A History of Gothic Art in England

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1900 edition. Excerpt: ...slender pillars, that stand quite free, carrying boldly stilted and foiled ribs, and some two feet behind is the outer wall, whose lancets are brought so close together that the piers are almost mullions. A work with the same elegance of detail, part only of which remains, was attached to the north transept of Tewkesbury (see plan fig. 284, p. 360), probably at the time when Henry III.'s queen was resident there. To Benedictine feeling would seem due its planning, on the scheme of a parish church, in a position which took it so completely away from the approved chapels of monastic usage. Afterwards, in the late fourteenth century, when the prejudices of monkish seclusion had passed away, a new Lady-chapel was provided in the usual position at the east end, and then the first chapel was remodelled, and made to join itself to the eastern chapels of the transept. But in its first building it was a separate church of two divisions--a nave, some 52 ft. by 24 ft., vaulted in four wide oblong bays, entered by a peculiarly wide and ornamented door from the north transept;--while a chancel projected beyond the transept wall two bays; the separation being a magnificently arcaded wall screen of three lofty arches, the centre richly shafted to make a double doorway. Just again as the church's eastern limb grew into new shape from chapel additions, so did the transept have its Norman apses replaced by larger square-ended altar-spaces. In rebuildings, as we have seen, these took the form of an eastern aisle, divided at first by solid walls, as at Glastonbury,1 and afterwards by lower screen work, as at Lincoln. Often such chapels were thirteenth-century additions to the Romanesque plan. Thus Chichester Cathedral (plan, p. 74) supplies...