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Updated: June 26, 2025
We went into the little damp church, with a twelfth-century campanile and well in the rose-garden; a deserted little place, only a bit of opus Alexandrinum, and a string of Cosmati work remaining, all the rest overlaid by the frescoes and stuccoes of a seventeenth-century Rasponi.
Nowadays, however, Gabrielle acted as his eyes; and so devoted was she to her father that she took a keen interest in his dry-as-dust hobbies, so that after his long tuition she could decipher and read a twelfth-century Latin manuscript, on its scrap of yellow, crinkled parchment, and with all its puzzling abbreviations, almost as well as any professor of palaeography at the universities, while inscriptions upon Gothic seals were to her as plain as a paragraph in a newspaper.
So far we have the glittering imagination of the twelfth-century bard; you might think working in a medium not wholly Celtic, but Norman-influenced as well; imagining his Arthurian Culhwch in terms of the knights he had seen at the courts of the Lords Marchers, were it not that just such descriptions are the commonplaces of Irish Celticism, where they come from a time and people that had never seen Norman knights at all.
Besides, the high walls of the aisles, as compared with the stunted growth of the cimborio, and with the compact and slightly angular form of the entire building, lend an unrivalled aspect of solidity, strength, and resistance to the twelfth-century cathedral church, so intrinsically different from that of Santiago.
Imperfect lovers bring to art and take away the ideas and emotions of their own age and civilisation. In twelfth-century Europe a man might have been greatly moved by a Romanesque church and found nothing in a T'ang picture.
Between the windows is a buttress that was introduced when the vault was added. The south-east angle on this side retains part of the twelfth-century flat buttressing. There are on this wall and the turret different types of masonry, which represent five distinct periods of building, from the twelfth to the nineteenth century.
Below this string is a thirteenth-century pointed window, with a billet-moulded label cut in a twelfth-century manner of design. The north side of the nave retains the seven twelfth-century clerestory windows, the one next to the transept having been rebuilt after the fall of the central tower and spire in 1861. There are no remains of later insertions, as on the south side.
The outer wall of the choir aisle is one of the most interesting portions of the building, from an archaeological as well as an architectural standpoint. It shows three of the arched heads of small twelfth-century windows that used to light the earlier triforium gallery. One of these has now a fifteenth-century insertion beneath it. This is in the second bay from the transept.
Questions of taste were soon decided in those days. When a twelfth-century youth fell in love he did not take three paces backward, gaze into her eyes, and tell her she was too beautiful to live. He said he would step outside and see about it. And if, when he got out, he met a man and broke his head the other man's head, I mean then that proved that his the first fellow's girl was a pretty girl.
The #North Transept# has on its west side two of the old twelfth-century round-arched windows, and opposite are the two large round-arched openings into the library and the chamber above it. The vaulting of this transept is not the same in detail as that to the south of the choir, and is rather earlier in the type of its mouldings.
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