Gothic: dating a church by its tracery

Romanesque builds with wall. Gothic builds with skeleton and glass. The change happens in the Île-de-France from the 1140s — Abbot Suger’s rebuilding of the choir at Saint-Denis is the conventional starting gun — and within a century it has produced interiors that no earlier culture could have imagined: two hundred feet of stone standing on what look like reeds, with the wall between them replaced by coloured light.

The word “Gothic” is an insult applied later by Italians who thought the style barbarous. Nobody who built these churches used it.

The three devices, and what they are for

The pointed arch. Its real advantage is not that it looks taller — it is that its height no longer depends on its span. A semicircular arch can only ever rise to half its width, so vaulting a rectangular bay with round arches gives you arches crowning at different heights and endless awkwardness. Point the arch and you can make it as steep or shallow as you like, so every arch in a bay reaches the same level. A pointed arch also carries its thrust down more steeply, pushing outwards less.

The rib vault. Build the diagonal and transverse arches first, as a permanent skeleton of moulded stone ribs, then fill the panels between them with thin webbing. The vault is lighter, can be built in stages over movable centring, and — crucially — delivers its load to four points rather than along a whole wall.

The flying buttress. Once the load arrives at points, it must be caught. A half-arch leaps from high on the nave wall, over the aisle roof, to a freestanding pier, carrying the vault’s outward thrust away from the building and down to the ground, often weighted by a pinnacle. This is what finally frees the wall.

Take the three together and the wall has almost nothing left to do. So it goes: first thinned, then pierced, then reduced to a frame around glass. That is the whole plot of Gothic, and it is why the developing shape of windows turns out to be the best clock in the building.

Tracery as the dating tool

Tracery is the stone barwork subdividing a window head. Thomas Rickman’s An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture (1817) noticed that it changed steadily and fast — it was expensive, visible, and done to fashion — and built the English periodisation on it. His three names are still in use.

The sequence runs roughly like this.

Plate tracery (late twelfth to early thirteenth century): shapes are punched through a solid slab of stone above a pair of lights — typically a plain circle. The stone dominates; the holes are cut in it.

Bar tracery (from about 1240 in England, earlier at Reims): the logic inverts. Thin moulded stone bars are assembled into patterns and the glass fills between them. Early bar tracery is geometric, built from circles and foiled circles.

Intersecting and reticulated (around 1290–1350): mullions curve and cross, producing lattices and, when the net-like units repeat, a honeycomb of ogee-sided shapes.

Curvilinear or flowing (roughly 1310–1380): the bars take up S-curves and dissolve into flame and leaf forms. This is the high point of English Decorated.

Rectilinear panel tracery (from about 1330, dominant from 1380 to the Reformation): the curves are abolished. Mullions run straight up to the arch head and horizontal transoms cross them into rectangles. This is Perpendicular, and it often carries on across the adjacent wall as blind panelling.

The English sequence

The trajectory is easy to remember as a single curve: straight lines (lancets), then curves (flowing tracery), then straight lines again (panels). Perpendicular is the odd one out in Europe, an English invention with no real continental parallel, born partly out of the labour shortage and sober taste following the Black Death, and it hangs on for two hundred years.

France and the English comparison

French High Gothic pursues one thing: height. Chartres (from 1194), Reims, Amiens, Beauvais push the vault ever higher — Beauvais tried 48 metres and part of it fell in 1284. The plan is compact, the east end is a chevet, a semicircular ambulatory ringed with radiating chapels, the west front carries a great rose window between twin towers, and the whole design drives vertically as a unity.

English cathedrals want something else. They are far longer and markedly lower, they insist on a dominant central crossing tower rather than twin west towers, they usually end square at the east instead of in a chevet, they often have double transepts, and their west fronts are frequently screens wider than the building behind. Salisbury and Lincoln against Amiens and Reims is the comparison worth holding in your head. English Gothic also loves the horizontal string course and the long unbroken roof line; French Gothic does everything it can to suppress them.

In the fifteenth century the two traditions diverge completely. France goes to Flamboyant (c. 1375–1500): tracery of flame-like double curves, no straight line anywhere, the surface encrusted — Rouen’s Saint-Maclou, the north spire of Chartres. England, at exactly the same moment, is building the rectilinear grids of Perpendicular. Late French curves, late English straight lines: it is one of the cleanest discriminations in the whole subject.

The vital trap: Gothic Revival is not Gothic

More pointed-arched buildings in Britain were built after 1830 than before 1540. The Gothic Revival begins as eighteenth-century picturesque play (Walpole’s Strawberry Hill), turns programmatic with A. W. N. Pugin, whose Contrasts (1836) argued that Gothic was the only honest Christian architecture, and then becomes the default for Victorian churches, town halls, stations, schools and universities. The revivalists were meticulous. They measured real medieval churches and copied the details exactly. So details will not save you.

What gives it away is fabric, regularity and function.

• Stone. Medieval ashlar is hand-cut: blocks vary in size, mortar joints are wide, and diagonal or axe tooling shows in raking light. Victorian stone is machine-sawn, with hairline joints and faces too flat and too clean.
• Repetition. Revival ornament comes from templates, so every crocket, capital and cusp is identical. Medieval carving wanders, because a dozen masons with different hands cut it.
• Iron. Cast-iron columns, tracery, railings, gutters and roof trusses, or a concealed iron frame, are conclusive. So is machine-rolled plate glass.
• Colour. Pugin, and after him Butterfield and Street, used hard structural polychromy — banded red and black brick, contrasting stone courses, encaustic tiles, saturated stencilled interiors. The fourteenth century painted its churches, but never in these flat, chemically bright, industrially uniform bands.
• Unity. A medieval church is a patchwork of campaigns, with seams, changes of stone, mismatched bays and blocked openings. A revival church was built in one go and looks it: no seams, one tracery style throughout, everything in register.
• Style mixing. Victorian architects often deliberately combined Early English shafts with Decorated tracery and a Perpendicular tower, or imported French and Italian Gothic motifs. A building that is archaeologically “correct” in three different centuries at once is a nineteenth-century building.
• Dates and purpose. Datestones, dedication plaques, gravestones no earlier than 1850, and above all the building type: there are no medieval Gothic railway stations, town halls with clock towers, or nonconformist chapels.

How to spot it in ten seconds

1. Is the arch pointed? If yes, you are in Gothic or a Gothic revival; if round, go back to Romanesque.
2. Go straight to a window head. No tracery, just lancets: c. 1180–1250. Circles and foils: c. 1250–1300. Nets and S-curves: c. 1300–1380. Rectangular panels with transoms: c. 1380–1540.
3. Check the arch profile. A flattened four-centred arch means late — Perpendicular or Tudor.
4. Look at the capitals. Stiff-leaf curls: Early English. Naturalistic leaves and ballflower: Decorated. Plain mouldings: Perpendicular.
5. Look up at the vault. Simple quadripartite ribs: early. Extra decorative ribs and bosses: Decorated. Fans: Perpendicular, and English.
6. Take in the silhouette. Very tall and compact with a chevet and a west rose: French. Very long and lower with a big crossing tower and a square east end: English.
7. If it is fifteenth century, check curve against grid. Flames say Flamboyant France; panels say Perpendicular England.
8. Interrogate the masonry. Hairline joints, sawn faces and no tooling mean Victorian, whatever the tracery says.
9. Hunt for iron, plate glass and banded polychromy. Any of them settles it for the Revival.
10. Ask whether the building is all one date. No seams, no blocked windows, no mismatched bays, and one consistent style throughout: it was built in a single Victorian campaign, not over four centuries.