This peculiarly English style is found far more convenient for domestic buildings than the earlier styles. There are a large number of palaces and houses of this style remaining, such as nearly all the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge; it can also be very well executed in brickwork. Some of the finest mediæval houses that we have remaining are of brick, and the tall brick chimneys of this style are both ornamental and convenient; they are usually built in the outer wall, and carried up above the level of the roof, and for this reason the fires made under such chimneys never smoke. Modern builders have greatly neglected this precaution, and the wind blowing over a high-pitched roof naturally descends on the other side, and carries the smoke down the chimney, instead of letting it float away freely with the wind.
No one who has seen the fine brick buildings of the time of Henry the Seventh can despise them. Eton College is almost entirely built of brick, excepting the chapel, which is faced with stone. In many districts the difference of expense between brick and stone is enormous. The old Romans were quite aware of this, and used brick far more than modern builders are willing to do, even for their imperial palaces and magnificent aqueducts.
The arches of this style are not usually so acute as in the earlier periods, and in the latter part of the style become very flat, but in the earlier portion they are similar to the previous style, as in the compartment of Fotheringhay. In this instance there is also a deep hollow molding, which looks at first sight like Decorated, and beginners in the study are frequently misled by this feature, but it is often continued for the first half of the Perpendicular period. The arch of the clere-storey window over the former is comparatively flat. The name of clere-storey is usually continued even when there is no triforium, or blind-storey, as it is called by William of Worcester, writing in the fifteenth century. The French have adopted the English name of clear-storey, with the old spelling [as clèrestorie]: it is therefore more expedient to observe it, but for beginners it may perhaps be necessary to explain that clere is the old spelling of ‘clear.’ The different forms of the two arches of the windows of the aisle and of the clere-storey in this dated example, prove that the form of the arch is never a safe guide to the date of a building; to fix a date, various details have often to be considered.
Compartment of Fotheringhay Church, A.D. 1435.
Waterperry, Oxon.
Arch over a tomb of a knight in plate armour, of the fifteenth century.
It is not always easy to distinguish at first sight the arch over a tomb of early Perpendicular from one in the Decorated style, as at Waterperry, Oxon. Here the battlement on the top of the wall at the back, and the plate-armour of the knight, and the crockets on the ogee arch, are more like the Decorated style.