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Updated: June 12, 2025
The clearstorey has a second plane of tracery, a feature not very common in England. The vaulting-shafts are in clusters of three and are filleted, and the string-course below the triforium is not carried round them. Each cluster springs from a semicircular corbel resting on a head, and has its capitals enriched with foliage.
The exterior is of brick, and has little charm save that of a tower of four rows of arches, narrowing together as they ascend. The nave is of great length and height, the barrel-roof of stone, the effect of the round arches and pillars in the triforium especially fine. There are two low aisles on either side.
Perhaps the best art to be noted is that found in the interior of the choir, with its fine triforium and clerestory windows above. Here, again, is to be observed the squared east end of the English contemporary church, a further reminder, if it be needed, of the influences which were bound to be more or less exchanged with regard to the arts and customs of the time, on both shores of La Manche.
The double half shafts set against the north and south fronts of the huge circular piers are in the greater part restorations. Over each pier arch there are two triforium arches imitated from the Early English of Salisbury. They are divided by slender pillars, but there is no triforium passage.
A triforium is properly a gallery, open to the church, between the internal and external roofs of the aisles, but here there were no aisles, and the gallery or passage is in the thickness of the wall. This term will be used wherever the usual term 'vaulting-shaft' is inapplicable. The earth here has apparently been brought in from outside. Can it have come from some sacred spot abroad?
Mention must be made of the fine stone screens and tabernacle-work on either side of the altar, the altar slab of Purbeck marble, the triforium of intersecting arches in the choir, and the roof pendants. The western portion of the church was built during the mastership of Peter de Sancto Mario, and his fine canopied tomb is a striking object on the north side of the nave.
Near to the centre of that arch is a vaulting shaft, and south of it a full-sized division of the triforium, with a full-sized division of the clerestory above it, and the division fills the space above both the remaining half of the first arch and the whole of the smaller second arch. It is as if the strata of the building had been broken by a violent change, and this is exactly what happened.
The triforium, supported by round pillars and arches, in its turn supports a tournée, with another row of arches and pillars; some fine sixteenth-century coloured glass still remains. Two inscriptions near by recall the historical associations of the site.
At the west end, between the towers is a large Perpendicular window, occupying the whole width of the nave, and on the north side the vaulted porch is a very beautiful feature. The interior reveals an inspiring perspective of clustered columns built in the Early English Period with a fine Decorated triforium on the north side.
Every new ornamental stone, to make room for which some original stone is displaced, detracts from the value of the building from an archæological point of view; and though there may be some, or even many, who prefer the trim and smug appearance of modern work to that of the old, instinct with life, full of the thoughts of the builders and workers in wood and stone, whose bones have mouldered into dust in the garth of the vanished cloisters, and whose very names have in many cases been forgotten, yet we hope that those who have this priceless treasure in their keeping may recognise ere it is too late, that the result of a continuance of the process of restoration commenced about the middle of the nineteenth century will be the gradual conversion of a splendid memorial of bygone ages into a modern sham, and they themselves will be regarded, when true love of art becomes general, with the same indignation as that which they themselves feel with regard to those who pulled down the roof of the south transept and cut out the columns and sub-arches of the triforium in days before the Gothic revival set in.
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