132 The Fourteenth General Meeting. 



supported, are highly interesting, but are clearly afterthoughts. 

 The much less graceful expedients by which the decorated towers 

 of Hereford and Wells are placed on their Early English supports, 

 show, as well as Westminster and Beverley, that the omission was 

 by no means singular among the great churches of the age. Early 

 English work is chiefly to be looked for in chancels, except in the 

 down parishes, where there has been less increase of population '} 

 in the towns, and generally in the vale country, the increase of 

 population is usually marked by the re-building of naves in the 

 perpendicular style ; and the increase of wealth, particularly from 

 the clothing trade, by the annexed aisles and chapels, usually late 

 in that style, often rich in execution, but inferior in design. 



Of the decorated style I am not prepared to name a building on 

 a great scale in the county. There are everywhere numerous 

 insertions, and other fragmentary parts, of which the windows, 

 buttresses, and parapets, at Malmsbury Abbey furnish fine 

 specimens. 



The very interesting Collegiate Church of Heytesbury, just 

 restored, shews some fine building transitional from the Early 

 English. Such transition also appears in the early part of Lacock 

 Abbey. The choir of Edington is transitional to perpendicular. 

 In this neighbourhood I passed to-day Great Bedwyn Church, 

 which appears to be chiefly a good decorated building. 



It has sometimes occurred to me (though I only throw it out as 

 a crude speculation) that there must have been a time in the 14th 

 century when some of our artists were impressed with a feeling 

 probably derived from the antique in Italy. In great buildings, 

 not in this county, we have the low proportions of Exeter ; the 

 members which we can hardly distinguish from Architrave, Frieze, 

 and Cornice, on the Chapter House and Choir at Wells. There 

 was a great reaction from the undercut mouldings of the former 

 style, to a moulding in form something resembling, and in position 

 identical with, the classical Ovolo. I am unable to name con- 

 spicuous churches exhibiting this. It has happened to strike me in the 



1 The Excursion to Aldbourne shewed the meeting a very pure and chaste 

 specimen of the emergence of this style out of the Norman. 



