The Architecture of Malmesbury Abbey Church. 



97 



Perpendicular doorway was also inserted withiD the great western 

 portal. 



The facade was now complete ; a tower, flanked by wings termi- 

 nating in turrets. In the direct west view, it must have presented 

 the same elevation as that of Ely, if the porch were removed and 

 the north transept completed ; the difference being, that what at 

 Ely were real transepts, was at Malmesbury a mere screen. The 

 violation of the law of reality was no greater than it had been 

 all along, and the front certainly assumed a more striking and 

 varied outline. But so recklessly does the addition appear to have 

 been made, that one is almost surprised at the account which 

 Leland gives of the church. He calls the abbey " a right magni- 

 ficent thing," adding, " where were 2 steples , one that had a 

 mightie high pyramis, and felle daungerusly, in hominum memoria, 

 and sins was not re-edified ; it stode in the midle of the transeptum 

 of the chirch, and was a marke to al the countrie aboute. The 

 other yet stondith, a great square toure at the west ende of the 

 church." 1 If the central tower was the original Norman one, we 

 are really surprised, notwithstanding the three centuries' difference 

 in their ages, to find that the earlier tower was the first to fall. 

 Such a piece of foolhardy daring as the western tower might have 

 been expected hardly to have survived till the age of Leland. 

 When it did fall I do not know ; but whenever that event took 

 place, it appears to have crushed the whole western portion of the 

 nave, which probably accounts for its ruined state at the present 

 day. The pier underneath the tower on the south side is gone, so 

 that the arcade of the nave is imperfect ; on the north side there 

 are no vestiges at all external to the present west end. 



Lantern. — In the lantern we find some appearances evidently 

 connected with the fall of the central tower. The rood-screen 

 across the western arch still remains, being now within the present 

 church, and now forming its altar-screen. But its central doorway 

 shows that it was originally a rood-screen and not a reredos, as at 



1 The expressions of Leland seem to assert that the towers co-existed, and 

 consequently to exclude the otherwise conceivable view, that the western tower 

 was built after the fall of the central tower, to supply its place, as at Waltham. 



VOL. VIII. — NO. XXII. H 



