The chapter-house also was rebuilt (c. 1240); rectangular, to fit the cloister. Also, the canons rebuilt both the Lady chapel and the adjoining transeptal chapel. Lancet work will be seen in all the piers on the south side of the Lady chapel, and in the second and third piers from the west, on its north side. The cult of the Virgin, much fostered by the Pope, Innocent III., was at its height in the thirteenth century. The Lady chapels of Bristol, Hereford, Salisbury, Winchester and Norwich were contemporaries of that of Oxford.
IV. To the latter half of the Geometrical period belong the fragments of the pedestal of St. Frideswide’s shrine, which has beautiful naturalistic foliage like that of the contemporary pedestal of St. Thomas of Hereford, A.D. 1289. Some twenty years later is the fine canopied tomb of Prior Sutton.
CHOIR.
V. In the Curvilinear period (1315-1360) the eastern chapel of the north transept was pulled down, and in its place was built a chapel of four bays, with four side windows of singularly beautiful tracery, and all different. They contain fourteenth-century glass, which should be compared with that in St. Lucy’s chapel and in Merton College chapel. The bosses are very beautiful: one of them has a representation of the water-lilies of the adjacent Cherwell. Hard by is the tomb of Lady Montacute, who gave the canons about half the Christ Church meadows to found a chantry. The chapel goes by various names: St. Katharine’s chapel, the Latin chapel, and the Divinity chapel. It contains good poppy-heads of Cardinal Wolsey’s time.
About the same time the eastern chapel of the south transept—St. Lucy’s chapel—was enlarged. The tracery of its east window starts in an unusual fashion below the spring of the arch.
Also the Norman windows were replaced here and there by large windows with flowing tracery, to improve the lighting of the church.
VI. There is little to show for the long Perpendicular period (1360-1485), except the insertion of a few large Perpendicular windows, and the so-called “Watching-chamber,” the lower part of which is the tomb of a merchant and his wife, the upper part probably, the chantry belonging to it, c. 1480.
VII. In the Tudor period, however, the canons were exceedingly busy. They set to work to make the whole church fireproof by covering choir, transepts, and nave with stone vaults. The choir vault is rather overdone with prettinesses. It is a copy—and an inferior one—of the massive vault of the Divinity School, which was completed c. 1478. Canon Zouch, who died in 1503, left money to proceed with the vault of the north transept, beneath which is his tomb. Only a small portion of this was completed. In the clerestory of the nave also corbels were inserted to support a stone vault; but the resources of the canons seem to have failed, and the rest of the church received roofs of wood. Another considerable work was the rebuilding of the cloisters.