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The triforium appears to be "sprawling," because it consists of a single great arch in each bay, sub-divided into four smaller ones. The clerestory is small rather than feeble. Its five lancets, though not large, are boldly decorated with shafts, carvings, and mouldings.
Omer, among all the group of northeast France, presents a true Gothic example in its great Basilique de Notre Dame, and it is a pity that its further development was along lines which indicate a trend, at least, toward debasement. This is plainly to be noted in the tracery of the lower and clerestory windows of nave and aisles.
This church, smaller than Saint German, of a less effective outline, and standing in the lower part of the town, has nothing like the same grand effect as the two towers of Saint German on the hill. But it has, with its tall clerestory, a stately look from some approaches, and it has its lesson to tell in the history of art.
The village is more closely associated even than its neighbour Chedzoy with the Battle of Sedgmoor, for Feversham, the Royalist general, had his headquarters here; and, after the battle many of the rebels were confined in the church. The nave has a good roof, with pendants. The N. transept is noteworthy for being carried above the base of the clerestory.
The mighty shafts and pilasters of the Gothic edifice rose like the stems of giant trees in a primeval forest from a dusky undergrowth, spreading out and uniting their stony branches far above in the upper gloom. From the clerestory windows of the nave an uncertain light descended halfway to the depths and seemed to float upon the darkness below as oil upon the water of a well.
The clerestory windows, also of three lights with somewhat similar tracery, are separated by narrow buttresses bearing square pinnacles, between which runs on a pointed corbel table the usual pierced parapet, and by strong flying buttresses, which at least in the western bays are doubly cusped, and are, between the arch and the straight part, pierced with a large foliated circle and other tracery.
They are now, as Willis points out, "only of the same height as the clerestory of the Norman Church, to which they formed appendages, and consequently they rose above the side-aisles of that church as much as the clerestory did.
The southern one has strong buttresses ornamented with panelling, and gargoyles at the corners. The northern is much plainer. Their side windows are like those of the clerestory. Britton conjectures that the unfinished state of the stonework on the north side of the choir beneath the window shows that a cloister or other low building was intended in this part, which was never executed.
The high arches shot up in long rows upon either side of them, straight and slim as beautiful trees, until they curved off far up near the clerestory and joined their sister curves to form the lightest, most delicate tracery of stone. In front of them a great rose-window of stained glass, splendid with rich purples and crimsons, shone through a subdued and reverent gloom.
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.
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