GLOUCESTER AND THPB PERPENDICULAR STYLE
Of structural logicality especially there is none in Perpendicular
vaults. These close-knit patterns of ribs have no longer anything to
do with vault construction. The main transverse ribs and cross ribs
are no longer distinguishable from the innumerable tiercerons (i.e.
ribs connecting the caps of the vault shafts with points on the ridge-
rib) and liernes (i.e. ribs neither springing from the vault shafts nor
leading to any of the main crossings). The whole is in fact a solidly
built tunnel-vault with plenty of decoration applied to it. The use
of the term tunnel-vault implies that the effect of Perpendicular
vaults is as much an emphasis on the horizontal, as it were, lid charac-
ter as the star-vaults of Germany and Spain. This interpretation is
confirmed by the general substitution in English Perpendicular ex-
teriors of low-pitched, often parapeted roofs for the higher pitch of
the I2th and I3th centuries.
Gloucester is the most consistent example of the Perpendicular
in English cathedrals. The naves of Winchester and Canterbury
(chiefly of the later I4±h century) are less uncompromising. In other
cathedrals the late Middle Ages did little major work. To find
* English architecture of 1350 to 1525 at its best, one should not visit
cathedrals and abbey churches, one should go to the manor-houses
and parish churches for the happiest ensembles and to the royal
chapels for the highest architectural standard. This change in the
relative importance of buildings is due to social and historical
reasons.
Taking domestic architecture first, what had happened between
the age of Harlech and that of, e.g.,Penshurst in Kent (pi. jcxxrx)
begun, it seems, in 1341, is that half a century of internal peace had
made owners of large houses in the country give up thoughts of
military defence and allow themselves more domestic comforts.
The extremely compact arrangement of rooms in the earlier castles
was no longer necessary. Its essentials were kept—the hall as the
centre of household life, with the high-table for the lord and his-
family at one end, the entrance and a screened-off gangway at the
other, a parlour or chamber with perhaps a solar above beyond the
high-table end of the hall, and kitchen, pantry, larders, buttery etc.,
on the other side of the screens—but more rooms were added and
the hall itself was provided with larger windows of several lights and
a bay-window at the high-table end. The grandest of surviving i+th-
century halls is John of Gaunt's at Kenilworth, 90 by 45 feet in size.
In some houses at that time a separate dining-room must already
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