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Updated: June 12, 2025
The places of the dignitaries and the names of the prebends have fortunately been allowed to survive, and are inscribed on small brass plates affixed to the stalls. The organ is in the triforium, and what is seen of the case is Gothic. The reredos and its surroundings are like every other. Careful engravings of a hundred years ago show a very different state of things.
First small separate heads began to obtain, as corbels, and were bracketed at the junctures of the arch-mouldings in the arcade and triforium of churches. Then on the capitals little figures began to emerge from the clusters of foliage. In many cases the figures are very inferior to the faces, as if more time and study had been given to expressing emotions than to displaying form.
Except for the windows of the chapels of Bishops Alcock and West in the aisles, and that the Early English lancets in the triforium range in the south aisle have been removed and a plain wall substituted, this eastern front is almost unaltered. It does not appear when this last alteration was made.
There is no triforium; but a passage, at a slightly lower level than in Archbishop Roger's bays, runs below the great clearstorey windows, which were once, no doubt, gorgeous with stained glass. Their arches are moulded, but the splay is left plain.
The interior, most will agree, is no more remarkable than the exterior adornments; in fact the same paucity of plan and of detail appears from one end to the other, inside and out. The aisles are astonishingly low; the choir and nave, each unusually short. There are no transepts, and there is no triforium whatever, no chapels of any remarkable beauty, and little glass that is even passable.
The cloisters have entirely disappeared, but a series of round-headed arches, formed of stucco, may conceal a stone arcading similar to that hidden by the Early English facing of the north wall. The small round-headed windows giving light to the triforium are more regularly arranged than on the north side; there is one, and only one, in each division between the buttresses.
Were it not for the height of the nave, crowned by a Romanesque triforium of blinded arches, the interior would be decidedly ugly. However, the height attained gives a noble aspect to the whole, and what is more, renders the ensemble curious rather than beautiful.
The middle of the three stages has some exquisite dwarfed Norman arches with no triforium passages; but there is one in the upper stage, with slender and graceful Early English arches and stained glass at back. The vaulting is also Early English, and dates from about the middle of the thirteenth century. The principal arches of the choir are supported by massive piers with square bases.
The clerestory gallery is, on each side of the choir proper, quite in the thickness of the wall. The core of the latter is Norman, but its facing, including the blind arcade at the triforium level, belongs to the Early English period. On either side of the presbytery the clerestory gallery springs from wall-piers with clustered Purbeck shafts.
This lower level was necessary on account of the vaulting at this end of the aisle, of which traces still remain, but the whole arrangement was clumsy, and we cannot be surprised at not finding it repeated on the other side of the church. The next bay has on the triforium level a curious windowless recess, the mouldings of whose arch spring from two shafts on each side.
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