on the south side. The parapet is later in design than those to the choir and lady-chapel; but it is of the same date as that on the south wall of the nave. In the five eastern bays it is of two tiers. The upper projects beyond the lower, and so widens the span between the north and south clerestory walls. It has been suggested that this was done in order to straighten the north wall, which in the twelfth century had been built so that it bent inwards towards the south.
The weathered and channelled backs of five of the buttresses are the same date as those south of the nave; but the easternmost one has a flat raking back like those to the north and south of the choir and presbytery. The four western buttresses had pinnacles with spirelets—now destroyed. The western one was square, the other three octagonal. All these are earlier in date than the fifth one from the west, this last one being probably the same in date, as it is in detail, as those on the south side. The sixth one finishes plainly with a square top. It may once have had a pinnacle, but none now remains.
The parapet to the aisle chapels in the four western bays is plain, with a weathered coping and string-course in which is some carved work of late fourteenth-century date. The gables between the buttresses are gone, as is the case on the south side; but traces of their old copings remain. The four large three-light windows are the same in design and detail, and were no doubt executed when the chapels themselves were built. They have traceried heads with early types of cusping of about the same date as, or a little later than, the rose window in the east gable; but they are certainly thirty or forty years earlier than those of the lady-chapel. The north window of the chapel in the fifth bay is a modern insertion of the same character as in the south aisle chapels of the nave. It probably, like them, contained a fifteenth-century window, which was removed to satisfy the taste which thought the present substitute the better thing. The detail of the two orders of its outer arch is earlier than that of the windows west of it. Above the point of this window is a small circular one, with a cusped treatment of perhaps the same date as the ones in the east end of the chapels at the end of the aisles of the presbytery.
The North Porch has a pointed outer arch in two orders. The abaci to the capitals are square; but now there are no shafts or bases in the jambs. The sub-arches appear to be about the same date as the transept vaulting, as they have the dogtooth ornament in their mouldings. On the west face of the buttress, close by, is a double niche in very bad repair; but as a specimen of work it is well worth studying. The parvise chamber above this porch is not lighted except by the small cuttings in the form of a cross which pierce the wall.
The new north-west tower, or its north front, has imitations of twelfth-century work throughout, except in the case of the coupled openings in the top stage, which are like the thirteenth-century work at the same level in the south-west tower. The lower part of the north-east buttress incorporates the remains of the original twelfth-century flat buttressing.
The Central Tower and Spire, although they were rebuilt again after the disaster in 1861, are as nearly as possible an exact reproduction of the originals.
The tower rises out of the substructure where the roofs of the nave and transept intersect. It is not square in plan, but has an axis from east to west, longer than that from north to south. Below the string-course, under the weathered sills of the arcaded openings in the belfry stage, are, on the north, south, and west, small wall arcades. At each angle there is a turret. Three of these are octagonal, but that at the south-west is circular till it reaches the string course below the parapet; and excepting those on the north-west and south-west they are used as staircases. Each of the four sides is pierced by two groups of coupled openings under superior arches, the several moulded members of which rise in four receding orders from the square abaci of the capitals of the angle shafts. The space between the pointed heads of the sub-arches on the east and west faces is pierced by quatrefoils; those on the west are different in design from those on the east.
The parapet of the tower has features in its design which indicate that the original one W been added to the earlier tower during the fifteenth century. The octagonal terminations to the four turrets were of the same character and date as the parapet.