What is the Perpendicular style?
The Perpendicular style is the third and last phase of English Gothic, running broadly from the middle of the fourteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth. The name refers to the strictly vertical mullions that run through the windows and across the walls.
English Gothic is traditionally divided into three phases: Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular. Where the Decorated phase pursued flowing, curved forms in its tracery, the Perpendicular returns to a rectilinear, grid-like system.
Characteristics
- Vertical tracery. The mullions of a window run unbroken up into the head and are crossed by horizontal transoms, producing a regular rectangular grid.
- Very large windows. The wall is reduced to a framework of piers and buttresses; the glass takes up almost the whole surface.
- Flat, depressed arches. The four-centred Tudor arch is the best-known outcome.
- Blind tracery on wall surfaces, so that the window motif continues across the wall — wall and window read as one system.
- Fan vaults. Conical vault surfaces in which every rib springs from the same point with the same curvature. It is the phase’s most distinctive contribution to European architecture.
- Slender piers and a strongly emphasised vertical build-up of the interior.
Why it emerged
The Perpendicular arose in the decades around the plague epidemic of the mid-fourteenth century. The standardised, rectilinear tracery was considerably simpler to cut and to repeat than the curvilinear tracery of the preceding phase — an advantage when skilled masons were scarce.
Well-known examples are the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, the cloisters and choir of Gloucester Cathedral, and the chapel of Henry VII at Westminster Abbey. In the nineteenth century the style was taken up again in the Gothic Revival, in churches, university buildings and schools far beyond England.
Related terms
- Gothic architecture
- Gothic revival
- Vault rib
- Lancet arch
- Pendentive
Want to learn more about construction terms? Visit our knowledge base at fredsdiyplans.com.