The Choir is in four bays with a presbytery; it is in the same style as the rest of the church, with the exception of the Perpendicular alterations in the upper part. It was formerly filled with heavy, ugly woodwork, and half way up all the pillars may be traced the modern stone-work which had to be inserted when the stalls and panelling that had encased the pillars were removed. Not a wreck of the old wood remains, and the choir is now seated with walnut-wood stalls by Farmer and Brindley,
along which runs a light iron screen, very carefully wrought by Skidmore of Birmingham in 1871. It is copied from Queen Eleanor's tomb in Westminster Abbey. The pavement relaid in 1871 contains representations of the cardinal virtues, copied from the church of the Knights of St. John at Malta. Yet there were original artists to be found twenty-five years ago!
The pillars of the choir are larger than those of the nave, which appear to have been reduced in girth (see p. 54). They are (according to the theory of p. [9]) part of Ethelred's church, dating from the first decade of the eleventh century; but their bases belong to the Norman restoration, and were probably put in by Cricklade. The triforium is also Late Norman, here as throughout the church, with the single exception of the one window in the south transept.
It is in the capitals of the choir that the most striking evidence of Saxon work in the church is said to lie. Thus they are of remarkable interest, besides being very fine specimens of stone-carving. If the visitor sits in a stall in the middle of the south side of the choir he will have the three most important capitals before him, and can study them at leisure. One striking feature common to them all is that they bear very evident traces of having been worn by the weather. It has been found by Mr. Drinkwater that the stone of which they are made is too durable to have been affected by the atmosphere while under cover; which would prove that they must have been in their present position exposed to the driving rains from the south, during the long period when the church was in ruins, that is to say, before the restoration of the twelfth century.
Another significant feature which these three capitals have in common, not only with each other but with all the others in the choir, is that their abaci are extremely thick, just twice as thick as those in the transepts and nave; and thick abaci are a mark of early work.
Their ornamentation is remarkable, partly Saxon and partly Oriental in character, and said to be unlike Norman work. Sir Gilbert Scott himself noticed the latter characteristic of these and other capitals in the church. "The foliated ornament," he wrote, "assumes a noble character, evidently evincing a study of the ancient Greek, which was effected through a Byzantine medium." We have already seen, in the History of the Cathedral, how this Byzantine influence is to be accounted for by the fact that Greek clergy flocked to the court of Ethelred's brother-in-law Richard; and further, it must be noted that many illuminated MSS. of Saxon date show that Greek ornament was admired and studied at the time. Professor Westwood, in his "Lapidarium," points out that in Saxon art the designs of stone-carving are so completely identical with those in the MSS. as to lead us to suppose that the artists of the illuminated drawings were also the designers of the architecture. So much is this the case that, "the age of a particular MS. being ascertained, we are able approximately to determine also the age of the carving." Professor Westwood was, in fact, among the first to be convinced of the Saxon origin of the capitals we are discussing.
It is worth while to give a few illustrations of this very important point. The first capital from the tower on the north side of the choir is ornamented with that curious spuma or wave-shaped work which has just the dip and swing of a wave of the sea as it curls over before breaking.
In a Psalter of the beginning of the eleventh century (B.M. Har. 2904) is to be found precisely the same vivid conventionalism.[ 2]