Page:County Churches of Cornwall.djvu/141

 THE CHURCHES OF CORNWALL 113 He found quire was the same width as nave and extended eastward 55 ft. The parishioners, in adapting the nave for their use when the canons had gone, happily decided to move the great win- dow from the E. end of quire to a like position at E. end of nave. It is a fine five-light window measuring about 35 ft. by 20 ft., and has a tran- som. The upper tracery forms a kind of crown. It dates from the dawn of the Perp. period, temp. Richard II. Carew, in his Survey of Cornwall (1602), says of St. Germans: "A great part of whose chauncell, anno 1592, fel suddenly downe, upon a Friday, very shortly after public service was ended, which hevenly favour, of so little respite, saved many persons lives, with whom immediately before it had been stuffed : and the devout charges of the well-disposed parishioners quickly repayred this ruine." This often-cited statement has been hastily assumed to mean the downfall of the conventual quire ; but it means nothing of the kind. The old quire was stripped of its lead immediately after the surrender of 1539, when the owners saw fit to turn much of it into a brew-house. That which fell in 1592 would be parts of the roof and very likely of E. wall of nave that had been too hastily built up by the parishioners some fifty years previously to make themselves a chancel. When N. aisle was cleared away, in 1803, the scheme included building of a kind of chapel or N. H