Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/754

 GOTHIC

674

GOTHIC

such as Ivirkstall and Fountains, Malmesbury, Peter- borough, Norwich, and Ely, were reared all over England, but the prevailing monastic influence was Benedictine, and this was always architecturally con- servative, and at the same time magnificent. Apses with encircling ambulatories were almost invariable, and there was frequent- ly the western transept, as at Bury and Ely. Towards the end of the Norman period the Cluniac influence great- ly intensified the native richness in decoration of Benedictine art, and to this we owe in great measure the rich and intricate carving of the , late Norman work that persisted down even to ' the chapel of Our Lady at Glastonbury, built 1 in 11S4. Before this date liad occurred two events which were to initiate and, in varying degrees, control the growth of Gothic in England: the coming of the Cister- cians and the rebuilding of Canterbury choir by William of Sens. The Cistercians always fa- voured Gothic, over the massive and grandiose Romanesque of the . Salisbuky Cathedral Benedictines and Clu- niacs, because of its early austerity and the econ- omies it made possible in building. Regular Canons, also, and for similar reasons, adopted the economical new form, and this double influence was constantly exerted towards structural and artistic simplicity — a fortunate thing for the new style, since it prevented a too early flowering in the richness and luxuriance of beautiful detail.

That William of Sens introduced to England and set before English eyes so much as he could of so much as then existed of French Gothic is quite true, but it does not appear that his was the first Gothic done in Eng- land, or that it had a wide or lasting influence. Mr. Bond divides the local adaptation of Gothic mto three schools — of the West, the North, and the South — giv- ing to the former priority in time. He says: "The first complete Gothic of England commences not with the choir of Lincoln, but of Wells, as begun by Regi- nald FitzBohun who was bishop from 1174 to 1191. ... It was in the West of England that the art of Gothic vaulting was first mastered; first, so far as we know, at Worcester; and it was in the West, first ap- parently at Wells, that every arch was pointed and the semicircular arch exterminated" (op. cit., VII, 105). This development was under way at Worcester, Dore, Wells, Shrewsbury, and Glastonbury, to name only a few of the examples quoted, by the time the work at Canterbury passed from the hands of William of Sens to those of William the Englishman, and there is little evidence that it had any particular effect on the progress already begun. In the North, Lincoln choir followed close after Canterbury and was manifestly influenced by it in many ways, but as Mr. Bond says, " it is equally plain that the obligation is almost wholly to the English and not to the French part of that de- sign" (op. cit., VII, 111-12), for not all of Canterbury choir is French, even in the case of the work of William of Sens himself; the slender shafts of Purbeck marble, the springing of the vault ribs from the level of the triforium caps rather than frotn the string course

above, the penetrations of the clerestory, the elabo- rately compound angle piers, with their ring of de- tached columns, are all English, and it is precisely these features St. Hugh copied at Lincoln. Neither does there appear in the retro-choir of Chichester, be- gun about the time William of Sens went back to France, any evidence that his v/ork had estabhshed a dominating precedent; here the work is of a distinc- tively native cast, the columns of the arcade in particular being original to a degree and of the most distinguished beauty.

The exotic element in Canterbury proved to be but an episode and English Gothic went on developing itself after its own independent fashion. The choir of Lincoln exerted far greater influence and became the general model for all parts of England. In some cases au attempt, and a successful one, was made to dispense with the vault entirely, as at Hexham, Tyne- mouth, and Whitby, where in each instance the timber roof of the Anglo-Norman abbey was retained, and the chief attention was devoted to refining and improving the detail and composition of the wall design, where extremely beautiful results were obtained, as at Whitby, by the strictly English elaboration of the arch mouldings and the profiling of the pier sections. The flying buttress also was slow of acceptance and never, indeed, became the striking feature it was in all the buildings of thirteenth-century France. The English cared little for logic and less for structural brilliancy, or even consistency; the goals they aimed at were beauty in all its forms, individual expression, novelty, originality — qualities they not seldom achieved at the expense of structural integrity. The Gothic of France was singularly consistent; it rapidly developed into a classical system from which no radi- cal departures were made and into which the element of individual initiative hardly entered, once the body of laws and precedents had been established. The Gothic of England never possessed any such canon either of logic or of taste. Every bishop, abbot, or master-builder strove to outdo his fellows, to strike out some new and dazzling masterpiece, and if, as a result, the medieval building of England failed of the finality, the certainty, and the uniformity of that of France, it achieved a variety and personality far in advance of any- thing to be found across the channel. The sec- ond importation of French ideas, in the shape of Westminster Abbey, was apparently as helpless to change the English character as Canterbury choir had been; here also the French setting out, the chevet, the structural system, were overlaid with English' qualities. " We may readily make the fullest allowance for French influence at Westminster, for so en- tirely is it translated into the terms of English detail that the result is triumphantly English. It is a remarkable thing indeed, that this church, which was so much in- fluenced by French facts, sliould, in spirit, be one of the most English of English buildings" (Lethaby, "Westminster Abbey and the King's Craftsmen", V, 125). French " facts " were apparently as helpless to control the general building of a people as they had been to restrain English workmen in their detail, and

Plan