Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/72

58 above 800 shields, of kings and other benefactors; and the whole presents a perfect blaze of splendour. Some of these groined roofs are adorned with a ramification of ribs, running out in a fan-shape, circumscribed by a quarter or half-circle rib, the intervals filled up with ornament. The cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral present, perhaps, the first specimen of the fan-tracery roof; and after that King's College Chapel, Cambridge, Henry VII.'s Chapel, and the Abbey Church at Bath. The Red Mount Chapel at Lynn, in Norfolk, is a unique and very beautiful specimen of the Perpendicular, not only having a richly ornamental roof of this kind, but, though much injured by time, displaying in every part of it design and workmanship equally exquisite. Henry VII.'s Chapel and the Divinity School at Oxford have pendents which come down as low as the springing-line of the fans.



A simpler roof, but quaint and impressive in its appearance, is the open one—that is, open to the roof framing. Here, as all is bare to the eye, the whole framework of beams and rafters has been constructed for effect. The wood-work forms arches, pendents, and pierced panels of various form and ornament. Such are the roofs of Westminster Hall, Crosby Hall in Bishopsgate, Eltham Palace, the College of Christ Church, Oxford, and many an old baronial hall and church throughout the country.



Specimens of this style of architecture in whole or in part will meet the reader in every part of England, Wales, and Scotland; and it should be remembered that it is an especial and exclusively English style, no other country possessing it. In Scotland Melrose Abbey and Roslyn Chapel present fine specimens of the Perpendicular, the latter one displaying some singular variations, the work of foreign artists.



When we descend from the military castle to more domestic architecture, we find the large houses of the gentry or nobility, though totally incapable of resisting cannon, yet frequently battlemented, flanked with turrets, and surrounded by the flooded moat. The large houses of this period were generally built round one or two quadrangles. These buildings often possessed a great variety of exterior detail: a great arched gateway with the