now first appear. This style prevailed generally
throughout the thirteenth century, and is usually designated as the EARLY
ENGLISH.

[Illustration: Horsley Ch., Derbyshire.]

Towards the close of the thirteenth century a perceptible, though gradual,
transition took place to a richer and more ornamental mode of
architecture. This was the style of the fourteenth century, and is known
by the name of the DECORATED ENGLISH; but it chiefly flourished during the
reigns of Edward the Second and Edward the Third, in the latter of which
it attained a degree of perfection unequalled by preceding or subsequent
ages. Some of the most prominent and distinctive marks of this style occur
in the windows, which were greatly enlarged, and divided into many lights
by mullions or tracery-bars running into various ramifications above, and
dividing the heads into numerous compartments, forming either geometrical
or flowing tracery. Triangular or pedimental canopies and pinnacles, more
enriched than before with crockets and finials, yet without redundancy of
ornament, also occur in the churches built during this century.

[Illustration: Worstead Church, Norfolk.]

In the latter part of the fourteenth century another transition, or
gradual change of style, began to be effected, in the discrimination of
which an obvious distinction again occurs in the composition of the
windows, some of which are very large: for the mullion-bars, instead of
branching off in the head, in a number of curved lines, are carried up
vertically, so as to form _perpendicular_ divisions between the
window-sill and the head, and do not present that combination of
geometrical and flowing tracery observable in the style immediately
preceding.

[Illustration: St. Michael's, Oxford.]

The frequent occurrence of panelled compartments, and the partial change
of form in the arches, especially of doorways and windows, which in the
latter part of the fifteenth century were often obtusely pointed and
mathematically described from four centres, instead of two, as in the more
simple pointed arch, and which from the period when this arch began to be
prevalent was called the TUDOR arch, together with a great profusion of
minute ornament, mostly of a description not before in use, are the chief
characteristics of the style of the fifteenth century, which by some of
the earlier writers was designated as the FLORID; though it has since
received the more general appellation of the PE