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5 2 MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
amples; the York-Nottingham group, with Queen Isabella's
Psalter and the Tickhill Psalter; and the so-called Queen
Mary's Psalter and Psalter ofRichard of Canterbury, these last
two being decorated by the same hand, a very skilled
draughts^
man, whose tinted drawings are among the
great examples of
this
particularly English convention.
It is in the East Anglian School that we find some ofthe most
splendid page layouts of English art; script, historiated initial,
linexending, and endlessly elaborate borders are built up into
intricate displays, which at times defeat their own object by bex
coming fussy, wearisome, and a little pretentious. One of the
most splendid, to judge from photographs, was the Douai
Psalter, destroyed in the First World War; the St. Omer and
Gorleston Psalters are characteristic examples; the Ormesby
Psalter, a puzzling book by various hands, shows classical
motifs from some Italian prototype woven into this English
pattern with considerable gain to the firmness and clarity ofthe
design (PL 103). Latest of the group, the Luttrell Psalter (c.
1 3 3 5^40) has the same treatment ofthe page, but its grotesq ues,
its large and ludicrous monsters, are crudely drawn and the
line has almost been crossed between fantasy and buffoonery,
though, as in all these manuscripts, there are some charming
genre scenes of everyday agricultural life.
Elsewhere the
countryside begins to bulk large in the artist's
consciousness. The chapterhouses of York and Southwell
have each a series of capitals, where the foliage is lovingly
studied from the actual leaves of trees and hedgerows, studied
with an accuracy that makes exact botanical identification
possible (PL 104 a). This is a new relationship between visual
experience and visual art, but these carvers, bred in a long
tradition of pattern making, could still control these natural
istic growths which mask but never forsake the form of the
capitals^ they so notably adorn. From now on these careful
borrowings played a large part in English decorative art.
At the close ofthe thirteenth
century the
type offigure sculp/
ture favoured by the court may be seen in the Eleanor crosses
erected in the 90*5. In the canopies the ogee curve is employed