110 THE DOVER ROAD 



struct ion are the two buildings alike ; their stories 

 run curiously parallel, both in their building and 

 in their destruction. Less than fifty years after 

 their simultaneous consecration, both churches were 

 partly destroyed by fire, and their ruined portions 

 rebuilt in the Transitional Norman and Early English 

 styles, by those two architects who are supposed to 

 be one and the same person — William de Hoo, Bishop 

 of Rochester, and that " William the Englishman " 

 who succeeded French William of Sens in rebuilding 

 the choir of Canterbury. At that time, allowing for 

 the great difference in their relative sizes, the two 

 Cathedrals must have borne a strong likeness to one 

 another ; and when we look upon Ernulf's nave here, 

 we look upon the likeness of the nave at Canterbury 

 until that period, between 1390 and 1421, when Prior 

 Chillendon replaced Lanfranc's work with the light and 

 lofty, but exceedingly uninteresting. Perpendicular 

 nave that now forms the western end of the Primate's 

 Metropolitan Church. 



Fortunately for ourselves, who think Norman work 

 not the flower of ecclesiastical architecture, but the 

 most interesting and aesthetically satisfying next to 

 the incomparable grace of the Early English period, 

 Rochester was too poor a See to be able to embark on 

 extensive schemes of rebuilding, and we are spared the 

 rather vulgar ostentation of skill and wealth to which 

 the Perpendicular style lends itself. Little could be 

 added to the dignity and solemn majesty, the right 

 proportions and impressive simplicity, of this massive 

 Norman nave. Here came Cromwell, whose soldiers 

 quartered their horses in the aisles, leaving the building 

 so desecrated that a saw-pit sunk afterwards in the 

 pavements seemed a scarcely worse use of the House of 

 God. Here also eighteenth-century monumental 

 masons have contrived monuments bad enough, even 

 for the surroundings of classic architecture, but no less 

 than an affront in this place ; while the half-learnt 

 Gothic restorations of Cottingham, whose puerilities 



