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Updated: May 9, 2025
As characteristic of the Angevine style, there is no triforium or clerestory, and hence, it is claimed, no necessity for flying buttresses, the support being accomplished by less graceful, if as effective, heavy square piers built into the outer wall. The transepts are not pronounced as to length or breadth, their chief beauty being their rose windows.
The transepts remain to us still, but the nave was transformed, in the very beginning of the Perpendicular time. It was transformed not rebuilt. Bishop William of Wykeham has obliterated Bishop Walkelin, but fundamentally the nave of Winchester remains Norman still.
From the outside at the angles a small portion of the plain wall of the triforium stage may be seen, against which the roofs of the choir and transepts abut; the nave roof, however, hides all of this stage at the western face: above this face is a band of red-brown sandstone, and above this the clerestory stage. In each face are two round-headed windows with a pointed blank arch between them.
On each side of the nave there is a series of chapels, constructed in the fourteenth century, between the buttresses of the main walls; they are full of very fine stained glass, and contain good pictures and monuments. The transepts are remarkable for their magnificent rose-windows, and in the north transept there is a staircase of open-tracery work of exquisite workmanship.
The transepts of the north and south are not grand members, but they are compact and graceful, and the façade of the southern arm is of a highly ornate character, bespeaking a wealth of ambition, if not of ability, on the part of the architect.
Of course these transepts were of four bays not as at present, of three only the bay in each case nearest the central tower having been destroyed when the tower fell. That tower was of Norman date, and is sometimes spoken of as Simeon's Tower. But he cannot have built the whole of it.
It is a curious fact that the plan of the great Rhenish churches, with the apses and transepts at each end, is found in North Africa at a much earlier date, which suggests direct intercourse, of which no record has survived.
Its outer appearance was comparatively simple it had neither spire, lantern, or transepts and its ivy-hidden belfry was a detached tower. The walls of the aisles were supported by massive buttresses, and surmounted by carved pinnacles; and from them sprung flying buttresses, ornamented with traced machicolations, to bear the weight of the embattled roof of the nave.
It was absolutely dark; only on the far distant altar three candles were lighted, three sparks, red and restless, like fireflies gleaming. Otherwise the nave, the chancel, the transepts were as one vast blackness stretching before them. They fled on in silence; their goal was the candles.
From the central tower there is a view over an enormous sweep of country which includes a stretch of the coast, for Coutances is only half a dozen miles from the sea. This central tower rises from a square base at the intersection of the transepts with the nave. It runs up almost without a break in an octagonal form to a parapet ornamented with open quatrefoils.
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