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Bishop Alexander, like St. Hugh, died of a fever, which he caught at Auxerre in France, where he had been to meet the Pope. Those French towns seem to have been pretty pestilential at all times. Bishop Chesney succeeded him, and either he or Bishop Bloet began the episcopal palace. He assisted at the Coronation of Henry II. in Lincoln, and founded St. Catharine’s Priory. He died in 1166, and, after the lapse of six years, Geoffrey Plantagenet, son of Henry II. by Fair Rosamund, held the See for nine years, but was never consecrated. In 1182 he resigned, and was afterwards made Archbishop of York. He gave many gifts to the cathedral, and notably two “great and sonorous bells,” the putative parents of “Great Tom.” Walter de Constantiis followed him, but was in the very next year translated to Rouen, 1184, and again the See was vacant for the space of two years.

ST. HUGH

In 1185 an earthquake did great damage, and in the following year Hugh of Avalon, the famous St. Hugh of Lincoln, was appointed Bishop by Henry II. He widened the west end by putting a wing to each side of the work of Remigius, and put a gable over the central arch, and began his great work of making a new and larger cathedral with double transepts and a choir 100 feet longer and a nave ten feet wider than that of Remigius, starting at the east and building the present ritual choir and both the eastern and western transepts. In this his work was of a totally new character, with pointed arches, and “is famous as being the earliest existing work of pure English Gothic.” But Early English work, so says Murray, was already being done at Wells in 1174, twelve years earlier, and it was there that the Gothic vaulting and pointed arch was first seen in England. From the great transept to the angel choir is all his design, and it bears no trace of Norman French influence in any particular. The name of Hugh’s architect is Geoffrey de Noiers, his work is more remarkable for lightness than for strength, and in about fifty years Hugh’s tower fell, setting thereby a bad example which has been followed so frequently that Bishop Creighton’s first question on visiting a new church used generally to be, “When did your tower fall?”