Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/118

 held the See for nine years, but was never consecrated. In 1182 he resigned, and was afterwards made Archbishop of York. He gave many gifts to the cathedral, and notably two "great and sonorous bells," the putative parents of "Great Tom." Walter de Constantiis followed him, but was in the very next year translated to Rouen, 1184, and again the See was vacant for the space of two years.

In 1185 an earthquake did great damage, and in the following year Hugh of Avalon, the famous St. Hugh of Lincoln, was appointed Bishop by Henry II. He widened the west end by putting a wing to each side of the work of Remigius, and put a gable over the central arch, and began his great work of making a new and larger cathedral with double transepts and a choir 100 feet longer and a nave ten feet wider than that of Remigius, starting at the east and building the present ritual choir and both the eastern and western transepts. In this his work was of a totally new character, with pointed arches, and "is famous as being the earliest existing work of pure English Gothic." But Early English work, so says Murray, was already being done at Wells in 1174, twelve years earlier, and it was there that the Gothic vaulting and pointed arch was first seen in England. From the great transept to the angel choir is all his design, and it bears no trace of Norman French influence in any particular. The name of Hugh's architect is Geoffrey de Noiers, his work is more remarkable for lightness than for strength, and in about fifty years Hugh's tower fell, setting thereby a bad example which has been followed so frequently that Bishop Creighton's first question on visiting a new church used generally to be, "When did your tower fall?"

Hugh of Avalon died in London in 1200, and William de Blois (1201) and Hugh of Wells (1209) went on with the building. The latter particularly kept to Hugh of Avalon's plan of intercalating marble shafts with those of stone. Other characteristics of St. Hugh's work are the double arcading in the transept and the little pigeon-hole recesses between the arcade arches, a trefoil ornament on the pillar belts and on the buttresses, and the deep-cut base mouldings. He put in the fine Early English round window in the north transept called the "Dean's eye," which has plate tracery. The five lancet lights, something after the "Five Sisters" window at York, were a later addition. The end of his work is easily distinguishable in the east wall of