palaces copied from the luxurious dwellings of the south,
the land-owners dwelt in manor-houses which, though they
might adopt a feudal semblance as at Hurstmonceux, Raglan,
and Thornbury, were yet dwellings, not castles, and English
building art, free and individual in its efforts and expres-
sion, comes always more and more into touch with the
national feeling. Without ceasing to be religious it adapts
itself to secular life, and deserts the cathedral and the mon-
astery for the village church and the crenellated manor-
house, and at last under the Tudors gives rise to the dom-
estic architecture of that sturdy middle class which has
always been the backbone of the English nation. Thus
while the nobles of France were wringing the money from
the wretched peasantry to rear their Renaissance châteaux,
the English squire and his tenants, still side by side as at
Crécy, were going on building their country houses and
farms on the old lines, adding a new aisle in the same style
to the parish church, raising an almshouse in the village or
a grammar school in the street of the little country town,
or providing a new college at Oxford or Cambridge to
receive its boys. The tendency, therefore, of Perpendicular
is, in spite of its name, opposite to that of French Flam-
boyant, away from verticality and deep-cut prismatic mould-
ings, and soaring ogee canopies, towards flatter roofs and
arches, square-headed windows, shallower and broader
mouldings, and a treatment of the wall surface by ranges
of superposed panellings giving strongly-marked horizontal
bands or lines, all features better adapted to domestic than
to ecclesiastical architecture.

But these characters do not appear in the earliest ex-
amples which are to be found in the masoncraft of Gloucester.
The influence of this school can hardly be overrated. But
for it, England would probably have continued to work out
the flowing lines and rich canopies of her later Decorated
on somewhat the same lines as were adopted later by the
French. The stout Norman columns of Gloucester choir
and triforium were pared down to a flat surface, and a
wonderful screen work of rectilinear panelling spread over
the whole, while in front of the piers slender vaulting shafts
rise from the ground in which every rib of the vaulting finds
its place, and the whole space between these piers is filled

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