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But the fact remains that the church possesses no vestry except what is obviously a disused chapel. =The Lady-chapel= or Lady-loft is 23 feet 3 inches wide, and 68 feet long. Its west and north sides, being formed by what was once the exterior of the church, display not only windows and buttresses, but also a string-course with gargoyles.
The huge buttress at the corner was very possibly added later, to counteract a settlement which is evident to anyone so standing as to bring the shafts on the apse in line with the corner of the choir, and which was doubtless due to the weight of the Lady-loft.
The original floor, if not earthen, may possibly have rested on the set-off. It has been suggested, however, that they may be relics of a feast buried here to defile the site of the altar. The bones in question are now in the Lady-loft. With one of the deposits was found a brass bodkin of the type used in the sixteenth century.
Those parts of the church which were rebuilt after the collapse of the south-east corner of the tower can be best examined from the roof of the Lady-loft, which forms with the roofs of the aisles a level surface of considerable extent. =The East Side of the South Transept= has three buttresses, crowned by pinnacles of which the two nearest to the tower are modern.
In the end of the aisle the blocked upper window is pointed, and has a little trefoiled niche above and to the left of it, and there is no thickening of the masonry above to necessitate carrying-arches. The buttresses at the corner reach to the top of the parapet and have no surmounting pinnacle. This cornice is continued within the Lady-loft, and reappears over the last bay of the choir-aisle.
Some have assigned it to about 1482; but the Lady-loft is clearly mentioned in the Treasurers' Rolls in 1470, and its architecture, which is Decorated rather than Perpendicular, would be in favour of ascribing it to the middle of the previous century, were it not for a certain coarseness of execution which makes a suspension of judgment advisable.
From the east wall of these two storeys an apse is thrown out, upon which rests a square projection from the Lady-loft, too short to be called a chancel.
There is a square aumbry to the right of this monument, and in the next bay another, divided by a stone shelf and having modern doors with ornamental iron-work. The northern bay is almost wholly occupied by a stone staircase leading up to two doors, one of which opens on the left into a chamber now containing the bellows of the organ, while the other opens into the Lady-loft or Library.
Its removal may have taken place either when the two Decorated buttresses were introduced, or at the erection of the Lady-loft, or possibly much later; but was doubtless contemporaneous with the building of the cross-wall, which was evidently intended not only as a partition, but as a 'stop' for the portion of the vaulting that was retained.
Except one small lancet adjoining this buttress, the windows of the Lady-loft are square-headed, with mullions branching out into intersecting arches whose cusps spring from the soffit independently of the mouldings an early feature; and the dripstones are square labels terminating in foliage, but with the ends not returned.
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