14 Notes on Recent Discoveries at Lacock Abbey. 
ran round the building. In the south-west angle the outline of 
the original base of the shaft can easily be traced. The two-light 
side windows, flanking the entrance archway, are of rather peculiar 
design. Their central shafts have caps at a much higher level than 
the jambs, which cannot be considered a satisfactory design, but it 
offends the eye less as it becomes more familiar. Of the many 
mutilations that the work has suffered the earliest are due to the 
nuns themselves, for the sake of their own comfort. Cuts have been 
made in the bases of the window shafts, for the evident purpose of 
slipping in boards,! and there are holes in the shafts and jambs, 
where they were fixed with pins. These were, most likely, intro- 
duced in the fifteenth century, and it is not improbable that they 
may have been taken down in summer. Cuts have also been made 
in the jambs of the central arch, for the purpose of fixing doors, 
and the Karly English cap of the north jamb of the arch has been 
cut into for the purpose of inserting a horizontal board which, on 
the south side, was let into a cut in the Perpendicular work. There 
is painting of the fifteenth century on the arch of the thirteenth 
century and on the adjoining Perpendicular work, and, as this was 
evidently stopped by the board above-mentioned it shows that the 
latter was inserted in the late Perpendicular period. This painting 
also occurs on the side windows. 
After the dissolution of the abbey, Sir William Sharington, the 
purchaser, converted this chapter-house into a dwelling-room, in- 
serting a doorway of Renaissance character under the central arch 
and closing the side windows, the whole being walled up flush 
internally, which accounts for a good deal of mutilation, but the 
earlier and later medieval work still remaining, partly exposed to 
view, externally. Finally, Ivory Talbot, my ancestor, in the last 
century, after other changes,” walled the whole up flush, externally, 
1 T am told that the same thing has been found in the chapter-house of Durham 
Cathedral. 
2 The opening of the doorway had been widened by cutting away some of the 
stonework of the jambs, which weakened the support of the head, but this may, 
perhaps, have been done before Ivory Talbot’s time. Whilst the door still 
continued open he added a pseudo-Gothic face to it on the east side, 
