Sens' idea, and see, too, where, and perhaps understand
why, it really fails or at least comes short of perfection.

William of Sens trained in Latin traditions had, and rightly, little
respect, we may think, for the work of the past. He would have had all
new. But by 1174, unlike Anselm in 1096, and still more unlike
Lanfranc in 1070, he had in all probability a genuine English and
national prejudice to meet, an English dislike of destruction and an
English hatred of anything new.

It has been said that the failure of William of Sens' design was due
to the meanness of the monks of Christ Church. But meanness is not an
English failing; on the contrary, our great fault is the very
opposite, extravagance. It was surely not meanness and at such a time
and in such a cause that forced the monastery to deny William of Sens
the free hand he desired; it was prejudice and a fear, almost
barbaric; of destruction. The monks forced their builder to
accommodate the new choir to what remained of the old work. They
refused to sacrifice St Anselm's tower on the south or the tower of
St Andrew on the north, therefore the wide choir of Canterbury,
already wider than the nave and growing wider still as it went
eastward, had to be strangled between them, and to open again as well
as it could into the Trinity Chapel and the Corona. All that was old,
too, and that they loved they used; the old piers of the crypt were to
remain and still to support the pillars of the choir, which were thus,
no doubt to William's disgust, unequally placed so that here the
arches are pointed but there round. In many ways William must have
considered his employers barbarians, and in the true sense of that
much abused term, he was right. No man brought up in the Greek and
Latin traditions would have hesitated to destroy in order to build
anew. The English cannot do that; they patch and make do, and what
must be new they cannot love until it is old; their buildings are not
so much works of art as growths, and there is much to be said for
them. Only here at Canterbury their prejudice has been a misfortune.
Not even the most convinced Englishman can look upon the twisted and
constricted choir of Canterbury and rejoice.

William of Sens, however, hampered though he was, is responsible for
the work we see. It is true he died after some four years of work at
Canterbury, falling one day from a scaffold, but William the
Englishman who followed him only completed what