Art rather than literature reflected the deeper currents of the thirteenth century.  Architecture, the great art of the middle age, was in its perfection.  The inchoate gothic which the Cistercians brought from Burgundy to the Yorkshire dales, and William of Sens transplanted from his birthplace to Canterbury, was superseded by the more developed art of St. Hugh’s choir at Lincoln.  In the next generation the new style, imported from northern France, struck out ways of its own, less soaring, less rigidly logical, yet of unequalled grace and picturesqueness, such as we see in Salisbury cathedral, which altogether dates from the reign of Henry III.  Here also, as in literature, foreign models stood side by side with native products.  Henry III.’s favourite foundation at Westminster reproduced on English soil the towering loftiness, the vaulted roofs, the short choir, and the ring of apsidal chapels, of the great French minsters.  This was even more emphatically the case with the decorations, the goldsmith’s and metal work, the sculpture, painting, and glass, which the best artists of France set up in honour of the English king’s favourite saint.  In these crafts English work would not as yet bear a comparison with foreign, and even the glories of the statuary of the facade of Wells cannot approach the sculptured porches of Amiens or Paris.  As the century advanced some of the fashions of the French builders, notably as regards window tracery, were taken up in the early “Decorated” of the reign of Edward I.; and here the claims of English to essential equality with French building can perhaps be better substantiated than in the infancy of the art.  But all these comparisons are misleading.  The impulse to gothic art came to England from France, like the impulse to many other things.  Its working out was conducted on English local lines, ever becoming more divergent from those of the prototype, though not seldom stimulated by the constant intercourse of the two lands.

The new gothic art enriched the medieval town with a splendour of buildings hitherto unknown, which symbolised the growth of material prosperity as well as of a keener artistic appreciation.  In the greater towns the four orders of friars erected their large and plain churches, designed as halls for preaching to great congregations.  The development of domestic architecture is even more significant than the growth of ecclesiastical and military buildings.  Stone houses were no longer the rare luxuries of Jews or nobles.  Never were the towns more prosperous and more energetic.  They were now winning for themselves both economic and administrative independence.  Magnates, such as Randolph of Chester, followed the king’s example by granting charters to the smaller towns.  Even the lesser boroughs became not merely the abodes of agriculturists but the homes of organised trading communities.  It was the time when the merchant class first began to manifest itself in politics,