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474
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
unification of the choir and presbytery space for a monastic
church by the device of continuing the vault of the presbytery
over the crossing was carried out at Sherborne in the fifteenth
century. In general, however, the great churches at Canterbury,
Lincoln, and Durham retained the internal lanterns over the
crossing which they had inherited from Anglo/Norman tra^
dition even when their central towers were rebuilt in the four/'
teenth and fifteenth centuries.
The alterations to the eastern parts of Gloucester are also
celebrated as the earliest surviving example of a fashion in
architecture which was to become widespread over the whole
country
in the course of the later fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries and to a large extent to supersede the type of design
which we have been discussing in connexion with Wells,
Exeter, and Ely. This new fashion is now believed to have
originated in London in the first years ofthe fourteenth century,
where its most striking examples were the new chapter/house
built in the 1320*5 at St. Paul's (PL 870) and the splendid chapel
made for the king's palace at Westminster, which was begun
in the 1290*5 and only finally completed about 1360. The St.
Paul's chapterhouse and St. Stephen's chapel, Westminster,
were the work of masons whose main employment seems to
have been for the court and many ofwhose names are known to
us. This court style is distinguished by an extraordinary refine^
ment and elegance of mouldings and also for a continued taste
for geometrical forms and a rather sparing use ofthe new ogee
doublexcurved line so popular in other works of the time. It
seems likely that this predilection for geometrical forms is a
reflection ofthe close association ofthe court and London with
the Continent, especially Paris, and many ofthe motifs of the
court masons can be traced to French practice of the later
thirteenth century. Two of these motifs call for special men'
tion: first, the device of covering one set of structural forms by
another set formed of openwork tracery. This is well known
from the Continent. There are notable examples in the west
front of Strasbourg. Amongst other examples it was adopted
on the exterior ofthe king's new chapel, where the lines ofthe