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CRYPT BENEATH THE CHANCEL OF REPTON CHURCH. 167 
the present western entrances, down from the church, along which 
were no doubt wooden gangways to the upper choir ; thus leaving 
the centre in both cases open to those who might be in the nave. 
The plan of the lower chancel and its curious side chapels is 
deserving of careful study and comparison with that of the so- 
called Saxon crypt at Wing church, with which these chapels 
present a most singular correspondence. 
3rd. There arrived a period when the old nave of wood is re- 
built of stone. This wooden nave could scarcely have dated 
earlier, at the most, than after the wintering of the Danish army at 
Repton in 874-5, and may even have been a hundred years later. 
The architectural character of this rebuilding is distinctly pre- 
served in the chancel-arch wall, whose advanced Norman design 
is fairly in accord with the vaulting and pillars of the crypt then 
first introduced, the work being fairly attributable to the period 
of the Earl of Chester, Ranulph, mentioned by Mr. Cox 
as the person whose wife afterwards refounded the Priory. 
Malmesbury says of a period preceding (about 1140), that St. 
Wistan’s body after being taken up had been conveyed here, 
“at that time a famous monastery, now a Vill belonging to the 
Earl of Chester, and its glory grown obsolete with age ;” and in 
another place, “at present, as I have heard, with few or scarcely 
any inmates.” This rebuilding, most probably in the life of this 
Earl (and thus prior to his wife’s buildings), nat only thus made 
good the parochial wants and responsibilities, but recast the choir, 
whose double chancels had lost, I suppose, the body of St. 
Wistan. Malmesbury’s words, “but at present thou dwellest 
at Evesham, kindly favouring the petitions of such as regard 
thee,” seemingly intend such an inference. 
The new recasting obliterates these divisions of the upper and 
lower ; and the ordinary nave floor is continued eastward by the 
construction and insertion of a now real crypt; formed in the 
sunken space of the lower Saxon choir; whose windows, thereby 
rendered useless, are built up, as yet seen in the south wall, at a 
level now just slightly above the surface of the new choir floor. 
The, now at last, removal of the old beams projecting into the 
