s and other similar buildings elsewhere had been
quite forgotten, and it was left to Professor Willis to discover that
the remains were not those of a disused church. Bentham[1] has an
engraving of the arches and clerestory, divested of all the domestic
additions, which to a modern student of ecclesiastical architecture
indicates at once a building of Norman date, which is described as an
elevation "of the remains of the Old Conventual Church of Ely, built in
the time of the Heptarchy, A.D. 673, and repaired in King Edgar's Reign,
A.D. 970." In the plan given in the same plate an imaginary apse is
marked out with dotted lines.[2] In the chapel is a groined roof, and
this belongs to the latter part of the twelfth century; but the nave
arches, where are some very good and unusual mouldings, have nothing of
Transitional work, and in the absence of documentary evidence would be
assigned to 1140 or 1150. The hall, situated to the north of what would,
in a church, be called the north aisle of the nave, is the work of
Walsingham.

[Illustration: PLAN OF THE INFIRMARY AS GIVEN IN BENTHAM'S "HISTORY AND
ANTIQUITIES"]

#Prior Crauden's Chapel# is a most exquisite specimen of the
Decorated period, designed by the same master mind that created the
octagon and the lady-chapel. Crauden was prior from 1321 to 1341. Built
as a private chapel, it was at one time converted into a dwelling, but
is now restored to sacred uses as the chapel of the King's School. It is
situated to the south of the deanery. It is of small dimensions, being
only thirty-one feet long; and this is exactly double its breadth. The
vaulted roof springs from clustered shafts in the walls; in the eastern
half, on each side, are two tall windows of two lights, with most
graceful tracery; at the east is a window of five lights, of equally
beautiful tracery, filled with stained glass, of which the five lower
figures are ancient and said to have been brought from Cologne. The
west window has four lights. When Professor Willis was conducting some
members of an architectural congress, in 1860,[3] over the monastic
buildings, on arriving at this "beautiful little gem of architecture,"
in the course of his remarks "he pointed to the restorations that had
taken place, and found that they were good ones, the actual mason's
lines having been taken in some instances. In one or two cases where the
work was destroyed the spaces had been filled up with plain block,
purposely to s