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Updated: May 13, 2025
The doorway into the choir is very curiously treated on this side. It is surmounted first by a lintel, the stones above which are wedges forming a 'flat arch, and then by a round arch so high as to run up behind the westernmost arch of the arcading. The very fine vaulting, although some have ascribed it to the Early English period, belongs more probably to the time of Archbishop Roger.
The ends of the aisles are also ornamented with arcading in three storeys, the lowest of which is like the lowest storey of the arcading at the west end of the nave; the second a smaller series of niches ornamented with gables and pinnacles; and the third a single arcade on each side of the window, filled with geometrical tracery and resembling those on the sides of the other aisle windows.
Sections of the town wall may be found in several places, but the most considerable portion is on the north side of the Westgate, where, until the middle of the last century, when Westernshore Road was made, high tides washed the foot of the wall. The arcading of this portion is much admired, and deservedly so.
This is the first example of this treatment, which was so happily followed in the naves of Winchester and Canterbury, in an English cathedral. In earlier examples, even where the triforium was decisively divided into bays and had ceased to be a continuous arcading, it was absolutely independent of the clerestory, as in the transepts of the minster.
There is a gable above it, running up to the bottom of the window and containing three niches. There are kneeling figures on each side of the gable, so that the top of it may have held a figure of Christ. All that portion of the west end not occupied by the window and the porch is filled with storeys of niches and arcading.
The North Porch, which no doubt from the days of its erection in the fourteenth century has formed the chief entrance into the church, is opposite to the westernmost Norman bay of the nave arcading. The porch itself is vaulted in two bays, the vaulting springing from slender shafts of Purbeck marble which rest on the stone seats on either side of the porch.
On each side of the doorway is a round-headed recess, and on the level of the door-arch, and interrupted by it, runs a row of blind arcading, the shafts of which rise from plinths, that project in carved heads from an elaborate string course.
This wall was built in Norman times, as may be seen from the small round-headed windows which light the clerestory, but was in Early English times faced with fresh ashlar, which conceals the Norman arcading of intersecting arches which ran along this wall.
In this chapel we see this reprehensible practice carried to its fullest extent, but there are many other parts of the building which have suffered. Most of the arcading on the exterior of the transept is modern imitation, and the tracery of the windows of the south choir aisle has been entirely renewed; no old stones, though many might have been used, have been reset in their original position.
The two #Aisles# are of the same length as the nave, and are divided from it by an arcading on either side, each containing six pointed arches. The easternmost arches consist of two plain orders, and are much narrower than the rest.
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