crossing of the choir and transept of Lincoln. In that case shafts were introduced which had nothing to support, while here are vault ribs with no shafts to carry them.
The almost total absence of vaulting in the smaller village churches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England is as noticeable as is the prevalence of vaulting in the small churches of France. Such examples as St. Mary le Wigford at Lincoln, Corringham near Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, and many others, consist of nave and aisles separated by arcades of pointed arches, usually of two simply bevelled orders, supported on clustered columns, whose members are adjusted to the arch orders, and enclosed by plain walls with small splayed and pointed windows and timber roofs. They are often very charming in both internal and external aspect, but constructively they have no Gothic character.
It must now, I think, be apparent that the early pointed architecture of the Middle Ages in England is, with few exceptions, totally different in its nature from that of the same period in France; and that in constructive principle it differs little, if at all, from the Norman-Romanesque, of which it is substantially but a decorative modification. I shall, in the concluding chapter, give further reasons for supposing it to be in the main really Norman rather than English.
