THE LATE GOTHIC STYLE C. I25O-C. I5OO
15th century in England desired the chief parish church of a pros-
perous town to look like appears in such a building as St. Nicholas,
King's Lynn, The church (fig. 39) was erected as a chapel of ease
from 1414 to 1419. One plan is responsible for the whole building,
and that plan is as uncomplicated as those of the contemporary royal
chapels. It consists of a rectangle of 162 by 70 feet, within which are
comprised nave and aisles as well as aisled chancel. There is no
structural articulation between west and east parts. All that inter-
feres with the uniformity of the outline is the tower taken over
from a previous building, the porch and the slightly projecting
apse. This sturdy plainness is no doubt a reflection of a change of
taste which the friars* architecture had brought about. It is evi-
dently in accordance with the style of the exteriors of German
churches. But inside such churches as St. Nicholas, King's Lynn,
or the two parish churches of Coventry (pL XL), or Holy
Trinity, Hull, have nothing of the romanticism of Nuremberg.
They stick to the traditional basilican elevation, piers are thin,
mouldings wiry and tracery is of the straightforward Perpendicular
type. There are no corners left in mysterious semi-darkness, nor any
surprising vistas. Where the fantasy of the Late Gothic designer
shows itself in the English parish church is in wooden screens and
wooden roofs. An almost inconceivable profusion of screens origin-
ally divided naves from choirs, aisle chapels from nave chapels and
the many guild chapels from the public spaces. The most lavishly
decorated are in Devon on the one hand, in East Anglia on the other.
But the greatest glory of the English parish churches are their timber
roofs (pi. XLI), roofs constructed as boldly by the carpenter as any
Gothic stone vaults by masons, and looking as intricate and techni-
cally thrilling as any configuration of flying buttresses around the
east end of a cathedral. There is a variety of types: the tie-beam roof,
the arch-braced roof, the hammerbeam roof (devised for West-
minster Hall by Yevele's colleague, the King's master carpenter,
Hugh Herland in 1380), the double hammerbeam roof and others.-
The most ingenious of them all is the one of the unaisled church of
Needham Market looking like a whole three-aisled building hover-
ing over our heads without any visible support from below. The
continent has nothing to emulate these achievements of a ship-
building nation. They are, in fact, strongly reminiscent of ships* keels
upside down.
Such roofs add a quality of structural richness to English churches