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500 MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
precise as a piece of Mozartian music, England returned to a
more frankly narrative style. The Amesbury Psalter (All Souls
College, Oxford), the Missal of Henry of Chichester (John
Rylands Library), and the Rutland Psalter (Belvoir Castle) are
a trio of masterpieces, all from the middle ofthe century, Gothic
in their
diapered backgrounds, curving postures, softly falling
drapery, but classicist in their sense ofrounded forms and their
strong feeling for the human implications ofthe story. Whereas
in France the window tradition of splitting up the page into
small scenes still held good, these English books have fullxpage
Crucifixions, Nativities, and, in the Rutland Psalter, Old
Testament scenes.
The great central school is, however, that of St. Albans. Here
all the arts were practised: fresco paintings of the thirteenth
century, a nobly posed series ofCrucifixions, still survive on the
pillars of the nave; a St. Albans craftsman, Walter of Cok
Chester, made the shrine for the relics of St. Thomas Becket
(translated 1220), and the scriptorium was in the thirties pre^
sided over by Matthew Paris, the historian, famous also to his
contemporaries for his skill in illumination. Space does not
permit here any attempt to distinguish between the many works
that have at various times been claimed for him. In his Chronica
Minora there is a full/page drawing of the Virgin and Child,
with the inscribed figure of Matthew himself kneeling before
her. It is a mature and powerful work; the sense of weight and
volume in the figure, so securely posed upon the seat, would not
seem out of place in the Giottesque painters of the Trecento
(PL i oi ). Far less sympathetic and pleasing
than her Ames^
bury sister, this representation of the Virgin shows a grasp of
visual forms in advance of the technical level of the times.
Tinted line drawings, to which English artists have always
been so partial, were much favoured at St. Albans, and it is a
medium which reveals all the skill ofthe draughtsmanship, the
sense of proportion, the reasonable anatomy, the bunched and
knotted drapery, carefully examined and no longer conven/
tionally formalized. Hair and beards fall in rippling curls, the
heads are slighdy bent and often seen three-quarters full; the