one purpose of this essay is to explore why that might be so in the case of two major buildings constructed in England in the aftermath of the Norman invasion of 1066: Colchester Castle and Lincoln Cathedral. Two points will emerge, of which one is the possible impact of ‘deep’ history, particularly the Roman past, on Anglo-Norman architecture. The other is that we may understand more about the motivations of the patrons and designers of these monuments by an oblique approach to their decision-making processes than by any that can be directly documented.

OVER THE LAST THREE MILLENNIA our planet has been increasingly covered with buildings. Humans are not the only species to reconfigure their environments, but we are special in the speed and variety of means by which we have done so, and in the deliberation involved in the process. That last point is crucial, for there is no likelihood that snails forming their shells ‘deliberate’, and scant evidence that birds building their nests do. Even beavers constructing dams are likely to be genetically programmed to do so rather than consciously deciding. Although Christopher Wren thought that the ‘Project of Building is as natural to Mankind as to Birds’, people come from a stock, the great apes, with no tradition of this project. As a working hypothesis we might suppose that, though our capacity to build is inherent, our inclination to build is opportunistic and imitative. It involves making the most of available resources and learning from observation, including watching the activities of other animals. Critically, what the process has enabled is our colonization of territory where nature, especially the climate but also dangerous creatures, might otherwise have been too threatening to our safety. Ultimately it has enabled us to format our landscapes, socially and conceptually as well as materially, distinguishing civilization from wilderness, culture from nature.