128 tit. Nicholas* Hospital, Salisbury. 



the seventeenth century, seems to have entertained the same belief. 1 

 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 eastern wall of the 

 two chapels appears to be coeval 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. 2 



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 



1 Mr. 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 cast 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. 



