The border might be wider or narrower, according to the proportion of the window, though a wide border was rather characteristic of quite early glass. A twelfth century border (Angers) will sometimes measure more than a quarter of the entire width of the window. The borders from Canterbury, Beverley, Auxerre, and Chartres ([overleaf]) are of the thirteenth. A border of sufficient dimensions will sometimes include medallion shapes as on [pages 115], [325], and even occasionally little subject medallions at intervals, or it may be half-circles, each containing a little figure; but such interruption of the running border is rare. In so far as it counts against monotony it is to the good.
75. Auxerre.
76. Chartres.
In narrower windows, such as more frequently occur in this country, where, as the Gothic style of architecture supplanted the Norman, lancet lights took a characteristically tall and slender shape, the border was reduced to less imposing proportions, as for example at Beverley;—there was no room for a wide frame to the medallions, nor any fear, it may be added, that these should be so large as to require breaking up into segments, as in much French glass, or at Canterbury: there the window openings, as was to be expected of a French architect, are more characteristically Norman than English in proportion. In a very narrow light in the one-time cathedral at Carcassonne the medallions break in front of a not very wide border; but then this, though a medallion window, belongs probably by date to the Second Gothic period.
