Plantagenet style

In 1128, the wedding of the Norman princess, Roman-German-Emperor's widow and heir of the English Throne Matilda with Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, laid the base of the rule of the House of Anjou-Plantagenet in England and parts of France.

Their son Henry marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152 gained the rule over the southwest of France.

But after the Battle of Bouvines in 1214, the Duchy of Anjou north of Loire River was controlled by the French crown.

Under the rule of Louis VII, since 1131 and allone since 1137 King of France, Eleanor's divorced first husband, about 1140 the Gothic architecture was initiated in the surroundings of Paris, the Île-de-France, in those days the French Crown land and some adjacent territories.

In the façades of Western French churches, the first pointed arches had appeared already in structurally totally Romanesque Buildings like Notre-Dame la Grande in Poitiers, on the other hand the Gothic-vaulted parts not only of Poitiers Cathedral have round arched windows.

The assumed incentive was that Bernard II, Lord of Lippe, as a follower of Henry the Lion, accompanied the duke for about a year in his "English" exile and there saw Poitiers Cathedral being built.

The adaption of the Angevine vaults east of the Rhine included further developments: Already in Marienfeld, the ribs are of sandstone, but the shells are of brick (like the walls of this nowadays plastered church).