Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: similar window in the south aisle of the choir only about two feet of the returned hood mould are now to be seen; but this coincides exactly with the same moulding in the south wall of the transept. ' Anno Mclv, obiit Martinus Abbas Burgi; suc cessit Willielmus de Watervyle.' So writes John the Chronicler. To this abbat is attributed the erection of the transepts of the church. ' In suo etiam tempore ambae cruces ecclesiee, et tres hystoriae . e. stories or stages, which in more classical Latin would have been called tabulata, magistral turris erectae sunt.' The Saxon Chronicle ends suddenly with an imperfect account of the year 1154, on which the latest editor, Dr. Giles, remarks: ' The last paragraph appears to relate to some building which the abbot and monks of Peterborough had begun about this time,' namely, this very transept. There can be no doubt that the above is a true statement. It is sufficiently evident, upon a close examination, that the main body of the transept is awork intermediate in date between the choir and the nave. But so uniformly was the existing fabric carried on, that it is by no means very easy to discover the junction between the new work and the old. Swapham. This shews that the central tower was actually built by Waterville, and implies, moreover, that it had a fourth stage added by Benedict, his successor. It must, consequently, have been a lofty structure, perhaps much higher than the present one. At any rate, it subsequently proved to be too heavy for the central pillars to support; a failing very common in the lantern towers of the middle ages. It is not very improbable that the type of this tower still exists in the fine central Norman tower at Castor. On comparing however the entrance arches into the nave aisles with those immed...
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