Norman font, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the whole is
by or for Hugh, for his shrine, his influence, and his example,
completed what his work, and his plans, never dreamed about. Yet these
last are responsible for much. He built a cruciform church, beginning
with the entrance to the choir, with the aisles on either side. The
chapels of St. Edward Martyr and St. James{24} form the base or step of
the cross. The east transept, with all chapels adjoining, the
choristers' vestry, antevestry, dean's or medicine chapel, with its
lovely door and the cupboards in the now floorless room above it, the
vaulted passage and chamber adjoining, are all his. So are, possibly,
the matchless iron screens between the two choirs (topped with modern
trumpery). South-east of the Medicine Chapel is one of St. Hugh's great
mystic columns, and there are a pair of them. Where the Angel Choir now
lifts its most graceful form and just behind the high altar, rose the
semi-hexagonal east end, the opened honeycomb, where most fitly was
placed the altar of St. John Baptist. It was somewhere in the walls of
this forehead that the original bishop's eye and dean's eye were once
fixed, possibly in the rounded eye sockets which once stood where Bishop
Wordsworth and Dean Butler are now buried.{25}

When we look closely at this work, we are astonished at the bold
freedom, and yet the tentative and amateur character of it. The builders
felt their way as they went along, and well they might, for it was not
only a new church but a new and finer style altogether. They built a
wall. It was not strong enough, so they buttressed it over the
mouldings. The almost wayward double arcade inside was there apparently,
before the imposed vaulting shafts were thought about. The stones were
fully shaped and carved on the floor, and then put in their positions.
Hardly anything is like the next thing. Sometimes the pointed arch is
outside, as in "St. James'" Chapel, sometimes inside as in "St.
Edward's." Look up at the strange vaulting above the choir, about the
irregularity of which so much feigned weeping has taken place. It
represents, maybe, the Spirit blowing where it listeth and not given by
measure. So, too, mystic banded shafts are octagonal for blessedness,
and they blossom in hidden crockets for the inner flowers of the Spirit,
and there are honeycombs and dark columns banded together in joyful
unity, all copied from nowhere, but designed by thi