[Illustration: Fig. 15. Patrington, Yorks: interior, looking across nave from south transept.]
§ 48. Mural painting, however, was little more than a complement to the stained or painted windows, which were the most gorgeous note of colour in the medieval fabric. There is no more familiar feature of medieval architecture than the gradual increase in the size of windows, due to that constant progress in the science of architectural construction, in which the timber-roofed parish church followed the vaulted cathedral. The low round-headed windows of the twelfth century were followed by the long lancets of the early thirteenth century. Lancets gradually drew closer and closer together, and were united with spherical openings above, until the mullioned window with its geometrical tracery was formed. The restless spirit of the medieval craftsman was not satisfied with tracery imprisoned within geometrical limits: the enclosing circles and triangles were removed, and the tracery twined in naturalistic curves in the head of the window. Then, at the middle of the fourteenth century, the limit of the imitation of nature was reached. The Black Death formed a sudden division between the work of the old school and the new age, and that formalism in window tracery began, which lasted for years, and left its mark on our architecture as late as the days of the Stewarts. It was long the fashion among those who saw merely the decline in architectural detail, distinctive of the 'Perpendicular' style, to speak of the magnificent achievements of the fifteenth century masons with an overbearing contempt. As a matter of fact, fifteenth century builders were gifted with a power of design, and an ability to plan a parish church as a whole, unequalled in the previous history of medieval art. They lost their interest in sculptured detail, because their main concern was with the broad contrasts of light, shade, and colour, which their large windows and high walls afforded--contrasts in which there was no use for minute detail, and the deep under-cutting and delicate carving of the earlier styles became mere waste of time. The great sheets of coloured glass, in which, as time went on, painting became of more and more importance, and large figures beneath tall canopies of white glass took the place of the smaller subjects and more deeply coloured canopies and grounds of an earlier time, supplied an effect fully as beautiful as that once given by the contrasts of bold projections and deep hollows in moulded arches and carved foliage. The mason in no small degree sacrificed his skill to the glazier; but, in the service of the glazier, his power of noble design on a large scale increased. No effect of colour can well surpass that which is still to be seen in some of our late medieval churches--the grisaille windows of the chancel at Norbury in Derbyshire, the late fourteenth century figure glass of the north aisle at Lowick in Northamptonshire, the fifteenth century east window of the south aisle at St Winnow in Cornwall, the fourteenth century Jesse tree, once in St Chad's, and now in St Mary's at Shrewsbury, or the fifteenth century Jesse tree at Llanrhaiadr-yn-Cynmerch, near Denbigh. Some of the parish churches of York are almost as rich in glass as the cathedral itself. But, in those churches which are still so fortunate as to retain nearly all their medieval glass, like All Saints, North Street, at York, St Neot in Cornwall, and Fairford, the lack of the connecting link which the mural paintings between the windows formed in the colour-scheme is sadly felt. At Fairford, in particular, where the wall-painting which remains is not near the windows, the glass, in its frame of cold plastered wall, gives the effect of isolated masses of almost violent colour, which need to be reduced to their proper key by the painting of the intermediate wall surfaces. On the other hand, at Pickering or Raunds, where we have the mural paintings, the glass is wanting. Often, where painting and stained glass have both disappeared, as in the chapel at South Skirlaugh, their necessity to the building forces itself on the attention. Probably, the full value of stained and painted glass in architectural design, and the relations which prevailed at the close of the middle ages between the mason and glazier, can be judged nowhere in Europe better than in King's college chapel at Cambridge.