The Chapter-House vestibule.
The windows in the L-shaped vestibule, or passage, which leads to the Chapter-House show a slight further development. Here the grisaille is of the same character as in the Chapter-House itself, but the coloured panels are each surmounted by a little crocketted canopy, which here appears for the first time in York. It is found in some glass at Selling, in Kent (which from the heraldry seems to commemorate Edward I.'s marriage to Margaret of France in 1299), in conjunction with grisaille in which the foliage is of the earlier conventional type, and which therefore may, perhaps, be a little earlier than these windows.
The clerestory of the nave.
The windows in the clerestory of the nave of York Minster are little, I think, if at all, later than those in the Chapter-House, but it is a little difficult to compare them as they are designed to be seen at such a very different distance from the eye, the white parts of the clerestory windows consisting only of interlacing bands of lead-work without any painted pattern at all. A small inset in [Plate XVIII.] shows the general arrangement of all these windows; the great wheel of the tracery, it will be seen, is filled with colour, while the lower lights are white with two bands of coloured panels running horizontally through them all. Of these panels the lower row consists of coats of arms of the great families of the North, contained in medallions of which [Plate XVI.] is an example. The upper row consists for the most part of subjects contained in somewhat similar medallions, but many of the panels are filled with earlier glass of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which were doubtless preserved from the older nave. Thus, if you let your eye run along the northern side it will be arrested at the extreme west end of the line by a piece of blue that is different from all the others. It is the twelfth century blue that we have seen at St. Denis and in the west windows at Chartres, and the panel is the portion of a Jesse Tree of the same pattern as that which is found at both those places, and which I mentioned when speaking of them. Portions of the foliage of the tree are in the tracery above. I think I recognize this blue too in a panel on the south side representing a man with a horse and cart, and remains of early thirteenth century glass are plentiful.
PLATE XXXI
THE ANNUNCIATION, FROM ST. OUEN, ROUEN
Fourteenth Century
The aisles of the nave.
Next after the clerestory, the oldest windows in the nave are the first five from the east in each aisle. In these the style of the Second Period is fully developed and is in no sense transitional. They are rather more advanced in style than the Merton College windows and are by a far finer artist, being, in fact, the finest work of the period that I know. They seem to me all to have been executed within a few years of each other, probably in continuous succession, and to show the gradual development which might be expected during the progress of the work.
Those on the north are the oldest and in the best condition, those on the south being much broken and confused, and one, alas! "restored." The general design is the same in all and is a typical fourteenth century one, two horizontal bands of coloured panels surmounted by canopies running horizontally through all the lights, separated by panels of grisaille which have a coloured spot in the centre of each panel. It is characteristic of the fourteenth century that the whole of the lower panels are in nearly every window devoted to the donor, who is thus given as much space as the subject. The grisaille is of the same type as at Merton. As in all early fourteenth century work, the sections divided by the heavy frame-bars are taken as the units of the design, the coloured panels with their canopies each occupying two sections and the grisaille panels one each. Nos. 2, 3, and 4 on the north were probably the first executed, as they contain no trace of yellow stain ([Plate XVII.]b). No. 5, from which the border of monks in their stalls in [Plate XVII.]a is taken, has a single touch of it in one place, but in No. 1 it is used, though still sparingly and tentatively, on the beaks and claws of the eagles in the borders of the outer lights ([Plate XVII.]c) and on the mail of the knights in the border of the centre light ([Plate XVIII.]), and here and there in the canopy. Another fresh development is the prolonging of the pinnacles of the canopy into the grisaille panel above.