quasi-roodloft at each end of the nave. There is no doubt that this custom prevailed in many other counties also, but the western loft has generally been destroyed in consequence of the barbarous custom of blocking up the tower-arch, which is often the finest feature in the church. The roodloft-galleries seem to have been used for choristers to stand upon; the lessons were also read from them. They are sometimes very large, extending over the eastern bay of the nave and occasionally over the western bay of the chancel also, as may be seen by the remains of the staircases for them.
The Redcliffe Church, Bristol, the west front and south porch of Gloucester Cathedral, and part of the choir of St. Alban’s Abbey Church, with the tomb of Abbot Wheathampstead, are also of this period, and good specimens of the style. Within the next twenty years we have a crowd of examples, which it is not necessary to enumerate.
But a few more specimens of the later period of this style can hardly be passed over, such as St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, and Henry the Seventh’s Chapel, Westminster; and of the very latest before the change of style, Bath Abbey Church, the Savoy Chapel, in the Strand, London, with its very beautiful panelled ceiling, and Whiston Church, Northants.
Gothic Architecture is usually considered to have come to an end in England in the time of Henry VIII. This is only partially true, it lingered on in many districts for another century; this was especially the case in Oxford, and I have much pleasure in republishing an excellent memoir on this subject by the late Mr. Orlando Jewitt, read at the meeting of the Royal Archæological Institute at Oxford, in 1850. It has never been much circulated, and has been quite forgotten, but the facts speak for themselves, and are clearly stated by Mr. Jewitt, and proved by his admirable woodcuts of these buildings. He was a thorough artist, and an enthusiastic lover of the subject of Gothic Architecture. His woodcuts differ from any others in this respect, they are not made from drawings, but are drawn on the wood by himself from the objects, and then handed to his brother, Henry Jewitt, to be engraved; the latter long had the reputation of “being able to cut the finest line of any one in the trade,” and in wood-engraving, where the lines have to be left standing to be printed, and the other parts to become white surface, cut away, the finest lines necessarily produce the finest woodcuts.
Some people talk of the Elizabethan and Jacobean style, but this is really no style at all, any more than what is foolishly called “the Queen Anne style.” All of these are jumbles of various styles, they are neither Gothic, nor Grecian, nor Roman, nor Italian, but can only be called with truth a mongrel mixture of styles, to which various names are given for convenience. The idea that they are cheaper on this account is entirely a delusion; the same amount of space to be covered, and the same extent of walls and of ornament, will cost the same whatever the style may be; that is a matter of taste only, about which it is needless to dispute; if any people are so blind as to prefer this mongrel work to a genuine style there is no help for it, they must expose themselves to the ridicule of the next generation.
The Gothic Architecture of Oxford, even as late as the seventeenth century, was not in this mongrel style, it was as good as the generality of modern Gothic of the Victorian school. The fan-tracery vault over the staircase of the hall of Christ Church, for instance, carried on a central pillar, as in a mediæval chapter-house, is thoroughly good Gothic, although the only record that we have of it is that it was built by “one Smith, an artificer from London,” in the time of Charles the Second. In the county of Somerset also there are some excellent examples of very late Gothic, and in some other districts; the English people were not willing to give up their preference for this their own national style to any other.
ON THE LATE, OR DEBASED, GOTHIC BUILDINGS OF OXFORD.
From the Reign of Elizabeth to the end of the Seventeenth Century.
Gothic Architecture seems to have attained its ultimate perfection in the fourteenth century, at which period everything belonging to it was conceived and executed in a free and bold spirit, all the forms were graceful and natural, and all the details of foliage and other sculptures were copied from living types, with a skill and truth of drawing which has never been surpassed. Conventional forms were in a great measure abandoned, and it seems to have been rightly and truly considered that the fittest monuments for the House of God were faithful copies of His works; and so long as this principle continued to be acted on, so long did Gothic Architecture remain pure. But in the succeeding century, under the later Henries and Edwards, a gradual decline took place: everything was molded to suit a preconceived idea, the foliage lost its freshness, and was molded into something of a rectangular form; the arches were depressed, the windows lowered, the flowing curves of the tracery converted into straight lines, panelling profusely used, and the square form everywhere introduced; until at length the prevalence of the horizontal line led easily and naturally to the renaissance of the classic styles, though in an impure and much degraded form. The mixture of the two styles first appears in the time of Henry VII.,—a period in which (though remarkable for the beauty and delicacy of its details) the grand conceptions of form and proportion of the previous century seem to have been lost. Heaviness or clumsiness of form, combined with exquisite beauty of detail, are the characteristics of this era.
In the time of Henry VIII. the details became debased, and there was a great mixture of Italian work, but still the Gothic ideas predominated, and there are some good examples of this date remaining, of which the Hall of Christ Church may be adduced as a proof.
In the reign of Elizabeth the mixture of the two styles was more complete; and though the details were frequently incongruous, there resulted from the union a style which, when applied to domestic buildings, was highly picturesque, and occasionally produced great richness of effect[G].