The Building of England: How the History of England Has Shaped Our Buildings. Simon Thurley

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Fig. 62 Lincoln Cathedral; the vault of St Hugh’s Choir of about 1200, the first instance anywhere of a rib that ran along the ridge of the vault. To this rib join ribs that have little structural necessity and do not define the bay structure – in other words, they are pure decoration.

      Ideas from Canterbury and Wells fed into the greatest of early English Gothic churches: the cathedral at Lincoln. In 1185 a vault in the east end of the cathedral collapsed and the following year Henry II appointed Hugh of Avalon as the new bishop. These two events led to a rebuilding of the eastern parts, largely completed by the time of Hugh’s death in 1200. This probably finished the original plan; but work continued and by about 1250 the whole cathedral, save the Norman west front, had been rebuilt. Lincoln was rebuilt in its own image. This was a cathedral that proclaimed its place at the top of the hierarchy, together with Canterbury and York. As a result nobody stinted on money, scale or decorative effect. Lincoln set out to dazzle – and dazzle it does.

      The earliest part to be rebuilt was itself replaced in 1255 by the Angel Choir, but St Hugh’s choir and eastern transepts remain. The first thing that strikes the visitor is the use of polished limestone in direct imitation of the work at Canterbury. The second thing is the form of the choir vault. The choir is still built with the thick walls, but the piers appear less massive than at Wells and the shafts from the vaults divide the elevation into bays. But the vaults do not reinforce the bay structure. For the first time there is a central rib running the length of the vault. Onto this, at seemingly random points, the transverse ribs join, creating a pattern that at first defies comprehension (fig. 62). This was not structural necessity, it was pure decoration. So at Lincoln ribs are used for the first time in an English way – as surface ornament. The nave vaults are slightly later and less idiosyncratic, but richer, denser, more complex and symmetrical. They succeed in making the vault as interesting and lively as the walls, bringing the whole together in a restless sea of ornament. The nave elevations below have extraordinary depth. This is not only achieved by passages in the clerestory and triforium but by the 27ft span of the arches, allowing a panorama of the aisle walls, which are deeply moulded with blind arcading. The effect is accentuated by the nave piers, each pair of which is subtly different.

      The design of Lincoln, extraordinarily experimental and hungry for novelty, had a huge impact on the next two generations of English builders. In 1817 the Regency architect, Thomas Rickman, christened the style of Lincoln ‘Early English’, a term that nicely expresses the essential insularity of what was being built. The great churches described above, and the many others that followed them, were individualistic and original, taking French ideas and turning them into a decorative vocabulary unique to England. This concentration on elaboration and surface ornament was a development from the Anglo-Saxons through the late Anglo-Norman monuments into the first Gothic structures. There is a real sense in which, by 1220, a national style had been formed.⁹