England.[1] An instance of a compound pier, none of whose
members are directly employed in the support of the vaulting, never occurs in the Gothic of France. Another defect of this pier of Chichester is that of the great distance at which the lesser shafts are placed in relation 
FIG. 73.
to the central column, which destroys that compactness of the group which is essential to strictly Gothic supports. The compound capital, too, which is in idea the same as that of the pier at the west end of the nave of Paris—described in the last chapter—necessarily shares this want of compactness, and thus the whole pier compares unfavourably with the French example.
The pier arcade is round arched and of two orders, the triforium consists of a round arch in each bay encompassing a sub-order of two pointed arches carried on clustered shafts, and the clerestory is substantially the same as that of Canterbury. Externally there is a shallow buttress against the clerestory wall, which is reinforced by a flying buttress of a purely French type, perhaps the earliest instance of a fully developed flying buttress in England.
The characteristics of this building are thus mixed. It is not, like Canterbury, a French design, but it is apparently the work of Anglo-Norman architects who adopted certain features of the growing French style, and naturally modified them according to their own tastes, but failed to perceive their functional connections and structural logic. Yet, notwithstanding the want of structural consistency, there is a good deal of beauty in this work.
Almost immediately after Chichester (probably about 1190) were begun the deservedly famous choir and the east transept of Lincoln Cathedral. In this beautiful building
- ↑ Sir Gilbert Scott, in his Lectures on the Rise and Development of Mediæval Architecture, vol. ii. p. 142, speaking of the development of the system of receding arch orders, says: "This gives us also our clustered columns, which are, in fact, the mere decoration of the receding orders of the piers." It is true that the clustered column in England is usually nothing more than this; but in true Gothic the grouping of members in the pier has reference primarily to the vaulting and not merely to the arch orders.
