Chapter IV: LANCET.—About 1220 the upper and eastern parts of the Lady chapel

were completed. It is a work of great beauty, especially in the rich clustering of shafts in the window-jambs and in the fine composition of the east end, with its quintet of lancets. The chapel is curiously low internally. The builder was an exceptionally cautious person. He not only provided for the thrusts of the vault by heavy buttresses and pinnacles, but, to get the thrusts as low down as possible, he made the vault spring below the window-heads. Moreover, down below he constructed a lofty crypt, thus raising considerably the floor of the Lady chapel. Thus encroached on from below and from above, the interior of the Lady chapel contrasts remarkably with its lofty and imposing exterior. Externally, moreover, as the window-heads could not rise high, owing to the low spring of the vault, a large amount of wall-surface was left, and had to be decorated. This was done in a remarkable way; the arcade which runs round it being the old-fashioned Norman arcade of intersecting semicircular arches—probably the last appearance of this design on the stage. Another puzzle is that the external doorway leading to this crypt contains Transitional details. Probably the whole of the lower part of the Lady chapel was built in the Transitional period. The crypt-worship of the eleventh century had gone out of fashion; and the Hereford crypt, like that at Norwich, was probably built as a golgotha or charnel-house.

V. EARLY GEOMETRICAL.—The history of the cathedral now resolved itself for the next hundred years into a series of attempts to get rid of the “dim, religious light,” so dear to the modern, so abhorrent to the mediæval ecclesiastic. Hereford choir was even worse lighted than Norman churches generally, being blocked to east and west by transepts, and having enormously bulky piers. So the Norman clerestory was taken down, and a Gothic clerestory with an inner arcade—an early and interesting example of plate-tracery—was substituted. Moreover, the choir was made fireproof by being vaulted in stone, _c._ 1250.