york00orns

CHURCH ARCHITECTURE. 187
Whatever might be the shortcomings of the ecclesiastics
of the fourteenth century as regarded the
highest duties of their calHng, they left one mark, at
all events, behind them which is yet unobliterated.
We
owe to them some of the most exquisite and graceful
architectural forms which consummate taste and unsparing
munificence have ever achieved. The Early
English style gradually merged into that which has
received the name of Decorated. We have already
noted the work of this character which adds so much
grace and beauty to the great mother church of the
diocese. We see it exemplified also in the minsters
of Ripon and Beverley, the great abbey church of
Selby, and the once collegiate church of Howden.
We see it in the stately ruins of St. Mary's Abbey at
York, of Fountains, of Rievaulx, and of Bolton.
But it spread far and wide. Few are the parish
churches in this great county which do not bear some
mark of the Edwardian period of our ecclesiastical
architecture in one part or another of their structure.
Towards the end of the century another transition
took place ; the flowing and curvilinear lines of the
Decorated Period were superseded by the vertical
ones of the Perpendicular style, a style which, with
various modifications, subsisted until the time of the
Reformation, and of which examples exist in tower or
window, clerestory or chantry chapel, in more than
half of Yorkshire's country churches. It is almost
needless to say how prominent are its peculiar characteristics
in the great minsters which still stand in
their solemn beauty, and in the remains which exist
of the monastic churches.