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It stood till 1379 with a low and short Norman nave and transept to the west, and a great Transitional choir and transept to the east. In 1379 Lanfranc's nave and transept were destroyed. It may be thought that at last a great and noble nave would be built north of the Frenchman's choir. Not at all.
The north transept end is very like the east end in its general design, but has, low down, the two windows lighting the Merton tomb, and the tiny one over the same bishop's Elizabethan effigy.
All the arches are round as are those leading to the chancel and transept chapels and are moulded exactly as are the piers. All the vaults have a network of well-moulded ribs. The tower has been added some fifty years later and is very picturesque.
These pinnacles and this crested parapet are found everywhere all round the church, though the pinnacles on the aisle walls from which the plain flying buttresses spring are quite different, being of a Manoelino design. Again the north transept door has evidently been inspired by the richness of Batalha.
The chancel, where the tomb first stood, is rather long and has as usual a square east end while the two flanking chapels are apsidal. The rest of the church, which may be a little later, as all the larger arches are pointed, consists of a nave and aisles of three bays, a transept, and a later tower standing on the westernmost bay of the south aisle.
E.A.B. Barnard, F.S.A., brought to my notice by the editor, the Rev. The assignment may, however, have been only a return to a much earlier similar arrangement when the transept was added to Badsey Church about the end of the thirteenth century, possibly expressly as a chapel for Aldington.
The manner in which the corner of the tower has been reconstructed is extremely interesting. Up the angle formed by choir and transept runs a sort of excrescence of masonry that blossoms out, so to speak, into an extraordinary complication of corbelling near the top, and is itself corbelled away at the bottom.
If you look at the transept porches of Rouen, or at the great and celebrated porch of the Cathedral of Rheims, or that of Strasbourg, Bayeux, Amiens, or Peterborough, still you will see that these lovely compositions are nothing more than richly decorated forms of gable over pointed arch.
The chapter-house lies to the east of the northern transept, and is connected with it by a lofty passage projecting three bays from the transept. The east end of the cathedral is square, as in most English Gothic churches.
For a whole week we lived under the shadow of the spire of the great cathedral. Our house was opposite the north transept, only separated by the road in front of it from the cathedral grounds.
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