The ribs now became beautifully moulded, and sometimes decorated with carving. In early works, as at St. Cross;[52] St. Peter’s, Oxford; St. Joseph’s Chapel at Glastonbury;[53] and in the aisles at Canterbury, the old Norman chevron was continued in the ribs. The meetings and intersections of the ribs at their apex were usually ornamented with bosses, and beautifully carved. These bosses assumed many varieties of form--sometimes a small rosette, or a little tuft of foliage, merely to decorate the centre of the intersection without covering the mouldings; sometimes the mouldings themselves return round a central opening, with or without foliage; sometimes a head of part of a figure was added to the last-named form in each angle, nearly at the plane of vaulting; sometimes beneath such moulded boss a disk was attached with or without foliage, as if to form a cover to the central opening; indeed, it was occasionally actually the moveable cover of such an opening. In England the usual form is a group of foliage covering the intersection, and frequently containing figure sculpture. Westminster Abbey furnishes admirable examples both of the foliated and sculptured bosses. As regards the intermediate surfaces of the vaulting, a curious difference is found to obtain between the methods adopted in France and in England. In France the courses of stone run parallel to the ridges, as would naturally suggest itself from the original intersecting vaults (Fig. 363); while in England they often take an irregular direction, as if suggested by placing them at right angles to an imaginary centre line of each triangular space, though really deviating much and irregularly from such a rule. [Illustration: Fig. 363.] The French seem much offended by the appearance of the English system; and I remember feeling in the same way when I first saw the French method. The latter seems to throw undue pressure on the diagonal ribs, while the English mode appears to throw it more equally on _all_ the ribs; throwing it, in fact, down into the direction of their meeting-point.[54]