occasional tendency of the later “flowing” decorated towards “flamboyant” forms, to be seen in some of the churches of Northamptonshire, marks the culminating point of this fresh approximation of French and English architecture.  But the division between the two countries brought about by war was illustrated before the end of the reign in the growth of the most local of our medieval architectural types, that “perpendicular” style which is so strikingly different from the “flamboyant” art of the neighbouring kingdom.  This specially English style begins early in the reign of Edward III, when the cult of the murdered Edward of Carnarvon gave to the monks of St. Peter’s, Gloucester, the means to recast the massive columns and gloomy arcades of the eastern portions of their romanesque abbey church after the lighter and brighter patterns in which Gloucester set the fashion to all southern Britain.  In the buildings of the later years of Edward’s reign the old “flowing decorated” and the newer and stiffer “perpendicular” grew up side by side.  If the two seem almost combined in the church of Edington, in Wiltshire, the foundation dedicated in 1361 for his native village by Edward’s chancellor, Bishop Edington of Winchester, the triumph of the perpendicular is assured in the new choir which Archbishop Thoresby began for York Minster, and in the reconstruction of the Norman cathedral of Winchester begun by Bishop Edington, and completed when his greater successor, William of Wykeham, carried out in a more drastic way the device already adopted at Gloucester of recasing the ancient structure so as to suit modern tastes.  The full triumph of the new style is apparent in Wykeham’s twin foundations at Winchester and Oxford.  The separation of feeling between England and Scotland is now seen in architecture as well as in language.  When the perpendicular fashion was carrying all before it in the southern realm, the Scottish builders erected their churches after the flamboyant type of their French allies.  Thus while the twelfth and thirteenth century structures of the northern and southern kingdoms are practically indistinguishable, the differences between the two nations, which had arisen from the Edwardian policy of conquest, expressed themselves ultimately in the striking contrast between the flamboyant of Melrose or St. Giles’ and the perpendicular of Winchester or Windsor.

English patriotism, which had asserted itself in the literature and art of the people long before it dominated courtly circles, continued to express itself in more popular forms than even those of the poems of Chaucer.  The older fashions of instructing the people were still in vogue in the early part of Edward’s reign.  Richard Rolle, the hermit of Hampole, whose Prick of Conscience and vernacular paraphrases of the Bible illustrate the older didactic literature, was carried off in his Yorkshire cell in the year of the Black Death.  The cycles of miracle plays, which edified and amused the townsfolk of Chester and York, crystallised into a permanent shape early in this reign, and were set forth with ever-increasing elaborateness by an age bent on pageantry and amusement.  The vernacular sermons and popular manuals of devotion increased in numbers and copiousness.  In this the time of the Black Death is, as in other aspects of our story, a deep dividing line.