BOOKS RECOMMENDED: As before, Corroyer, Parker, Reber. Also, Bell’s Series of _Handbooks of English Cathedrals_. Billings, _The Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of Scotland_. Bond, _Gothic Architecture in England_. Brandon, _Analysis of Gothic Architecture_. Britton, _Cathedral Antiquities of Great Britain_. Ditchfield, _The Cathedrals of England_. Murray, _Handbooks of the English Cathedrals_. Parker, _Introduction to Gothic Architecture_; _Glossary of Architectural Terms_; _Companion to Glossary_, etc. Rickman, _An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture_. Sharpe, _Architectural Parallels_; _The Seven Periods of English Architecture_. Van Rensselaer, _English Cathedrals_. Winkles and Moule, _Cathedral Churches of England and Wales_. Willis, _Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral_; ditto _of Winchester Cathedral_; _Treatise on Vaults_. +GENERAL CHARACTER.+ Gothic architecture was developed in England under a strongly established royal power, with an episcopate in no sense hostile to the abbots or in arms against the barons. Many of the cathedrals had monastic chapters, and not infrequently abbots were invested with the episcopal rank. English Gothic architecture was thus by no means predominantly an architecture of cathedrals. If architectural activity in England was on this account less intense and widespread in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries than in France, it was not, on the other hand, so soon exhausted. Fewer new cathedrals were built, but the progressive rebuilding of those already existing seems not to have ceased until the middle or end of the fifteenth century. Architecture in England developed more slowly, but more uniformly than in France. It contented itself with simpler problems; and if it failed to rival Amiens in boldness of construction and in lofty majesty, it at least never perpetrated a folly like Beauvais. In richness of internal decoration, especially in the mouldings and ribbed vaulting, and in the picturesque grouping of simple masses externally, the British builders went far toward atoning for their structural timidity. [Illustration: FIG. 128.--PLAN OF SALISBURY CATHEDRAL.]