of the Perpendicular time. It was transformed not rebuilt.
Bishop William of Wykeham has obliterated Bishop Walkelin, but
fundamentally the nave of Winchester remains Norman still. The
Perpendicular work is only a lovely mask, or rather just the sunlight
of the fourteenth century which has come into the dark old Norman
building. The most notable change is the roof, in Norman times a flat
ceiling, now a magnificent vault. But that century was not
content with transforming the nave, it littered it with the first of
its various delights, those chantries which are among the greatest
splendours of this Cathedral, and which still, in some sort,
commemorate Bishop Edingdon (1366), Bishop Wykeham (1404),
Bishop Beaufort (1447), Bishop Waynflete (1416), Bishop Fox (1528) and
Bishop Gardiner (1555) the last Catholic Bishop to fill the See.

[Illustration: NORTH TRANSEPT, WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL]

The transformation of the nave, which occupied full an hundred years,
was not, however, the last work undertaken in the Cathedral before the
change of religion. Bishop Courtenay, in the last years of the
fifteenth century, lengthened the Lady Chapel, and finally Bishop Fox
in the very beginning of the sixteenth century began the transformation
of the early fourteenth century Presbytery, but got little further
than the insertion of the Perpendicular windows. He did, however,
transform the Norman aisles there, and screened them, and upon the
screens in six fine Renaissance chests he gathered the dust of the old
Saxon saints and kings.

But apart from its architecture the church is full of interest. Where
can we find anything to match the exquisite iron screen of the eleventh
century which used to guard St Swithin's shrine but which, now that is
gone, covers the north-west doorway of the nave? Is there another font
in England more wonderful than that square black marble basin
sculptured in the twelfth century with the story of St Nicholas? Is
there any series of chantries in England more complete or more lovely
than these at Winchester, or anywhere a finer fourteenth century
monument than that of Bishop Wykeham? Nowhere in England certainly can
the glorious choir stalls be matched, nor shall we easily find a pulpit
to surpass that in the choir here dating from 1520. If the restored
retablo over the high altar is disappointing in its sophistication,
we have only to pass into the Feretory to discover certain marvellous
fragments of the origi