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The south transept, where Bishop John of Dalderby was buried, contains what no one sees without a feeling of delight, and wonder that such lovely work could ever have been executed in stone,—the great rose window with its twin ovals and its leaf-like reticulations, which attract the eye more than the medley of good old glass with which it is filled, but which gives it a beautiful richness of effect. Below this are four lancets with similar glass.

THE FONT

The aisles of the nave are vaulted, the groins springing from the nave pillars on the inner, and from groups of five shafts on the outer side. Behind these runs a beautiful wall arcade on detached shafts, continuous in the north aisle, but only repeated in portions of the south aisle, with bosses of foliage at the spring of the arches. In the aisle at the second bay from the west is the grand old Norman font, resembling that at Winchester. There is another at Thornton Curtis in the north-east of the county. Neither of the Lincolnshire specimens are so elaborately carved as that at Winchester, which is filled with scenes from the life of St. Nicholas, but all are of the same massive type, with dragons, etc., carved on the sides of a great block of black basalt resting on a round base of the same, with four detached corner pillars leading down to a square black base. These early basalt fonts, of which Hampshire has four, Lincolnshire two, the other being at Ipswich, Dean Kitchin conclusively proved to have all come from Tournai, in Belgium, and to date from the middle of the twelfth century, a time coinciding with the episcopacy of Bishops Alexander and De Chesney at Lincoln, and Henry de Blois at Winchester. The one at St. Mary Bourne is the biggest, and has only clusters of grapes on it and doves. The other two are at East Meon and at St. Michael’s, Southampton, and have monsters carved on them like the Lincolnshire specimens.