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English parish churches in the 15th century are very simple in design, This plainness is a reflection of a change of taste which the friars' architecture had brought about. Where the fantasy of the Late Gothic designer shows itself in the English parish church is in wooden screens and wooden roofs. The greatest glory of the English parish churches is their timber roofs constructed as boldly by the carpenter as any Gothic stone vaults by masons, and looking as intricate and technically thrilling as any configuration of flying buttresses around the east end of a cathedral. There is a variety of types: the tie-beam roof, the arch-braced roof, the hammerbeam roof, and others.
The most ingenious of them all is the one of the unaisled church at Needham Market, looking like a whole three-aisled building hovering over our heads without any visible support from below. The Continent has nothing to emulate these achievements of a ship-building nation. They are, in fact, strongly reminiscent of ships' keels upside down.
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