By the commencement of the thirteenth century the French princi ples of construction had made themselves completely at home in Eng land. The plan followed that of the earlier period, always with three aisles instead of five, with a square-ended choir surpassing the nave in extent, and with a large chapel in a straight line beyond the choir. Two transepts, with side-aisles on the eastern side, inter sected the longitudinal axis and projected far beyond the face of the side-aisles of the nave and choir. Over the intersection rose a grand central tower greatly surpassing the towers upon the west front.
Worcester choir of Worcester Cathedral was con secrated in 1218, and shows the peculiarities of early English Gothic in all their fulness.
Salisbuiy Cathedral furnishes a brilliant example of an arrangement such as is described above; its magnificent choir was built 1220-1258, and the nave and west front immediately after, while the massive central tower, with its lofty stone spire, was probably erected not very long afterward.' The windows of the side and central aisles are as yet narrow, high, and arranged in groups of two or three, which are not united by an embracing arch except in the transepts, where the area between the arch and the lancet windows is pierced by quatrefoils. The French system is exem plified more markedly in the extreme lightness of the pillars between the nave and its side-aisles. In order that each part may exhibit its useful ness, these pillars consist of groups of detached and extremely slender shafts of the hardest stone, which are united only by a moulded bond stone at half their height and by the capital. As not one of these shafts is continued up the face of the clere-storey wall, it might be inferred that when the structure was commenced no vaulting was contemplated in the centre aisle. But the great projection of the buttresses of the side-aisles proves that they were intended to take the burden from the pillars.
The triforium has a low-pitched arch of a span equal to that of the main arches below; beneath this arch are two other pointed arches, each of which embraces two smaller ones resting on an intermediate column. All these arches rest on short columns with bases and capi tals. The whole forms an interesting transition from the Romanesque system to the later Gothic tracery, and is in France to be found only in certain cloisters; but it belongs to a period when tracery had almost developed its independence. The vault of the middle aisle is partly sup
ported by short clusters of shafts which stand upon corbels placed above the pillars of the triforium, and partly by others which start immediately under those pillars.
The Ai/lister at Beverley exhibits resemblances to Salisbury Cathedral, for, though in certain places the shafts which bear the groining of the nave start from the ground, in others the cluster of shafts commences upon a corbel above the arches of the nave and widens as it ascends. Each bay of the triforinm has four well-proportioned openings surmounted by trefoil arches. Behind these stand very short colonnettes joined by pointed arches. The clere-storey windows are narrow and pointed, and the spaces between them are filled with arcaded work. The arches, cor responding to the shape of the groin, rise ever higher, and thus attain that exaggerated sharpness and pointedness to which the English writers on art have given the characteristic title of " lancet-shaped." Lancet Arches are common in English structures of the period. These arches, in connection with other exaggerated proportions—as in the arches of the triforium at Beverley, in the depressed arches of the triforium at Salisbury, and in the pillars formed by the slender shafts united—bear witness that the English brought into use in their buildings bizarre pro portions rather than such as were strictly harmonious and truly classical. They are the echo of that striving after the strange and the imaginative which was expressed in the English buildings of the twelfth century, but which there, held in check by the solemnity of the massiveness around them, was less inharmonious than here, where comparison with the clas sical harmony of the French buildings of the same date is so easy. The mninster at Beverley has two transepts and a square end to the choir. The west front shows simply the three aisles of the nave, while in the Ca thedral of Salisbury an upper horizontal structure of the height of the middle aisle, richly membered with arcades and niches, lies in front of all three aisles.