English Gothic architecture


English Gothic is an architectural style that flourished from the late 12th until the mid-17th century. The style was most prominently used in the construction of cathedrals and churches. Gothic architecture's defining features are pointed arches, rib vaults, buttresses, and extensive use of stained glass. Combined, these features allowed the creation of buildings of unprecedented height and grandeur, filled with light from large stained glass windows. Important examples include Westminster Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral. The Gothic style endured in England much longer than in Continental Europe.
The Gothic style was introduced from France, where the various elements had first been used together within a single building at the choir of the Abbey of Saint-Denis north of Paris, completed in 1144. The earliest large-scale applications of Gothic architecture in England were Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. Many features of Gothic architecture had evolved naturally from Romanesque architecture. The first cathedral in England to be both planned and built entirely in the Gothic style was Wells Cathedral, begun in 1175. Other features were imported from the Ile-de-France, where the first French Gothic cathedral, Sens Cathedral, had been built. After a fire destroyed the choir of Canterbury Cathedral in 1174, the French architect William of Sens rebuilt the choir in the new Gothic style between 1175 and 1180. The transition can also be seen at Durham Cathedral, a Norman building which was remodelled with the earliest surviving rib vault. Besides cathedrals, monasteries, and parish churches, the style was used for many secular buildings, including university buildings, palaces, great houses, and almshouses and guildhalls.
Stylistic periodisations of the English Gothic style are
The architect and art historian Thomas Rickman's Attempt to Discriminate the Style of Architecture in England, first published in 1812, divided Gothic architecture in the British Isles into three stylistic periods. Rickman identified the periods of architecture as follows:
From the 15th century, under the House of Tudor, the prevailing Gothic style is commonly known as Tudor architecture. This style is ultimately succeeded by Elizabethan architecture and Renaissance architecture under Elizabeth I.
Rickman excluded from his scheme most new buildings after Henry VIII's reign, calling the style of "additions and rebuilding" in the later 16th and earlier 17th centuries "often much debased".
Architect and art historian Edmund Sharpe, in The Seven Periods of English Architecture, identified a pre-Gothic Transitional Period, following the Norman period, in which pointed arches and round arches were employed together. Focusing on the windows, Sharpe dubbed Rickman's Gothic styles as follows:
  • Rickman's first Gothic style as the Lancet Period
  • Rickman's second Gothic style divided into the Geometrical period and then the Curvilinear period
  • Rickman's third style as the Rectilinear period. Unlike the Early English and Decorated styles, this third style, employed over three centuries was unique to England
In the English Renaissance, the stylistic language of the ancient classical orders and the Renaissance architecture of southern Europe began to supplant Gothic architecture in Continental Europe, but the British Isles continued to favour Gothic building styles, with traditional Perpendicular Gothic building projects undertaken into the 17th century in England and both Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture incorporating Gothic features, particularly for churches.
Classical-inspired architecture predominated after the Great Fire of London The rebuilding of the City of London was so extensive that the numbers of workers employed broke the monopoly of the medieval livery company of stonemasons and the Worshipful Company of Masons and the role of master-mason was displaced by that of the early modern architect. The new St Paul's Cathedral designed by Christopher Wren and his Wren churches mostly dispensed with the Gothic idiom in favour of classical work. Outside London however, new ecclesiastical buildings and repairs to older churches were still carried out in Gothic style, particularly near the ancient university towns of Oxford and Cambridge, where the university colleges were important patrons of 17th-century Gothic construction.
By the 18th century, architects occasionally worked in Gothic style, but the living tradition of Gothic workmanship had faded and their designs rarely resembled medieval Gothic buildings. Only when the Gothic Revival movement of the late 18th and 19th centuries began, was the architectural language of medieval Gothic relearned through the scholarly efforts of early 19th-century art historians like Rickman and Matthew Bloxam, whose Principles of Gothic Ecclesiastical Architecture first appeared in 1829.
Alongside the new Gothic building work of the 19th century, many of England's existing Gothic buildings were extensively repaired, restored, remodelled, and rebuilt by architects seeking to improve the buildings according to the Romantic, high church aesthetic of the Oxford Movement and to replace many of the medieval features lost in the iconoclastic phases of the Reformation, the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. In the process of this Victorian "restoration", much of the original Gothic architecture of the Middle Ages was lost or altered beyond recognition. However, medieval works left unfinished were often completed or restored to their "original" designs. According to James Stevens Curl, the revival of Gothic architecture was "arguably, the most influential artistic phenomenon ever to spring from England".
The various English Gothic styles are seen at their most fully developed in cathedrals, monasteries, and collegiate churches. With the exception of Salisbury Cathedral, English cathedrals–having building dates that typically range over 400 years–show great stylistic diversity.

Early English Gothic (late 12th–late 13th centuries)

Early English Gothic predominated from the late 12th century until midway to late in the 13th century. It succeeded Norman Architecture, which had introduced early great cathedrals, built of stone instead of timber, and saw the construction of remarkable abbeys throughout England. The Normans had introduced the three classical orders of architecture, and created massive walls for their buildings, with thin pilaster-like buttresses. The transition from Norman to Gothic lasted from about 1145 until 1190. In the reigns of King Stephen and Richard I, the style changed from the more massive severe Norman style to the more delicate and refined Gothic.
Early English was particularly influenced by what was called in English "The French style". The style was imported from Caen in Normandy by French Norman architects, who also imported cut stones from Normandy for their construction. It was also influenced by the architecture of the Ile-de-France, where Sens Cathedral had been constructed, the first Gothic cathedral in France. The chancel of Canterbury Cathedral, one of the first Early English structures in England, was rebuilt in the new style by a French architect, William of Sens.
The Early English style particularly featured more strongly-constructed walls with stone vaulted roofs, to resist fire. The weight of these vaults was carried downwards and outwards by arched ribs. This feature, the early rib vault, was used at Durham Cathedral, the first time it was used this way in Europe.
Another important innovation introduced in this early period was the buttress, a stone column outside the structure that reinforced the walls against the weight pressing outward and downward from the vaults. This evolved into the flying buttress, which carried the thrust from the wall of the nave over the roof of the aisle. The buttress was given further support by a heavy stone pinnacle. Buttresses were an early feature of the chapter house of Lichfield Cathedral.
Early English is typified by lancet windows, tall narrow lights topped by a pointed arch. They were grouped together side by side under a single arch and decorated with mullions in tracery patterns, such as cusps, or spear-points. Lancet windows were combined similarly pointed arches and the ribs of the vaults overhead, giving a harmonious and unified style.

Characteristics

  • The vertical plan of early Gothic cathedrals had three levels, each of about equal height; the clerestory, with arched windows which admitted light on top, under the roof vaults; the triforium a wider covered arcade, in the middle; and, on the ground floor, on either side of the nave, wide arcades of columns and pillars, which supported the weight of the ceiling vaults through the ribs
  • The most distinctive element of this period was the pointed arch,, but they were soon used in all cathedrals
  • The Early English rib vaults were usually quadripartite, each having four compartments divided by ribs, with each covering one bay of the ceiling. The horizontal ridge ribs intersected the summits of the cross ribs and diagonal ribs, and carried the weight outwards and downwards to pillars or columns of the triforium and arcades, and, in later cathedrals, outside the walls to the buttresses
  • The lancet window, narrow and tall with a point at the top, became a common feature of English architecture. For this reason, Early English Gothic is sometimes known as the Lancet style. The Lancet openings of windows and decorative arcading are often grouped in twos or threes. This characteristic is seen throughout Salisbury Cathedral, where groups of two lancet windows line the nave and groups of three line the clerestory. At York Minster the north transept has a cluster of five lancet windows known as the Five Sisters window; each is 50 feet tall and still retains its original glass
  • Stained glass windows began to be widely used in the windows of the clerestory, transept and especially west façade. Many were elaborately decorated with tracery; that is, thin mullions or ribs of stone which divided the windows into elaborate geometric patterns, as at Lincoln Cathedral
  • Rose Windows were relatively rare in England, but Lincoln Cathedral has two notable examples from this period. The oldest is the Dean's Window in the north transept, which dates to 1220–1235. It is an example of an Early English plate-tracery rose window. The geometric design, with concentric tiers of circular window lights, predates the geometric tracery of the later decorated style of Gothic architecture. The principal theme of the window is the second coming of Christ and the last judgement. Some scenes are associated with death and resurrection, such as the funeral of Saint Hugh, the founder of the cathedral, and the death of the Virgin
  • Square east end. The typical arrangement for an English Gothic east end is square, and may be an unbroken cliff-like design as at York, Lincoln, Ripon, Ely and Carlisle or may have a projecting lady chapel of which there is a great diversity as at Salisbury, Lichfield, Hereford, Exeter and Chichester
  • Sculptural decoration. Unlike the more sombre and heavy Norman churches, the Gothic churches began to have elaborate sculptural decoration. The arches of the arcades and triforium were sometimes decorated with dog tooth patterns, cusps, carved circles, and with trefoils, quatrefoils, as well as floral and vegetal designs. Simple floral motifs also often appeared on the capitals, the spandrels, the roof boss that joined the ribs of the vaults
  • The clustered column. Instead of being massive, solid pillars, early Gothic columns were often composed of clusters of slender, detached shafts, which descended the vaults above. These were often made of dark, polished Purbeck "marble", surrounding a central pillar, or pier, to which they are attached by circular moulded shaft-rings. One characteristic of Early Gothic in England is the great depth given to the hollows of the mouldings with alternating fillets and rolls, and by the decoration of the hollows with the dog-tooth ornament and by the circular abacus or tops of the capitals of the columns