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ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHITECTURE 453
arcading into which the open
arches of the windows were
fitted. The arcaded galleries on the internal face ofthe clerestory
wall were linked from bay to bay by low vaulted tunnels
through the intervening masses of masonry. It seems that this
system once imported from Normandy appealed to the desire
for decoration which characterized the architecture of the
twelfth century and was exploited with enthusiasm by English
builders, who continued the system well into the thirteenth
century. One of the latest and most developed examples is the
late thirteenth/century eastern extension of Lincoln cathedral,
where the clerestory consists oftwo planes of tracery, one in the
outer face of the wall glazed, the other on the inner face open.
This system ofthick double walls to the
clerestory, with arcaded
galleries on the inside, seems to have been abandoned com/
paratively early in Normandy in favour ofthe elaborated but'
tress system which was being developed in the Paris area,
and its survival and increased use in England is the more
remarkable.
In the second quarter of the twelfth century the Cistercian
order founded its first House in England. The order was par/
ticularly successful in this country and a series of great houses
grew up, notably in the north, and almost equally in Wales and
on the Welsh borders. The first Cistercian buildings, especi/
ally the two Cistercian abbeys, Rievaulx and Fountains, show
that the new order imported its architectural ideas almost
wholesale from Burgundy, the region of France where the
order took its rise. At Rievaulx we know the form ofthe early
nave from excavations, and at Fountains the nave has, in the
The Rievaulx nave was of extreme
main, survived (PL 79 a).
architectural
severity and very close indeed to such early Bur/
gundian Cistercian churches as Fontenay. Two character/
istics in particular recall Burgundy, the use of pointed barrel
vaults set
transversely
to the direction of the church, and the
consequent employment of the pointed arch for the main
arcades. At Rievaulx the pointed barrel vaults appear to have
been constructed as continuations of the soffits of the arcade
arches. At Fountains both these devices are found in a slightly