e cuspings
of the arches. From a distance the appearance of the church is certainly
more English than anything else, but that is due chiefly to the flat
roof--a thoroughly Portuguese feature--and to the upstanding pinnacles,
which suggest a long perpendicular building such as one of the college
chapels at Oxford.

Lastly, if the open-work spire is a real copy of that destroyed in
1755, and if there ever was another like it on the Capella do
Fundador,[80] they suggest German influence, although the earliest
Spanish examples of such German work were not begun at Burgos till 1442,
by which time the church here must have been nearly if not quite
finished.

It is then not difficult to assign a great many details, with perhaps a
certain amount of truth, to the influence of several foreign countries,
yet as a whole the church is unlike any building existing in any of
these countries or even in Spain, and it remains as difficult, or indeed
as impossible, to discover whence these characteristics came. So far
there had been scarcely any development of window tracery to lead up to
the elaborate and curious examples which are found here; still less had
any such constructive skill been shown in former buildings as to make so
great a vault as that of the chapter-house at all likely, for such a
vault is to be found perhaps nowhere else.

Probably the plan of the church, and perhaps the eastern chapel and
lower part of the transept, are the work of Affonso Domingues, and all
the peculiarities, the strange windows, the cusped arches, the
English-looking pinnacles, as well as all the constructive skill, are
due to Huguet his successor, who may perhaps have travelled in France
and England, and had come back to Portugal with increased knowledge of
how to build, but with a rather confused idea of the ornamental detail
he had seen abroad.

When Dom Joao died in 1433 his eldest son, Dom Duarte or Edward,
determined to build for himself a more splendid tomb-house than his
father's, and so was begun the great octagon to the east.

Unfortunately Dom Duarte's reign was short; he died in 1438, partly it
is said of distress at the ill success of his expedition to Morocco and
at the captivity there of his youngest brother, so that he had no time
to finish his chapel, and his son Affonso V., the African, was too much
engaged in campaigning against the Moors to be able to give either money
or attention to his father's work; and it was still quit