[23.] This cathedral will be hereafter referred to, for the sake of brevity, by the name of Notre Dame. Other cathedrals having the same name will be distinguished by the addition of the name of the city, as “Notre Dame at Clermont-Ferrand.”
[CHAPTER XVII.]
GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE IN GREAT BRITAIN.
Books Recommended: As before, Corroyer, Parker, Reber. Also, Bell’s Series of Handbooks of English Cathedrals. Billings, The Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of Scotland. Bond, Gothic Architecture in England. Brandon, Analysis of Gothic Architecture. Britton, Cathedral Antiquities of Great Britain. Ditchfield, The Cathedrals of England. Murray, Handbooks of the English Cathedrals. Parker, Introduction to Gothic Architecture; Glossary of Architectural Terms; Companion to Glossary, etc. Rickman, An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture. Sharpe, Architectural Parallels; The Seven Periods of English Architecture. Van Rensselaer, English Cathedrals. Winkles and Moule, Cathedral Churches of England and Wales. Willis, Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral; ditto of Winchester Cathedral; Treatise on Vaults.
GENERAL CHARACTER. Gothic architecture was developed in England under a strongly established royal power, with an episcopate in no sense hostile to the abbots or in arms against the barons. Many of the cathedrals had monastic chapters, and not infrequently abbots were invested with the episcopal rank.
English Gothic architecture was thus by no means predominantly an architecture of cathedrals. If architectural activity in England was on this account less intense and widespread in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries than in France, it was not, on the other hand, so soon exhausted. Fewer new cathedrals were built, but the progressive rebuilding of those already existing seems not to have ceased until the middle or end of the fifteenth century. Architecture in England developed more slowly, but more uniformly than in France. It contented itself with simpler problems; and if it failed to rival Amiens in boldness of construction and in lofty majesty, it at least never perpetrated a folly like Beauvais. In richness of internal decoration, especially in the mouldings and ribbed vaulting, and in the picturesque grouping of simple masses externally, the British builders went far toward atoning for their structural timidity.
FIG. 128.—PLAN OF SALISBURY CATHEDRAL.
EARLY GOTHIC BUILDINGS. The pointed arch and ribbed vault were importations from France. Early examples appear in the Cistercian abbeys of Furness and Kirkstall, and in the Temple Church at London (1185). But it was in the Choir of Canterbury, as rebuilt by William of Sens, after the destruction by fire in 1170 of Anselm’s Norman choir, that these French Gothic features were first applied in a thoroughgoing manner. In plan this choir resembled that of the cathedral of Sens; and its coupled round piers, with capitals carved with foliage, its pointed arches, its six-part vaulting, and its chevet, were distinctly French. The Gothic details thus introduced slowly supplanted the round arch and other Norman features. For fifty years the styles were more or less mingled in many buildings, though Lincoln Cathedral, as rebuilt in 1185–1200, retained nothing of the earlier round-arched style. But the first church to be designed and built from the foundations in the new style was the cathedral of Salisbury (1220–1258; Fig. 128). Contemporary with Amiens, it is a homogeneous and typical example of the Early English style. The predilection for great length observable in the Anglo-Norman churches (as at Norwich and Durham) still prevailed, as it continued to do throughout the Gothic period; Salisbury is 480 feet long. The double transepts, the long choir, the square east end, the relatively low vault (84 feet to the ridge), the narrow grouped windows, all are thoroughly English. Only the simple four-part vaulting recalls French models. Westminster Abbey (1245–1269), on the other hand, betrays in a marked manner the French influence in its internal loftiness (100 feet), its polygonal chevet and chapels, and its strongly accented exterior flying-buttresses ([Fig. 137]).