These advances in vaulting allowed for the addition of windows higher up in the building's walls, in the clerestory and the triforium.
Early Gothic buildings commonly display ribbed vaulting made of stone for the support of the weight of a wooden ceiling. Stone ceilings are stronger; for example, the chapter house at Southwell Minster has stone vaulting and no central pillar.
Examples of cathedrals in England that incorporate early Gothic style features can be found in Salisbury, Lincoln, Southwell in Nottinghamshire, Wells, Bristol, Norwich and Worcester. Gothic style was widely used by cathedral builders and two continental examples are the cathedral at Reims (northern France) and the Sint Niklaaskerk in Ghent (Belgium).
Where intersecting barrel vaults were not of the same diameter, Romanesque construction practice resulted in the twisting of the groins; their construction must at all times have been somewhat difficult, but where barrel vaulting was carried round over the choir aisle and was intersected by semicones instead of cylinders, as in St. Bartholomew's Smithfield, groining systems became more complicated; this would seem to have led to a change of system, and to the introduction of a new feature, which completely revolutionized the construction of the vault. Hitherto the intersecting features were geometrical surfaces, of which the diagonal groins were the intersections, elliptical in form, generally weak in construction and often twisting.
The medieval builder reversed the process, and set up the diagonal ribs first, which were utilized as permanent centres, and on these he carried his vault or web, which henceforward took its shape from the ribs. Instead of the elliptical curve which was given by the intersection of two semicircular barrel vaults, or cylinders, he employed the semicircular arch for the diagonal ribs; this, however, raised the centre of the square bay vaulted above the level of the transverse arches and of the wall ribs, and thus gave the appearance of a dome to the vault, such as may be seen in the nave of Sant' Ambrogio, Milan. To meet this, at first the transverse and wall ribs were stilted, or the upper part of their arches was raised, as in the Abbaye-aux-Hommes at Caen, and the Abbey of Lessay, in Normandy.
The problem was ultimately solved by the introduction of the pointed arch for the transverse and wall ribs - the pointed arch had long been known and employed, on account of its much greater strength and of the lessened thrust it exerted on the walls. When employed for the ribs of a vault, however narrow the span might be, by adopting a pointed arch, its summit could be made to range in height with the diagonal rib. Moreover, when utilized for the ribs of the annular vault, as in the aisle round the apsidal termination of the choir, it was not necessary that the half ribs on the outer side should be in the same plane as those of the inner side; for when the opposite ribs met in the centre of the annular vault, the thrust was equally transmitted from one to the other, and being already a broken arch the change of its direction was not noticeable.