CHOIR.
The first question the monks had to decide was that of lighting. Their answer was a momentous one. They decided to get additional light by raising the walls of transept and presbytery, and inserting immense clerestory windows. The nave was internally 67½ feet high. To get a big clerestory, they raised the south transept and presbytery to the height of 86 feet. Similar tall clerestory windows were being built, but in the Curvilinear style, in the choirs of Lichfield and Wells. But as yet clerestory windows were, as a rule, rather small; and some big churches of the Curvilinear period, such as Grantham and Patrington, had no clerestory at all. For what was to be the glory of the closing days of English Gothic architecture—the Lantern type of church—we must give the credit to the masons of Gloucester. And also for the new type of window. The new big window, occupying the whole breadth and nearly the whole height of the end wall of the south transept, had to be strengthened by cross-bars or transoms; and the tracery of the head had to be strengthened by the substitution of vertical straight lines, as far as possible, for curves. Here, then, we have the genesis of the Perpendicular or Rectilinear window.
Then there was the question of the vault. If we can believe Abbot Froucester, so early as 1337 the monks put over the south transept not only one of the earliest lierne vaults in the kingdom, but one so accurately worked that the junctions of the ribs did not require to be masked by bosses: they mortised the ribs together with as much precision as if they were dealing with joints in cabinet work. And over the choir and under the tower they put up the most amazingly complicated lierne vault that was ever constructed: this, too, not later than 1351.
Thirdly, they appear to have intended to separate the presbytery from its aisles by the usual stone screens—designed to correspond with the tracery of the clerestory windows. This would have left an ugly cavernous arch—that of the eleventh-century triforium—in each bay, between the screen below and the clerestory above. The pattern of the tracery of the clerestory window had been repeated once in the screen below: what more natural than to repeat it a second time in the shape of a screen set in front of the open arch of the triforium? It remained merely to join up the mullions of all three—lower screen, triforium screen, and clerestory window—and the three members were welded together into one composition; harmony and unity reigned from pavement to vault. Here again we have at Gloucester not only the commencement, but the full development of what became the leading principle in later English Gothic—the desire to impose unity on the elevations of their churches by repeats of window tracery. It is but a short step from Gloucester choir to St. George’s, Windsor. The only improvement that was made on the design of the Gloucester choir was that in the next century, when fan-vaulting came into vogue, this also was covered all over with the patterns of the window tracery.
FROM SOUTH-EAST.
One question still remained unsolved: how to treat the east end of the church. At Norwich, where the Gloucester precedent was largely followed a century later, the apse and ambulatory and chevet of chapels were all retained—with most beautiful effect. At Gloucester—unfortunately, as it seems to me—they pulled down the apse; and on the wall of the three eastern bays of the ambulatory they erected three gigantic windows, so welded together as to compose one window. And, to bring the whole into view, they made the new easternmost bays of the presbytery, which had now to be built, wider to the east than the west. Thus they got one of the biggest windows in the world, and one of the ugliest. However, no one looks at the tracery of the window, but at the painted glass which it still retains. This glass is decidedly Perpendicular in character, but the armorial bearings in it show that it was completed before 1350. All the characteristics of late Gothic glass are there. Thus the canopies and the figures alike are silvery white, and yellow stain is introduced here and there. The drawing, however, is shockingly bad; and the colour is got in a very artless way by inserting backgrounds of vertical stripes of red and blue.
At the same time—between 1337 and 1377—the monks were provided with new choir-stalls. But while stone-work and glass alike are Perpendicular in character, the stalls have bowing ogee canopies, and are quite Curvilinear.
Next the north transept was remodelled (1368-1373). It is very much like its brother, but is eight feet higher, and the vault has bosses.