One of the most remarkable periods in the history of English art is that which covers the closing years of the thirteenth and the opening years of the fourteenth centuries. This period is distinguished, among other evidences of intense artistic vitality, by the appearance of a group of illuminated manuscripts, some of which were produced by the famous East Anglian school of illuminators, while others had their origin in London. Their works bear the impress of their artists' contact with a busy world; they mark an advance upon their predecessors, not however because they cut themselves adrift from the ‘hieratic’ traditions maintained in the monastic houses, for at least another century had to pass before this finally occurred, but in their purely artistic qualities; they express swifter movement, show more vivid observation, and manifest a greater delight in all natural and human form. For a century or more English art had shown remarkable powers of growth: now it began to emerge from the cloister; artists and craftsmen congregated in centres, and they became forcing houses, as it were, of a new and luxuriant growth, which was peculiarly and essentially English without any immediate counterpart on the continent.