Divergence between English and French schools.

A notable feature of the fifteenth century is the divergence which takes place in it between the styles of English and French stained glass. Although in some respects they develop along parallel lines the two no longer form, as they did almost to the end of the fourteenth century, one school. The Hundred Years' War has done its work, and produced a separation of spirit for which the world has, perhaps, been the poorer ever since.

Indeed for the first half of the fifteenth century, during which the best of the English work was done, the quantity of stained glass produced in France seems to have been almost negligible, and a comparison of the conditions of the two countries is a sufficient explanation of this fact. While England was becoming rich and prosperous and developing her foreign trade, France was laid waste by war and struggling to free herself from the foreigner who had beaten her down. It was not till the English had been finally expelled, and France had emerged from the struggle a stronger State than she had ever been before, that the art revived; and when it did so it owed little, as is not surprising, to English influence, but on the other hand began to feel, almost at once, the influence of the Continental schools of painting.

In England, on the other hand, in spite of the quarrels of the nobles and the rival claimants to the throne, the middle class were steadily growing wealthy and powerful. The wool trade was bringing a great deal of money into the country, and the result is still seen not only in the number and size of Perpendicular churches that were built, but in the immense output of stained glass that took place. The fifteenth century, indeed, was by far the most prolific period in the history of English stained glass, and, in spite of four hundred years of destruction, vast quantities of it still remain.

General character­istics of the English style.

The general characteristics which distinguish the English style in glass in the Third Period—the "Perpendicular" style—are as follows:—

The canopy.

(1) The Type of Canopy.—Although in the fifteenth, as in the fourteenth century, figures were occasionally placed directly on a background of white quarries, as may be seen at York, in the clerestory of St. Martin's-le-Grand, and in the transepts of the Minster, the fifteenth century artists showed no signs of wishing to abandon the canopy.

It was a curious freak of fate that imposed the canopy upon stained-glass designers and made it a sine quâ non for two hundred years. It has certain obvious advantages, it is true. It conveniently filled the head of the light, and its upright lines and pinnacles repeated those of the surrounding architecture and made the window part of it; but the imitation of a stone niche in glass is hard to justify on abstract grounds, and it is difficult now to understand the enthusiasm which, as soon as it was introduced, made its adoption so universal that, with few exceptions, the artists of the day seemed unable to conceive of a single figure or a set of subject panels otherwise than surmounted by a bewildering mass of crockets and pinnacles. It is true that in the hands of mediæval craftsmen, in England at least, there was no attempt, as there was later, at literal imitation of stone-work; the canopy was rather ornament with an architectural motif, and as such possessed beauty; but I cannot help thinking that if they had never adopted it they would have evolved some other ornamental form which, while serving the same purposes, would have been more strictly in accordance with the rules of sound art, and might have given more room for the play of individual fancy.