than
the church is to be found anywhere. The plan, indeed, of the church,
omitting the Capella do Fundador and the great Capellas Imperfeitas,
presents no difficulty as it is only a repetition of the already
well-known and national arrangement of nave with aisles, an aisleless
transept, with in this case five apsidal chapels to the east. Now in all
this there is nothing the least unusual or different from what might be
expected, except perhaps that the nave, of eight bays, is rather longer
than in any previous example. But the church was built to commemorate a
great national deliverance, and by a king who had just won immense booty
from his defeated enemy, and so was naturally built on a great and
imposing scale.[77]

The first architect, Affonso Domingues, perhaps a grandson of the
Domingo Domingues who built the cloister at Alcobaca, is said to have
been born at Lisbon and so, as might have been expected, his plan shows
no trace at all of foreign influence. And yet even this ordinary plan
has been compared by a German writer to that of the nave and transepts
of Canterbury Cathedral, a most unlikely model to be followed, as
Chillenden, who there carried out the transformation of Lanfranc's nave,
did not become prior till 1390, three years after Batalha had been
begun.[78] But though it is easy enough to show that the plan is not
English but quite national and Portuguese, it is not so easy to say what
the building itself is. Affonso Domingues died in 1402, and was
succeeded by a man whose name is spelt in a great variety of ways,
Ouguet, Huguet, or Huet, and to whom most of the building apart from the
plan must have been due. His name sounds more French than anything else,
but the building is not at all French except in a few details.
Altogether it is not at all easy to say whence those peculiarities of
tracery and detail which make Batalha so strange and unusual a building
were derived, except that there had been in Portugal nothing to lead up
to such tracery or to such elaboration of detail, or to the constructive
skill needed to build the high groined vaults of the nave or the
enormous span required to cover the chapter-house. Perhaps it may be
better to describe the church first outside and then in, and then see if
it is possible to discover from the details themselves whence they can
have come.

The five eastern apses, of which the largest in the centre is also twice
as high as the other four, are probably the ol