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ART 509
with some ofthe more splendid and individual vestments pre/
served on the Continent, but in the same museum the panels of
the Marnhull orphrey show the range of expression and vivid
narrative quality that was achieved (PL 107 a).
The colours which, somewhat faded, still glow on the em'
broidered vestments are more brilliant in the stained glass that
survives in some quantity. Canterbury has the greatest collect
tion of early thirteenth/century glass, but it is at York that the
developments ofthe glaziers' art can best be studied. During the
Civil War, a period very dangerous to pictured windows,
those ofthe minster were protected by Fairfax; in the replacing
of the
glass
after the war of 1939-45, much cleaning and re/
grouping of scattered fragments was undertaken. York has
been doubly fortunate; in preservation, and in the scholarly skill
and devotion which has surveyed and its reinterpreted great
possessions. In the Five Sisters window ofthe north transept the
minster has a notable example of grisaille glass, where leading,
tracery, and strips of coloured glass build up a trellis frame/
work through which on a background of greyish glass runs a
scroll and leaf pattern. The Five Sisters is work of the later
thirteenth century. Early in the fourteenth century the discovery
ofthe silver stain process (painting the glass with a preparation
of silver, which when feed produced a yellow colour on white
glass or green on blue) increased the range ofdetails that could
be secured without separate leading of each different colour.
By 1 3 3 8 when Robert the Glasier made the York west window
this process was freely used. The type of design also had
changed. Each light has a large single figure under an elaborate
Gothic canopy against a single/coloured background, a type
that was to be demonstrated even more finely in the huge east
window ofGloucester, glazed between 1 347 and 1 349 to com/
memorate the victory at Crecy (PL 106 a). These stately indv
vidualized figures under their elaborate canopies reach their
full developmental the glass ofthe ante/chapel ofNew College,
Oxford, where a new subtlety of colour, cooler and less vivid
but with a brilliant shimmering effect, lends especial distinc/
tion. In the fifteenth century York was once more one of the