icissitudes of over seven hundred years, the church was
reduced to the appearance shown in our illustration (fig. 8), when its
restoration was seriously taken in hand in 1863.

[Illustration: FIG. 8--INTERIOR OF CHURCH IN 1863.]

The task which the restorers then set themselves to accomplish, and in
which they have been eminently successful, seemed at the time well-nigh
hopeless. All the conventual buildings, and everything outside the
actual walls of the church had been alienated, and, to a great extent,
destroyed, and of the church itself but a battered torso remained. The
nave had been destroyed at the Dissolution, and its site had become the
parish churchyard; the south transept had perished in the fire of 1830,
and its unroofed area had also become a burying-ground; whilst the north
transept had been gradually encroached upon, no one knew how, and a
large part of it was then used as a forge. The desecration of the east
end was almost worse. The great Lady Chapel, which had been rebuilt in
the fourteenth century, and which had formed part of the assignment to
Sir Richard Rich, had been for long employed for trade purposes, being
at one time the printing shop in which Benjamin Franklin had worked, and
was, in 1863, a factory for fringe. This factory had gradually extended,
on the upper floor, over the eastern ambulatory, up to the back of the
reredos wall and over the south aisle, so that it was lighted, in part,
through Prior Bolton's window from the church itself. This encroachment
over the ambulatory shows well in the illustration (fig. 7). The north
triforium was the parish school, which, with its noises, interfered with
the services of the church, and, with the roughness of its occupants,
endangered the safety of the groining below, and of the north wall which
then leaned dangerously from the upright. The whole area of the church,
which had been raised in the fifteenth century, was filled with graves,
many of which were dug below the very foundations of the piers; moisture
oozed over the grave-stones and darkness overspread the walls, so that
it struck a chill into all who entered it. It was a by-word and a
desolation.

In draining the area of the church, in rebuilding the decayed piers, and
in bringing up the north wall to the perpendicular, the restorers
effected great and substantial improvements, but in lowering the floor
to its original Norman level, and in rebuilding the apse as they
believed it was firs