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The pedestals are long, and richly ornamented with tabernacle work. The greater part of the ornament of the screen is massed in the canopies. These canopies are made up of three inner arches, cusped, immediately above the heads of the kings, and five outer arches, cusped and gabled, round them.
But I cannot as yet believe that it was not at last intended to imitate a bough; a bough of a very common form, and one in which "active rigidity" is peculiarly shown. I mean a bough which has forked. If the lower fork has died off, for want of light, we obtain something like the simply cusped arch.
All the arches are round with a big splay on each side carved with four-leaved flowers. They are cusped at the top, and at the springing two smaller cusped arches are thrown across to a pinnacled shaft in the centre. The buttresses between them are covered with spiral grooves, and are all finished off with twisted pinnacles. Inside the pointed vault is much simpler than in the walks below.
The chancel is entered, under a circular cusped window, by a wide round arch, whose outer moulding is curiously carried by shafts with capitals set across the angle as if to carry a vaulting rib; in the chancel itself the walls are double, the outer having the plain square-headed windows seen outside, and the inner very elegant two-light round-headed openings resting on very thin and delicate shafts, with a doubly cusped circle above.
It is of three lights, with flowing tracery at the head, and with small cusped and crocketed arches thrown across each light at varying levels. There are niches on the jambs, and the outer moulding is carried round the window head in broken curves, after the manner of Resende's house at Evora.
He says they "deserve particular examination, not only because they are very early and fine specimens of cusped and traceried windows indeed, among the best in the kingdom but for a remarkable peculiarity in the jambs; whereof one side is Norman, with the square capitals to the jamb-shafts both within and without, and the other Early English, as are the arch-mouldings and hoods round the whole arches, which were probably semicircular at first, for at present the point cuts through a stringcourse inside.
The chancel, a little lower than the nave and transepts, is entered by an acutely pointed and richly cusped arch, and has a regular Welsh groined vault, with a well-developed ridge rib.
At the top are long finials with more chains holding corals on which rest armillary spheres. The head of the window is formed of twisted masses, from which project downwards three large thistle heads. Above this is a great wreath of leaves, hung with two large loops of rope, and twisting up as a sort of cusped ogee trefoil to the royal arms and a large cross of the Order of Christ.
A sense of fear of the unknown moved in the heart of his weariness, a fear of symbols and portents, of the hawk-like man whose name he bore soaring out of his captivity on osier-woven wings, of Thoth, the god of writers, writing with a reed upon a tablet and bearing on his narrow ibis head the cusped moon.
The choir is, as would be expected, richer in detail as well as more elaborate in design; and it would be difficult to find in England anything to surpass the tracery of the clerestory windows and triforium arches, the beautiful cusped inner arches of the clerestory range, the open parapets at the base of the two stages, or the long corbels, covered with foliage, that support the vaulting shafts.
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