the first distinct example of an edifice in the so-called "Early English" style, and as a product of purely English genius.[1] It is certainly one of the few buildings m England which approach nearly to Gothic. It contains all the essential parts of a Gothic edifice; but they are so treated that a strictly Gothic result is hardly reached. That the builders did not possess a clear apprehension of the structural principles of the new style is manifest in many points. Gothic forms are used by them in an imitative rather than in an inventive way. For instance, there is a want of compactness in the lower piers, especially in those piers of the transept which
FIG. 78.
have the much-admired crockets on the angles of their central members. A pier whose component parts are thus widely detached, fails to conform to the principle of Gothic building which demands the utmost concentration of supports. The forms of the vaulting conoids, in spreading out so widely upon the clerestory wall, are a still more significant indication of the want of clear apprehension of Gothic principle; and the ponderous arches thrown across the triforium in place of a second flying buttress are yet another.
Contemporaneous with Canterbury and Lincoln is the Church of St. Mary's, New Shoreham; its ground-story, according to Sharpe, dating from 1175, and its upper
- ↑ "St. Hugh's choir of Lincoln Cathedral is the earliest building of the pure Gothic style free from any admixture of the Romanesque that has hitherto been found in Europe or in the world," says Mr. Parker.—Introduction to the Study of Gothic Architecture, p. 102.
