English architecture. Through it all there runs "a vein of
invention which marks them as bold and original geniuses,"
says Professor Willis, and they were fortunate also in this,
that the disaster of the Black Death in 1349 seems to have
been less severe in their neighbourhood than elsewhere, so
that their work appears to have been hardly checked, whereas
in the rest of England, owing to that, and to the Wars of
the Roses, we find little building of the first rank going on
until the accession of Henry VII in 1485. Indeed, unfinished
work on a large scale was everywhere stopped, so that
great churches like Patrington (Yorks), which were well
advanced in the Decorated style, stood still for years and
were completed with Perpendicular tracery and details.
During that long period, however, another great change
was taking place. That change was the final transfer of
activity from the monastic orders to the people themselves,
in the country districts, to the bishops and secular clergy,
in the towns. The great period of Cistercian building was
past, but the second quarter of the fourteenth century was,
more than any other, the time when the people themselves
rebuilt their parish churches and adopted the aisleless
chancel of the Cistercians; and in the towns it was the
bishops and their clergy who built or finished Wells, Salis-
bury, Ely, Lichfield, Exeter, York, Beverley, and Howden.
Finished, rather than built, for great as was the amount of
work done, it consisted almost entirely, so far as the greater
building is concerned, in completion rather than in com-
mencement.

Yet on the whole the fourteenth century was in England
a period of steady progress and development of her archi-
tecture through the three stages of Decorated work; Geo-
metrical, Flowing, and Flamboyant, to the final stage of
Perpendicular.

But it was far otherwise with France. For a hundred
years, from 1338 to 1453, just when our own Gothic
was winning its most brilliant triumphs at Hull, Boston,
Howden, Selby, Beverley, Carlisle, Lichfield, Wells, and
Ely, owing to the wealth and prosperity which the nobles
and squires of England reaped from the great war, France
was going through the most miserable time of all her
chequered history. Her Gothic architecture was practically

-258-