“The foliage of the capitals is exquisitely beautiful, and though distinguished technically by the name of _stiff-leaf foliage_, because there are stiff stalks to the leaves rising from the ring of the capital, the leaves themselves curl over in the most graceful manner, with a freedom and elegance not exceeded at any subsequent period. The mouldings are also as bold and as deep as possible, and there is scarcely a vestige of Norman character remaining in any part of the work.”--(R.) Viollet-le-Duc, who fixes the date of St. Hugh’s Choir at 1220 or 1210 at the earliest, says: “We have in Normandy, especially in the cathedral of Rouen and the church of Eu, architecture of the date of 1190; it is purely French, that is to say, it corresponds exactly with the architecture of the ‘Isle de France’ except in certain details. At Eu, at the cathedral of Le Mans, at Seez, we have architecture which resembles that of the choir of Lincoln, but that architecture is from 1210 to 1220, it is the Norman school of the Thirteenth Century. There is, indeed, at Lincoln, an effort at, a tendency to originality, a style of ornament which attempts to emancipate itself; nevertheless the character is purely Anglo-Norman. “The construction is English, the profiles of the mouldings are English, the ornaments are English, the execution of the work belongs to the English school of workmen of the beginning of the Thirteenth Century. “On the exterior the choir of the Cathedral of Lincoln is thoroughly English or Norman, if you will; one can perceive all the Norman influence; arches acutely pointed, blank windows in the clerestory, reminding one of the basilica covered with a wooden roof; a low triforium; each bay of the aisles divided into two by a small buttress; shafts banded. In the interior vaults which have not at all the same construction as the French vaults of the end of the Twelfth Century; arch-mouldings, slender and deeply undercut; the abacus round; the tooth-ornament; which do not at all resemble the ornaments which we find at Paris, Sens, St. Denis, etc.” The =Choir-Stalls=, dating from the Fourteenth Century, are among the finest in England. Pugin considered them quite the best.