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BISHOP GROSTESTE

Hugh of Avalon died in London in 1200, and William de Blois (1201) and Hugh of Wells (1209) went on with the building. The latter particularly kept to Hugh of Avalon’s plan of intercalating marble shafts with those of stone. Other characteristics of St. Hugh’s work are the double arcading in the transept and the little pigeon-hole recesses between the arcade arches, a trefoil ornament on the pillar belts and on the buttresses, and the deep-cut base mouldings. He put in the fine Early English round window in the north transept called the “Dean’s eye,” which has plate tracery. The five lancet lights, something after the “Five Sisters” window at York, were a later addition. The end of his work is easily distinguishable in the east wall of the great transept. He also built the Galilee porch, which was both a porch and an ecclesiastical court, and the Chapter house, with its ten pairs of lancet windows, its arcading and clustered pillars and beautiful central pillar to support the roof groining. He was succeeded, in 1235, by the famous Robert Grosteste, a really great man and a fine scholar, who had studied both at Oxford and Paris. He opposed the Pope, who wished to put his nephew into a canonry, declaring him to be unfit for the post, and stoutly championed the right of the English Church to be ruled by English and not Italian prelates. In his time the central tower fell, and he it was who built up in its place the first stage at least of the magnificent tower we have now. He also added the richly arcaded upper portion of the great west front, and its flanking turrets crowned by the figures of the Swineherd of Stow with his horn, on the north, and Bishop Hugh on the south. Henry Lexington, Dean of Lincoln, succeeded him as Bishop in 1254, and during his short episcopate of four years Henry III. issued a royal letter for removing the Roman city wall further east to enable the Dean and Chapter to lengthen the cathedral for the Shrine of St. Hugh after his canonisation. Then began the building of the ‘Angel Choir,’ which “for the excellence of its sculpture, the richness of its mouldings and the beauty of its windows, is not surpassed by anything in the Kingdom” (Sir C. Anderson). Its height was limited by the pitch of the vaulting of Hugh’s Ritual Choir, just as the height of Grosteste’s tower arches had been. The Angel Choir was finished by Lexington’s successor Richard of Gravesend, 1258-1279, and inaugurated in the following year with magnificent ceremony under Bishop Oliver Sutton, Edward I. and Queen Eleanor both being present with their children to see the removal of St. Hugh’s body from its first resting-place before the altar of the Chapel of St. John the Baptist in the north-east transept, where it had been placed in 1200 when King John himself acted as one of the pall bearers, to its new and beautiful gold shrine in the Angel Choir behind the high altar.