aisle of the presbytery, near the place where he was afterwards buried. The undoubted Decorated character of the upper stage of the west tower marks it as belonging to the very earliest years of the century. There is not the least tendency towards any features of the Perpendicular style. Without reckoning tombs and chapels, there is no structural work of distinct Perpendicular character to be seen at Ely Cathedral, except some remains of the cloisters, and the windows in the nave aisles and clerestory, and those in the upper parts of the great transept, and the large supporting arches which have been inserted beneath the Norman arches of the west tower. The triforium walls in the nave were raised in the fifteenth century, as those in the presbytery had been raised in the fourteenth. The style of the tracery shews that this alteration was carried out quite late in the century, perhaps about 1480. In the south transept there is also a large Perpendicular window. The very late east window of the south presbytery aisle was inserted as part of Bishop West's Chapel, who died in 1533. In 1539 the monastery was surrendered to the king. Such of the domestic buildings as were not required for the use of the dean and canons were as usual sold. The Constitution of Henry VIII. provided for the customary officers of a cathedral establishment. The prior became the first dean, and remained in office till his death, eighteen years later. Though the minster had become a cathedral when the bishopric was instituted, yet the prior and convent were always custodians of the fabric, and apparently supreme therein; and there was nothing strictly corresponding to a capitular body. A memory of the fact that the bishop was in place of the abbot remains to this day in the position of the bishop's seat in the choir. There is no throne, properly so called. The bishop occupies what is in most cathedrals the dean's seat--on the south of the entrance at the screen. The north side is in consequence the Decani side, and the Cantoris side is on the south. This position of the dean's stall on the north, though very unusual, is not unique. It occurs also at Durham and Carlisle; but at those cathedrals there is a throne for the bishop, and the bishop's seat in a stall in the south, corresponding to the dean's in the north, is not met with elsewhere. "At Ely alone, of all cathedrals in Christendom, owing to its first bishop having been an abbot who was himself the banished bishop of another see, the diocesan has continued to occupy the abbot's stall, while the head of the corporation (before the Reformation a prior, and since then a dean) has occupied the opposite stall, usually assigned to a sub-prior or sub-dean."[18] There were three Benedictine abbeys which retained their monastic establishment after a bishop had been made and the minster became a cathedral--Canterbury, Durham, and Ely.