he time the nave
was reached the Frenchmen who had planned the church were dead, and the
native workmen, being quite unused to such a method of construction, for
all the older vaulted churches have their central barrel upheld by the
half-barrel vault of the galleries, could think of no other way of
supporting the groining of the main aisle. They had of course the flying
buttresses of the choir apse to guide them, but there the points of
support come so much closer together, and the weight to be upheld is
consequently so much less than could be the case in the nave, that they
may well have thought that to copy them was too dangerous an experiment
as well as being too foreign to their traditional manner of
construction.[54] Whatever may be the reason, the west aisle of the
transept and the side aisles of the nave rise to the full height of the
building. Their arches are naturally very much stilted, and with the
main vault rest on piers of quite unusual size and strength. The
transverse arches are so large as almost to hide the diagonal ribs and
to give the impression that the nave has, after all, a pointed barrel
vault. The piers are throughout cross-shaped with a half-shaft on each
cardinal face: at the crossing there is also a shaft in the angle, but
elsewhere this shaft is replaced by a kind of corbel capital[55] at the
very top which carries the diagonal ribs--another proof, as is the size
of the transverse arches, that such a ribbed vault was still a
half-understood novelty. The most peculiar point about nave piers is the
way in which not only the front vaulting shafts but even that portion of
the piers to which they are attached is, except in the two western bays,
cut off at varying heights from the ground. In the six eastern bays,
where the corbels are all at the same level, this was done to leave room
for the monks' stalls,[56] but it is difficult to see why, in the case
of the following five piers, against which, as at Clairvaux, stood the
stalls of the lay brothers, the level of the corbels should vary so
much. Now all stalls are gone and the church is very bare and desolate,
with nothing but the horrible reredos to detract from that severity and
sternness which was what St. Bernard wished to see in all churches of
the Order. (Fig. 25.)

The small chapel to the west of the south transept is the only part of
the church, except the later sixteenth-century sacristy, where there is
any richness of detail, and there