Medieval Roots Ever since Cobbett wrote his History of the Protestant Reformation there has been a fashion for depicting in variously fanciful ways the medieval civilisation of England. Some of these pictures are tenderly romantic, like A Dream of John Ball and The Story of the Unknown Church by William Morris; others are charged with the boisterous energy that explodes in the first four lines of Chesterton's poem, The Englishman: 'St. George he was for England, And before he killed the dragon He drank a pint of English ale Out of an English flagon.' The down-to-earth, practical heartiness of that sentiment is certainly reflected in line after line of the Canterbury Tales; and the things that were built and made and used in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries suggest that the medieval Englishman, and in particular the craftsman, was well equipped with common sense and a capacity for enjoying such good things as life then offered. Smith, carpenter, and mason handled their materials with a familiarity which bred neither contempt nor a lordly and arrogant sense of power, but love and respect: they wore their mastery of wood and metal and stone very lightly: they coaxed materials and never bullied them, nor were they ever intimidated by their obduracy, but instead accepted it as a challenge to invention. Those men were slowly establishing a tradition of design, broadening and deepening skills I hat had been handed on generation after generation, from the days of that vivid, short-lived and accomplished civilisation in Northumbria - when Bede could write of 'the peaceable and calm disposition of the times' - through the shadows of Danish raids and Saxon disunity, until the Norman Conquest unified the country and Norman builders unified and expanded the crafts. Thus tutored for nearly four hundred years by the Mistress Art, English craftsmen had, by the end of the fifteenth century, created a clearly recognisable style in woodwork and to a lesser extent in metalwork. In stained glass and stone carving, illuminated manuscripts, goldsmith's work and embroidery, English achievements were famous; but it is in woodwork that the national and characteristic approach to design has most clearly persisted. From the time when the crude chests of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were decorated with roundels of chip carving to the masterly cabinet-making of such latter-day artist-craftsmen as Ernest Gimson and Sidney Barnsley, an unmistakable affinity of purpose is apparent, disclosing that deep affectionate sympathy for materials, that sense of apt selection and gay orderliness in the forms of embellishment, which are inseparable ingredients of the English tradition of design. With the beginning of the Tudor period, an English style was apparent in royal, ecclesiastical and domestic architecture, and the ancillary arts and crafts. It represented a splendid partnership of slender stonework, tinted glass, comfortable brickwork and decorative plaster, wood acting sturdily in structural work or clothing walls with carved panelling or providing stout and serviceable but never clumsy tables and benches and, more rarely and for state occasions only, chairs. Ornamental devices flowed along beams and panelling, chests and cupboards, variegating the oak surfaces with geometric and naturalistic motives, of which the linenfold pattern and the convolutions of the vine became the most familiar; often those chest fronts and doors and panels would be stiffened by the reproduction in miniature of the structural and decorative forms of Perpendicular Gothic architecture, and surfaces would resemble blind windows, filled with intricate tracery, giving to wooden chests or silver caskets the likeness of some shrine seen, as it were, through the wrong end of a telescope. So the sixteenth century, which was a century of social and economic change, opened with the arts and crafts of England in a condition of felicitous stability; when colour entered into life with a natural vigour that was subsequently forgotten, and the selection and arrangement of representations of the foliage and flowers of English trees and gardens, and the beasts of the field and the chase, were carried out with an innate sense of decorative fitness, that never oppressed any surface or subdued the gaiety and vitality of the designer's conception, whether it was expressed in terms of wood or precious metal, tapestry or painted plaster. National talent for design had attained fluency and coherence: liberated from the almost exclusive patronage of the Church, architects and craftsmen were ready for fresh adventures and experiments in the building and furnishing of the great country houses and palaces desired by the new rich class that arose and flourished under the Tudor kings. But the opportunity was soon severely qualified by imported fashions, and the development of the English tradition in design became confused and partly arrested for over a century. Article Medieval Roots was readed 238 times.