CHOIR AND TRANSEPT.
Quivil commenced his work in the two Norman towers, in which he inserted tall arches, thus making them an integral part of the church. He also built the arches of the crossing, and provided abutment to the west by building one new bay on either side of the nave. All that one sees here—the first bay of the nave, and the alterations in the transepts, the window tracery, the piers and arches, the pierced balconies hung up on the walls of the towers, the substitution of Purbeck marble for stone shafts—is Quivil’s work. As to the easternmost bay of the nave on either side, it differs from the rest of the nave in having a wider arch; while its clerestory windows have the same straight-spoked wheel as Quivil’s windows in the transept; the mouldings of the capitals of the first two piers correspond with those of the transeptal arches; the bases are lower than those elsewhere in the nave; the bosses of the aisles are flatter; even the flying-buttresses differ.
Now that he had remodelled the centre of the church, Quivil set to work to recast the eastern parts of the church, commencing at the far east end, so as to interfere with the services as little as possible. He first transformed the Lady chapel; to him are due the shafts, sedilia, double piscina, and the vaulting, the rib-mouldings of which are of earlier character than those of the choir; and the windows, which closely resemble those of Merton College, Oxford, which we know was commenced in 1277. In the centre of the Lady chapel Bishop Quivil is buried; he died in 1291. The chapels on either side may have been remodelled or partly remodelled by Bronescombe; but the east windows are later in style, and are Quivil’s.
The piers hereabout are very interesting. Those of the Lady chapel looking into the side chapels are composed of four columns. The north-east and south-east piers of the choir have clusters of eight shafts instead of four; while in the pier between them the cluster of eight is developed into a cluster of sixteen columns. Finally, notice that these piers are set diamond-wise, with four flat faces, and the angles to the north, west, south, and east.
Bishop Bitton (1292-1307).
Bishop Quivil had only touched the fringe of the choir, but he must have collected much material for its transformation; for his successor completed it, even the vaulting, in fifteen years—the last fifteen years of Edward I. It seems to have been done in two sections; first, the four eastern bays of Bishop Marshall’s work, then the older bays to the west. It is clear that the builders took away both piers and arches from underneath Bishop Marshall’s clerestory wall, and put in new ones, without bringing the wall down—a kind of engineering feat which the mediæval builders undertook with a light heart. The new piers all consist of “vast horizontal slices of Purbeck marble, from nine to fifteen inches thick”; the arches of native sandstone. These immense marble piers give the interior of Exeter a magnificence rare in England, only to be paralleled by the marble churches of Italy. The colour-contrast, too, between the blue-grey marble of the piers, the yellow sandstone of the arches, and the white Caen stone above, is delightful. The mouldings of Bitton’s work are clearly distinguishable from those of Quivil, and were retained, with little variation, to the west end of the cathedral. Bitton got himself into some curious difficulties by retaining instead of pulling down the twelfth and thirteenth-century clerestory walls. The first of the two, the western, was the thicker wall. Hence the piers to support it had to be thicker: they exceed the eastern piers in diameter by nine inches. But by bringing both eastern and western piers to the same line facing the central aisle of the choir the difference of nine inches appears only in the side-aisles, where it is less noticeable. Again, the length of the western bays was 2½ feet greater than that of the four eastern ones. When, therefore, Bitton set out the seven eastern pier-arches there remained an awkward gap of 2½ feet between the last arch and the great pier of the crossing. This he bridged over by the tiny arch which appears at the extreme west of each arcade of the choir, the incongruity of which was largely masked later by the great choir-screen. He seems to have worked to the middle of the choir—first from the east, then from the crossing. When, however, the two sets of arches met, they did not fit, and the clumsy junction had to be botched over by the aid of a stilt.
Bishop Stapledon (1308-1327).
FROM NORTH-EAST.