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Updated: May 13, 2025
The walls were covered with whitewash, and probably with a view to make it easier to warm the church, walls were built behind the triforium arcading all round the church. These walls are shown in some of the illustrations made a few years ago; they have now been entirely removed.
The columns are of cipollino; the caps, once gilded, are very like those of the pulpit, which seems to be of the same date. It is octagonal and surrounded by round-arched arcading, two arches to a side, with coupled columns on the sides and three at the angles, above single arches resting upon shafts of precious marbles with elaborate caps which also at one time were gilded.
The south door must have been crowded with the most elaborate ornament, but the delicately carved stone-work has been hacked away and the thin pillars replaced by crude, uncarved chunks of stone. There is Norman arcading outside the north transept as well as just above the floor in the north aisle.
In each bay without a window there is a row of blind arcading, which, like the mouldings of the arches by which the gallery passes through the wall piers, springs from carved corbel heads. In the transept end the screens before the three lancets of the clerestory are of the usual form, but are adapted to their graduated heights, and there are small additional arches, one at each side.
Above this comes the clerestory, the pointed arch between the round-headed windows indicating a somewhat later date; and above this there is a chamber perfectly plain within, and not open to the church below. The outside of this is decorated with an arcading of intersecting arches, which indicates a somewhat later date.
On either side of the rose window are small lancet windows with smaller blind arches on each side of them. Both windows and arches are surrounded also with dog-tooth moulding. An arcading with shafts and cusped arches runs along the base of the front, not quite reaching the exterior buttresses. In the centre is the porch by which entrance to the minster is generally obtained.
They are ornamented with blank arcading in six stages, of different dimensions and character; all is in perfect harmony with the rest of the composition.
It may be well at the outset to point out that of the three horizontal divisions of the nave the main arcading occupies approximately three-sevenths of the total height of the wall, while the triforium and clerestory each occupy about two-sevenths.
The illustrations will show how shafts run on the face of the arcading right up from floor to roof.
The central portion has a restored wheel-window with radiating colonnettes and round arches, and above it in the gable is another with cusped tracery of a later date; round this an arcading ramps as at the end of the aisles, and the lower rose is flanked by arcading in two stages arched only in the upper one.
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