 The French term "" was first used in the architectural sense by archaeologist Charles de Gerville in a letter of 18 December 1818 to Auguste Le Prévost to describe what Gerville sees as a "debased Roman architecture".In 1824 Gerville's friend Arcisse de Caumont adopted the label "" to describe the "degraded" European architecture from the 5th to the 13th centuries, in his "Essai sur l'architecture religieuse du moyen-âge, particulièrement en Normandie", at a time when the actual dates of many of the buildings so described had not been ascertained