stic times. The whole church has been frequently restored,
but the exterior has suffered from the vagaries of architects, who
found less scope for their own ideas inside the building, where the
original stone-work was in better preservation. Much of the damage was
due also to neglect, for after the dispersal of the monks, most of whom
were themselves capable of superintending the repairs, {13} the lesser
brethren, in fact, working on the building with their own hands, a long
period went by during which neither the authorities of the Church nor
of the State took note of the decaying stone-work. At last, in the
time of Charles I., Dean Williams--afterwards Archbishop of York--took
Abbot Islip as his pattern, and spent much of his own private income,
since there were no funds available, in repairing the most ruinous
parts of the church, notably the north-west, the west end, and the
south-east chapels. He also remodelled the monks' dormitory, which he
made into a library. So ungrateful was the public for these benefits
that the Dean was accused of paying for this necessary work "out of the
diet and bellies of the Prebendaries," but he was completely exonerated
by a chapter order in 1628, indignantly denying the truth of "this
unjust report." Williams's own disgrace and then the long interregnum
put a stop to these benefactions, and the ruin continued unchecked for
the next score or more of years. Dolben, an energetic man who had
fought for his king during the Civil War, was made Dean soon after the
Restoration, and on the very day of his installation the first fabric
fund was instituted out of the Abbey revenues, a very inadequate sum,
as it proved, for the {14} expenses. With this money, however, Dolben
was able to repair the roof and vaulting, then in danger of falling;
and later, in the seventeenth century, the fund was augmented by a
Parliamentary grant.

At that time, with the approval of Dean Atterbury, the decaying tracery
of the north rose window was completely destroyed and remodelled. The
south had already been tampered with, and Wren anathematises the little
Doric passage, which in Atterbury's time was patched on before the
northern window, and the "cropping of the pyramids." In the first
years of the eighteenth century Wren was himself Surveyor of the
fabric, and, while he saved much of the stone-work from irretrievable
ruin, fresh havoc called by the name of restoration was wrought under
his direction