THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE C» I25O-C. I50O
English, Decorated and Perpendicular. Early English was at an end
when the Angel Choir was growing. Decorated is the style of Bristol
and Ely. Perpendicular corresponds to what we have seen of Late
Gothic in Germany and Spain, and it is a contribution of equal
national vigour. Once it had been created by a few strong-minded,
clear-headed architects, it brushed aside all the vagaries of Decorated
and setded down to a long, none too adventurous development of a
plain-spoken idiom, sober and wideawake. People have tried to
connect the coming of this new style with the Black Death of 1349.
This is wrong; for it is there in all its perfection as early as 13 31 in the
south transept and as early as 1337 in the choir of Gloucester Cathe-
dral (pi. xxxvn). The thick circular piers of the Norman choir were
left standing but with their galleries hidden behind a screen of lean
uprights and horizontals divided up into rows of panels. The east wall
was opened into one huge window with, except for the few main
partitions, nothing but a system of glazed panels. The number of
horizontal divisions invalidates all that might have been left of the
upward soar of earlier Gothic architecture. In this the same new ten-
dency is visible as in the double row of windows in German
churches. But while on the Continent the walls were made solid
too, English Perpendicular walls remained glass screens. And just as
thus the wall structure was less drastically changed than in Germany
or Spain, so the spatial character of Perpendicular rooms returned—
under renewed influence, it seems, of French buildings of about 1240
to 1330—to the clarity of the High Gothic style. Basilican plans were
only very rarely given up in favour of the spatially more promising
aisled-hall plan of Bristol and Germany. The only fanciful feature in
Gloucester and indeed in many other Perpendicular parts of cathedral
and abbey churches is the decoration of the vaults (pLxxxvm). There
is as much imagination displayed in them as in the German and
Spanish vaults. In fact neither of these two countries, let alone France,
has produced anything so complicated as the scheme of Gloucester
at so early a date. On the other hand, Perpendicular vault decoration
is harsher than that of Continental Late Gothic, just as Perpendicular
tracery is harsher than German, Spanish or French tracery of about
1500 (or than English tracery of 1320). The ribs of Gloucester form
patterns as abstract and as angular as the matchsticks on the walls of
Earl's Barton tower three hundred years before, patterns equally
remote from the luxuriance of Ely, the resilience of Lincoln and the
structural logicality of classic French rib-vaults*
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