s once been of great beauty, especially of the
boss at the centre of the apse.[65]

But besides those two castles there is another building of this period
which had a greater and more lasting effect on the work of this
fourteenth century. In England the arrival of the Cistercians and the
new style introduced or rather developed by them seems almost more than
anything else to have determined the direction of the change from what
is usually, perhaps wrongly,[66] called Norman to Early English, but in
Portugal the great foundation of Alcobaca was apparently powerless to
have any such marked effect except in the one case of cloisters. Now
with the exception of the anomalous and much later Claustro Real at
Batalha, all cloisters in Portugal, before the renaissance, follow two
types: one, which is clearly only a modification of the continuous
romanesque arcades resting on coupled shafts, has usually a wooden roof,
and consists of a row of coupled shafts bearing pointed arches, and
sometimes interrupted at intervals by square piers; this form of
cloister is found at Santo Thyrso near Guimaraes, at Sao Domingos in
Guimaraes itself, and in the Cemetery cloister built by Prince Henry the
Navigator at Thomar in the fifteenth century.

[Sidenote: Cloister, Cellas.]

The most remarkable of all the cloisters of the first type is that of
the nunnery of Cellas near Coimbra. Founded in 1210 by Dona Sancha,
daughter of Sancho I., the nunnery is now a blind asylum. The cloister,
with round arches and coupled columns, seems thoroughly romanesque in
character, as are also the capitals. It is only on looking closer that
the real date is seen, for the figures on the capitals, which are carved
with scenes such as the beheading of St. John the Baptist, are all
dressed in the fashion that prevailed under Dom Diniz--about 1300--while
the foliage on others, though still romanesque in arrangement, is much
later in detail. More than half of the arcades were rebuilt in the
seventeenth century, but enough remains to make the cloister of Cellas
one of the most striking examples of the survival of old forms and
methods of building which in less remote countries had been given up
more than a hundred years before.

The church, though small, is not without interest. It has a round nave
of Dom Manoel's time with a nuns' choir to the west and a chancel to the
east, and is entered by a picturesque door of the later sixteenth
century.

[Sidenote: Cloiste