Henry Yevile—The Life of an English Architect. - Archaeologia Cantiana

REVIEWS: Henry Yevile—The Life of an English Architect. By John H. Harvey Continued

present-day concrete style, such a blot in positions where it cannot be hid. On periods the author seems inclined to bring the "Dark Ages" down into post-Romanesque times when the normal dating for this darkest period in our history is 450 to 597. Again as to the Black Death and the mortality due to it (p. 19), Dr. G. C. Coulton has studied this subject and his conclusions are that the death rate has been much exaggerated.
As I have indicated, the book will induce a closer study of some of the buildings the author praises. Among these is the Abbot's house of 1372 at Westminster, and the evidence brought out (p. 39) that the contract for work at St. Dunstan's in the East "contained a clause specifying that the work was to be to the design (la devyse) of Yevele".

   Another interesting detail which the author gives but which I should have thought told against Yevele as one of the two Bridge-Wardens, was sending to Rome without funds a John Pecchee, their emissary, when there was an intermediary on the spot—John Chirchman—able to carry the business through the Papal Chancery.
   The book is lavishly illustrated and it is only unfortunate in its period of publication that the text has to be so rigorously compressed into a limited number of pages, and many of the plans so reduced in size. Finally, the K.A.S., following on the author's paper on Yevele "And His Works in Kent" in Vol. LVI, pp. 48-53, will value the fuller treatment which this book now gives us, and which, as concerns Canterbury, owes much to Mrs. Gardiner.
                                                        W.P.D.S.