download

478
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
Hereford are not quite those ofthe orthodox later fan, but show
markedly the influence ofthe court school ofmasons with their
predilection for French/derived geometrical patterns. Almost
contemporary with the Hereford chapter/house
are the first
bays of the cloister at Gloucester, in which the fan vault,
though used on a slightly smaller scale, has already begun to
assume the
patterns with which the later examples have made
us familiar.
The invention of the fan vault did not mean that the more
varied type of patterned vault, ofwhich the most extreme ex^
amples have been described at Wells and Gloucester above, was
altogether superseded, though the tendency to make the vault
conoids into symmetrically formed corbel brackets prevails in
almost all important late^medieval vaults. The freer pattern^
making ofwhat is called the lierne vault, as opposed to the fan,
however, continues in fashion right down to the early sixteenth'
century vaults at St. George's, Windsor, a building which
contains some ofthe most remarkable examples oflate vaulting.
In the last quarter ofthe fifteenth century there was developed,
apparently first at Oxford, a type of vault which is sprung not
from the piers nor the clerestory walls at the sides ofthe building
but from two points being voussoirs oftransverse arches thrown
across the main space, each voussoir being about a quarter of
the way across. In the earliest example, at the Divinity School
at Oxford (chap. XV, PL 109 V} 9 the great
transverse arch is
plainly visible and the voussoir consists of a huge stone from
the upper part of which the vault is sprung and which hangs
below the line ofthe arch in the form ofa lantern pendant. The
best known and most elaborate example ofthis type of vaulting
is that of the great chantry chapel which Henry VII added to
the east end of Westminster abbey, in which the pattern of
vault ribs, an orthodox fan pattern, springs from the lower
part ofthe voussoir stone just above the pendant lantern and
the network of panels conceals the great
transverse arch which
passes across the church above it. A further refinement at West'
minster is that the panels are largely openwork tracery through
which a keen eye can just discern the great transverse arch.