The Sussex Coast - online book

A Literary & Historical travel guide to the Sussex Coast

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284                   THE SUSSEX COAST
in turn with foliage caps. The chancel is not in line with the nave and is entered by the descent of a step. At different times in the fourteenth century the aisle walls were rebuilt; some of the Perpendicular windows have octagonal shafts with concave sides. In this style are fine sedilia, pis­cina and Easter sepulchre, and also the rare feature of a piscina by the rood loft, which had its southern stairway immediately south of the chancel arch, its northern one in a turret against the aisle wall, the passage passing across the aisle over a buttressing arch. The corresponding arch on the south has the grotesque corbel figured by the initial letter of this chapter. The western bay of the nave is extremely interesting, as affording a mediaeval instance of builders of one period deliberately imitating the style of an earlier one, other examples of which occur in the western bays of the nave of Westminster Abbey and in the Abbey Gateway at Bristol.* The Early English responds were converted into whole pillars, the foliage of the caps being crudely reproduced, the mouldings of the arches matched very neatly, square-headed windows, however, instead of lancets were employed in the clearstory. The tower arch shows similar signs of efforts to harmonise with the earlier parts of the church; the tower, otherwise with a barrel vault, follows the ordinary lines of Perpendicular. All the work of this style in the church seems to be between 1380 and 1400, though it is perilous to give exact dates. The chancel has some exceedingly beautiful early fourteenth-century screens. It is most unusual in Sussex to find so large and early a church without a central tower.
\Also Eosslyn Chapel and Iona Cathedral.
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