THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE C. I2$O-C. I50O
out capitals, the vaults without transverse arches and the bridges in
the aisles did ip. Bristol—it sets space into a motion, quicker, more
complicated and less single-minded than any to be experienced in
Early English churches. Its immediate forerunner in the three-
dimensional treatment of a wall is the chapter-house of York
Cathedral, c. 12,90, where the seats around the walls have not blind
arcades behind, as at Salisbury (pi. xxxm) about fifteen years before,
but are placed into tiny polygonal niches. Their forty-four times re-
peated projection causes a spatial ripple too slight still to be felt as
breaking the continuity of the wall, but quite noticeable, once one
is aware of the coming of this new tendency.
This tendency was by no means exclusively English. Continental
countries experienced it too, though considerably later. France
especially did not fully wake up to the spatial and ornamental impli-
cations of the Late Gothic style until the end of the 15th century.
Only in the midi there exists work of European significance, cul-
minating in the Cathedral of Albi (begun 1282). Albi, a fortified
church, is a mighty compact block from outside without any of the
elaborate artictllation of classic Gothic exteriors, and inside consists
of a single nave with side chapels—originally fully as high as the
nave—placed between the buttresses. Thus spatial unity is achieved,
though a unity of plainness and not of complex interwoven move-
ment as at Bristol.
This tendency towards inner and outer plainness, as characteristic
of the change-over from High to Late Gothic as the intricacies of
the Decorated in England, is chiefly an outcome of the influence of
the new Orders of Preachers, the Franciscans and Dominicans or
Grey Friars and Black Friars, founded in 1209and 1215, and spreading
from 1225 onwards at a rate only comparable to those of the Cluniac
and Cistercian spreads in their respective centuries. The 13th-century
churches of the friars, in whatever country they were built, were,
in accordance with the reformed rules of the new orders, of simple
and useful plan, large, and with very little to suggest & specifically
ecclesiastical atmosphere. They did not need much in the way of
eastern chapels, as many of die friars were not priests, but they
could not do without very spacious naves to house the large con-
gregations which came to listen to their popular sermons.
The'friars, it is known, where the orders of the people. They liked
strong effects and active lives. They scorned the sheltered and
leisurely existence of the other orders on their country estates,
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