Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/174

Rh sections are rounded in accordance with the usual Anglo-Norman custom, and the archivolts are everywhere provided with hood moulds. The lower piers are plain round columns of coursed masonry, with which are grouped four slender monolithic shafts, the whole forming a compound member, whose parts correspond with the orders of the superposed arches.

The buttress system of Salisbury is very imperfectly developed, nothing more than a shallow pilaster strip appearing externally. Beneath the aisle roof a flying buttress is brought to bear upon the wall at the springing of the vaults, which aids in resisting, though it does not wholly bear, the lateral pressures, these being largely overcome by massiveness of construction in the walls.

It will thus be seen that Gothic principles are, at most, but very imperfectly embodied in Salisbury. There is, in the structure, no continuous pier reaching from the pavement to the cornice, no well adjusted and externally apparent buttress system, and consequently no complete and functional framework. It is essentially a walled building which, though not so ponderous in effect as that of Durham, is yet, in principle, notwithstanding its pointed arches, its multiplied mouldings, and its slender shafts, little different from it in structural character. Perhaps the next English cathedral of importance, though it is not a building of the first magnitude, is that of Wells, whose nave and transepts, erected during the episcopate of Bishop Jocelin (1206-1242), are contemporaneous with the naves of Lincoln and Salisbury. In the nave of Wells we have a repetition of some of the peculiarities which have just been noticed in that of Salisbury, while it exhibits some other features that depart still more widely from Gothic principle. Here, as at Salisbury, the vaults are, indeed, of true Gothic form, but the vaulting shafts descend but little way below the clerestory string, and thus the bays are undivided by continuous upright supports. The triforium is an unbroken arcade of narrow openings extending along the whole length of a massive wall. The piers and pier arches are excessively ponderous, though their effect is lightened by numerous subdivisions into shafts and mouldings. The buttress system consists, again,