real and
its majesty is properly appreciated. The total span, from end to end, of
556 feet, compared with the 537 feet of Ely, the 525 of York, the 524 of
Lincoln, and the 516 of Canterbury, would not alone produce the effect
of almost infinite vastness, and is certainly not realised either in a
distant prospect from the hills or in a nearer view from the cathedral
precincts. But when once the nave is entered, owing partly to the open
and comparatively low choir-screen, the magnificent vault of nearly 400
feet may easily be understood to have few rivals in the world. Certainly
neither of the two buildings in England which are practically equal in
size to Winchester Cathedral give the peculiarly overwhelming sense of
length produced here. The old epithet of "Royal" may be said to apply as
fitly to the cathedral as to the town, and it certainly is a worthy
shelter for the bones of half-forgotten dynasties, and as fine a
monument of an earlier England as Westminster is of later periods in the
development of the country.

Of course, as in all English cathedrals, a lack of colour and a sense of
coldness and emptiness modifies any unqualified admiration which one
might at first feel. But Winchester could well afford to admit far more
than the most captious critic could utter against it, and yet claim to
be the most stately nave that England can show. Despite the late
recasting, the proportions are Norman, and the very core of the pillars
is still the original Norman stonework. Notwithstanding the changes
wrought by Edingdon and Wykeham, all the more petty detail of the
Decorated period is lavished on a colossal structure planned with the
simple magnificence of those that "builded better than they knew."

Perhaps it is not quite fair to the later architects to attribute all
the excellence of the work to the earlier builders, for the graceful
columns of the nave's eleven bays which rise unbroken to where the
roof-groining springs from their capitals are made by Wykeham to fulfil
a new duty which entirely alters their whole aspect. The general effect
has been said to be as if a Norman architect had expressed himself in
the more refined idiom of the early fifteenth century. Yet the work of
Edingdon and Wykeham was ruthless in its way. The original Norman nave
of Walkelin consisted of the normal three storeys, of equal height in
this case--the main arches, triforium, and clerestory. At the present
day the main arches are fully ha