nsverse eastern arm,
like the Nine Altars at Fountains and Durham, was made with a view to
the continually growing number of altars and daily masses. In Cistercian
abbeys, the churches of which were wholly devoted to the uses of the
monastery, the aisles of the nave were divided into chapels by
transverse walls. In the secular cathedral of Chichester, where the
aisles had to be left free, outer aisles, similarly divided, were made.
Great French cathedrals, like Amiens, not only have a complicated series
of chapels opening from the aisles of the apse, but have their naves
lined with chapels, which were formed by removing the outer walls of the
aisles to a level with the outer face of the buttresses. The ordinary
parish church had no need of these elaborate arrangements, although in
towns and in districts where money was plentiful and its possessors
recognised its true source, plans hardly less spacious than those of the
cathedral and monastery churches came into being. But it is obvious
that, in a church where there were no more than two or three altars,
space would be gained by removing them from the body of the church to
the end of the aisles. In some twelfth century churches there were
probably altars against the wall on either side of the narrow chancel
arch; and, in later days, as at Ranworth and Patricio, when the rood
screen filled the lower part of a broad arch, altars were placed against
the screen. In the first case, the chancel arch might have been widened;
in the second case, the sides of the screen would have been freed, by
the addition of aisles into which the altars could have been removed.

Sec. 42. The most common plan of the aisled church is formed by an aisled
nave with a long aisleless chancel, western tower, and south porch. So
common is this that it may be spoken of as the normal plan of the larger
English parish church. There must have been, we already have said, a
very large number of aisleless churches in England at the time of the
Conquest. Where Norman builders reconstructed parish churches, they
showed a distinct preference for the aisleless plan. But, in many
churches, built about or soon after the beginning of the twelfth
century, aisles were planned and executed. The walls of earlier churches
were entirely taken down, and new arcades built in their place, not
necessarily on the precise line of the old foundations. Aisled twelfth
century naves on a magnificent scale may be seen, for example,