nt restoration whatever ornament its rather flat mouldings may
once have had. Above is a good wheel window, with a cusped circle in the
centre, surrounded by eight radiating two-arched lights separated by
eight radiating columns. The two arches of each light spring from a
detached capital which seems to have lost its shaft, but as there is no
trace of bases for these missing shafts on the central circle they
probably never existed. All the other nave windows are mere slits; and
above them runs a rich corbel table of slightly stilted arches with
their edges covered with ball ornament resting on projecting corbels. In
the apse the five windows are tall and narrow with square heads, and the
corbel table of a form common in Portugal but rare elsewhere, where each
corbel is something like the bows of a boat.[51]

The inside, now turned into a museum, is much more interesting. The
chancel is entered, under a circular cusped window, by a wide round
arch, whose outer moulding is curiously carried by shafts with capitals
set across the angle as if to carry a vaulting rib; in the chancel
itself the walls are double, the outer having the plain square-headed
windows seen outside, and the inner very elegant two-light round-headed
openings resting on very thin and delicate shafts, with a doubly cusped
circle above. The vault, whose wall arches are stilted and slightly
pointed, has strong well-moulded ribs springing from the well-wrought
capitals of tall angle shafts. It will be seen that this is a very great
advance on any older vaulting, since previously, except in the French
Church at Alcobaca, groined vaults had only been attempted over square
spaces. The finest of the many objects preserved in the museum is the
tomb of Dom Duarte de Menezes, who was killed in Africa in 1464 and
buried in the church of Sao Francisco, whence, Sao Francisco having
become a cavalry stable, it was brought here not many years ago. (Fig.
24.)

Such are, except for the church at Idanha a Velha and that of Castro de
Avelans near Braganza, nearly all the early buildings in the country.
Castro de Avelans is interesting and unique as having on the outside
brick arcades, like those on the many Mozarabic churches at Toledo, a
form of decoration not found elsewhere in Portugal. The church of
Alcobaca is of course, in part, a good deal older than are some of those
mentioned above; but the whole, the romanesque choir as well as the
early pointed nave, is so unli