NAVE, LOOKING EAST.
Building operations seem to have halted for some thirty years; and when they were resumed, c. 1360, the completion of the north side and the rebuilding of the south side of the nave were carried out in a balder and more economical way. All this Perpendicular work, including the completion of the new tower, seems to have been completed before the end of the fourteenth century. About the same time the great transept was vaulted and panelled, somewhat after the fashion of the Gloucester work. The transept is a tangle of early Norman, late Norman, Transitional, Curvilinear, and Perpendicular work. Evidently there are breaks and lacunæ in the architectural record of Worcester which we have no materials for filling up. In the fifteenth century the monks seem to have rebuilt their cloister.
A late and interesting bit of design is to be seen in the chantry of Prince Arthur, elder brother of Henry VIII., who died in Ludlow castle in 1486. The flat roof, with its fan-vault, skeleton ribs and pendant, is an anticipation of the vaulting of his father’s chapel in Westminster Abbey.
Externally the cathedral is wholly nineteenth-century work: decay of the stone had rendered recasing unavoidable. Within, much of what pretends to be thirteenth-century detail is really work of the nineteenth century, commonplace in design, coarse in execution; some of it by Perkins, some by Scott; everything is shiny and new; nothing has ever been done so bad as the “restoration” of Worcester choir and presbytery.
The Cathedral Church of St. Peter, York.
FROM NORTH.
I.