part, only in arcades and single openings, while other Gothic features are introduced without functional use.
This lack of structural unity exhibited by the pointed architecture of the latter part of the twelfth century in England is in marked contrast with the consistency of structural principle everywhere exhibited at the same time in the architecture of France. It shows that there was no such consistent development in the architecture of England as there was in that of France at this time. The pointed arches and other Gothic features in England, with few exceptions, were due to direct continental influence, but were merely ornamental modifications of structurally unmodified designs; and even this ornamental modification was by no means as yet universal. For contemporaneously with Canterbury and Lincoln were built the great naves of such important churches as Ely and Peterborough,[1] in which the round arched and heavy walled Norman art remains substantially unchanged. Even the aisle vaults of the nave of Peterborough, though provided with transverse and groin ribs, are in other respects essentially Norman constructions. The pointed arch is nowhere employed in them, and their workmanship is heavy and inelegant. Had there been anything in England at this time corresponding with the architectural movement of the native schools of lay builders in France, it would have been impossible that such vaults as these, to say nothing of the nave with which they are joined, should be constructed half a century after the vaults of St. Denis, and while the choir of Lincoln was building in the near neighbourhood.
The failure among the architects in England to comprehend the true principles of Gothic building becomes still more marked in the thirteenth century, as the so-called Early English style advances, and more still, as it passes into the Decorated or Geometrical. An examination of a few typical buildings of this period will illustrate this fact. Among the most important and the finest of the earlier class is the nave of Lincoln, erected between 1209 and 1235. Already in this structure are the vaults encumbered by numerous superfluous ribs,—ribs which have no necessary
- ↑ The nave of Ely was not completed before 1174, and that of Peterborough was built between 1177 and 1193.
