128 St. Nicholas’ Hospital, Salisbury. 
the seventeenth century, seems to have entertained the same belief.! 
Our first illustration (Plate No. I.) gives, in the dotted lines, Mr. 
Hickman’s picture of what the hospital had been. 
Against these arguments, strong as they seem, is to be set the 
present aspect of the remains of the hospital of 1245. Briefly, the 
present look of those remains goes far to justify the assertion that 
another arcade, supporting another set of cells, cannot ever have 
been built, and that the original design admitted only of two chapels, 
not three. There is no evidence, in the northern wall of the chapel 
which is now the kitchen, of any beginning of a row of arches 
corresponding to that in the south wall. The easteru wall of the 
two chapels appears to be coéval with the rest of the chapels: yet 
there is a very distinctly marked corner-buttress on the north-east 
of the northern chapel of the two, corresponding to the buttress at 
the south-east corner of the southern chapel. Now if there had 
ever been another chapel at the north of the northern chapel, the 
corresponding buttress would have been on the north-east of that, 
and the eastern wall of the chapels would have been continued 
without any buttress at all past the spot where the north-eastern 
buttress now stands.? 
On the other hand, it is hardly possible to suppose that Mr. 
Hickman’s elaborate descriptions are entirely invented. Perhaps it 
would be better, in the absence of direct evidence, to suggest the 
conclusion that Bingham intended, when he began, to build a 
hospital on the threefold plan so commonly in use: but that his 
death stopped the design, which afterwards was completed on a 
smaller scale, by finishing the two chapels already begun, and 
1Mr. Bigge writes thus :—“ there is a chapel now within the hospital, the 
other by it being pulled down.” 
2 That the northern transept, as figured by Hickman, ever really existed there 
is nothing to show. The southern transept was exactly on the spot where after- 
wards (in the fifteenth century) stood a covered way to the privies (see Plate 
No. II.), since demolished. 
What Hickman calls the Sanctum Sanctorum—the building to the east of the 
of the present eastern wall of the hospital—can never have been in existence at 
all; and this is sufficient to discredit his whole plan. 
