The western transept features piers composed of eight stone shafts and eight marble shafts, reiterating the number eight as symbolic of creation. The bays of the transept are similar to the bays of St Hugh’s Choir. The architecture changes above the capitals of the piers, though, seeming to be the work of a different architect. The vaulting of the main transept is sexpartite, and is the same height as St Hugh’s Choir, seventy-four feet. Each bay is divided into six cells by a transverse and two diagonal ribs, a simpler, conventional variation of the vaulting of St Hugh’s Choir, and, as a result, far more influential to subsequent architecture. The vaulting of the western transept was not built high enough, and the bay at the north end above the Dean’s Eye is higher than the others.
The main sources of light in the cathedral are the Dean’s Eye and Bishop’s Eye. The windows are the best example of stained glass in early-13th-century England, preceding the stained glass at Canterbury. Both windows in the transept are twenty-four feet in diameter. The Dean’s Eye retains its original tracery, while the tracery of the Bishop’s Eye is from the Decorated period in the 14th century, inserted around 1320 in honour of John of Dalderby. Both windows are described in the Metrical Life of St Hugh. The windows would have been completed during the bishopric of Robert Grosseteste. It is probable that the windows were not part of the original design of the transept. The Dean’s Eye is too big for its position, resulting in an alteration in the vaulting. The Bishop’s Eye interrupts a buttress shaft between the lancet windows, intended for a springer rib for the vault; the buttress as built serves no purpose. The Dean’s Eye faces the deanery to the north, while the Bishop’s Eye faces the bishop’s palace to the south, next to the Galilee Porch, the ceremonial entrance to the cathedral for the bishop. As described in the Metrical Life of St Hugh, the Dean’s Eye protects the cathedral from the spirit of the Devil to the north, while the Bishop’s Eye invites the Holy Spirit from the south into the cathedral.
The Dean’s Eye is considered to be the culminating example of a rose window with plate tracery in Gothic architecture, along with earlier examples in Chartres Cathedral from the 12th century. Plate tracery was the earliest form of tracery in the Gothic stained-glass window, with lights or glazed openings inserted into openings in a sheet of masonry. Plate tracery was replaced by bar tracery, with thin, individual stone mullions, after the Dean’s Eye, around 1225. Bar-tracery windows allow much more light through the window into the interior of the cathedral, so the plate tracery of the Dean’s Eye and the windows at Chartres are seen as limiting the amount of light allowed to enter into the cathedral. The later bar-tracery windows in the Angel Choir at Lincoln, for example, allow in much more light.
The subject of the images in the glass of the Dean’s Eye is the Church on Earth, the Church Militant, paired with the Church in Heaven, the Church Triumphant, in sixteen circular openings surrounding a quatrefoil. Christ is seated in the centre surrounded by the blessed in Heaven. Four compartments surrounding the central image, which are probably not in their original positions, forming the quatrefoil, show various subjects, including the relics of St Hugh. Subjects in the sixteen outer circles of the window include angels with the instruments of the Passions, St Peter conducting people to Heaven, the Resurrection, and bishops and archbishops. Below the window, five lancet windows can be seen through an arcade of seven lancet arches. Large lancet windows on either side of the Dean’s doorway, dating from the 14th century, contain images of angels playing musical instruments and geometrical patterns. The musical instruments of the angels are a reference to the musica cosmica in contrast to the musica mundana, that there corresponds to all music created by human beings a celestial music.
In the Metrical Life, the Dean’s Eye and Bishop’s Eye are compared to heavenly bodies. While the two windows in the transept can be seen as the sun and the moon, the rest of the windows are seen as the stars. Inscriptions above the windows describe “dwellers in the Heavenly City and the weapons with which they overcame the Stygian Tyrant”, so that the windows represent the heavenly cities, as in the De Civitate Dei of St Augustine. The windows allow the architecture to play the role of reinforcing standards of Christian justice in medieval society. The Bishop’s Eye is the greater of the two windows, because it faces south to receive the Holy Spirit, while the Dean’s Eye faces north to protect the church against the devil. The two windows illuminate the cathedral from the “lantern of heaven”, the great transept, which “with these eyes surveys the gloom of Lethe”, the oblivion of the river of forgetfulness in Hades. While the two great windows symbolise the Bishop and Dean, the clerestory windows below symbolise the canons, and in the aisles, the vicars, in a descending hierarchy from spiritual to more material and mundane affairs.
St Hugh’s Choir consists of four bays, and is eighty-two feet wide between outer walls. There are two arches in each bay of the triforium, each divided into two sub-arches, with trefoils and quatrefoils in the tympanum above. It is believed that the original triforium had a continuous row of lancet windows. There are three clerestory windows instead of two in three of the four bays, corresponding to the Trinity, with an arcade of Purbeck shafts in front of them, and five arches, which may contribute to an explanation of the asymmetrical vaulting. There are two clerestory windows in the westernmost bay, which has regular sexpartite vaulting, as in the transepts. The first bay to the east of the choir, which crosses the lesser or eastern transept, and connects St Hugh’s Choir to the Angel Choir, begun later around 1250, also has asymmetrical vaulting.
A major debate among historians is whether the present form of the vault of St Hugh’s Choir was conceived prior to the collapse of the tower, or supporting walls, in 1237 or 1239, or whether it was invented after the collapse, during the bishopric of Robert Grosseteste. It is possible that the original structure built during the bishopric of St Hugh of Avalon, possibly designed by Geoffrey de Noyers, had a timber roof and a flat wooden ceiling, supported by thin walls, including the outermost arcade in the aisles, with flat buttresses on the aisle walls. The flat buttresses may have been for a planned sexpartite vault, which was abandoned during the process of construction for the present asymmetrical vault. This would explain the alternating circular and hexagonal vaulting shafts, which would accommodate alternating patterns of ribs in a sexpartite vault, between the single transverse rib and the transverse rib and two diagonals, while the patterns of ribs from the springers are consistent in the asymmetrical vault.
North-east transept. Lincoln Cathedral.
Nave, c. 1205–1230. Wells Cathedral.
Galilee Porch portal, c. 1215. Ely Cathedral.
Galilee Porch arcade, c. 1215. Ely Cathedral.
Lady Chapel, arcading, c. 1205–1235. Winchester Cathedral.
Cloister east walk vault, c. 1220. Chester Cathedral.
When the present vaulting was added later, perhaps after the collapse, the walls needed to be shored to support the extra weight. Part of the shoring involved building a second arcade over the first to support the increased wall thickness above, but the builders did not want to conceal the original arcade, so the piers and arches of the second arcade were made to alternate with the piers and arches of the original arcade, resulting in the present syncopated double arcade. The apexes of the arches of the first arcade