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468
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
the Westminster treatment; it is, however, profoundly different
from Ely in that the fashion for the great
traceried window is
exploited at Lincoln on a colossal scale. The great east window
ofthe church (P1.8 3 a),
as occasioned by the continuance ofthe
main vessel at full height to the extreme east end, is one of the
largest ever constructed and is the first of the colossal traceried
windows which give a special
character to the buildings ofthe
east and north of England in subsequent years. The Lincoln
window is of eight lights,
treated as a series of lancets sur^
mounted by foiled circles, a geometrical method of compost
tion common in France, and at Lincoln possibly
derived from
Westminster, which was soon to be superseded by far more
varied and ingenious systems of design. Above the main east
window at Lincoln is a second window lighting thespaceabove
the vaults. This window, though
foiled circle motif, has five
lights and, this being an odd number,
still based on the lancet and
indicates one ofthe forces which tended to break up the perfect
geometry of the early traceried patterns.
Later thirteenth'
century windows employed a greater variety of geometrical
motifs, such as trefoils, small dagger/shaped openings, a pro"
digal use of cusping to the lancet shapes themselves, and an
astonishing variety of patterns composed of those elements, a
favourite device being to incorporate one large circular figure
within a surrounding network of trefoils, almost as ifthe motif
ofa small rose window were embodied in the traceried
pattern.
There are good examples of this at Merton College, Oxford,
and rather earlier in the
(PL 8 3 ), at the very end ofthe century,
east window of the lady chapel at Exeter. These varied de^
veloped geometrical traceries were never, in fact, entirely super'
seded, but in the first years ofthe fourteenth century the use of
the doublexcurve or ogee led to a new type of tracery with flow
ing lines and an even greater freedom of composition which
seems to anticipate the flamboyant windows of the fifteenth
century on the Continent. One early form of developed geo^
metrical tracery met most frequently in the west of England has
been called the reticulated, filling the upper part ofthe window
with trefoil or
quatrefoil figures ofequal size, giving the effect of