When the choir-stalls were added, these shafts were cut away to make room for them, and finished off with panelled corbels. This part of the building, which had received such a severe shaking by the fall of the tower, was further strengthened by the erection of the arcaded screens between the piers. They fill all four arches on both sides, dividing the choir from the aisles to the north and south. The next bay eastward, which crosses the lesser transept, is filled on both sides by screens of wrought ironwork, having that scrolled pattern so often found in early examples. They are illustrated in the South Kensington Museum Handbook on Ironwork, by Mr. Starkie Gardner, who calls them the best preserved specimens of their style now existing in England. The screens are apparently thirteenth-century work, and they might be as early as the time of St. Hugh. The awkward row of gas-jets along the top is in strange contrast to these fine screens. Above the latter, on each side, two constructive beams of oak stretch across the arch. One is at the height of the pier capitals, and the other on a level with the base of the triforium arcade. An attempt was made in the last century to mask their ugliness by encasing them in Gothic work of carved wood. The magnificent series of oak =Choir-Stalls=, with their forest of pinnacles rising to the height of the pier-capitals, forms one of the chief glories of the minster. They were considered by Pugin to be the finest examples in the kingdom. Their erection, in the third quarter of the fourteenth century, is due to the munificence of the treasurer, John de Welburne, a great benefactor of the minster. A full list of the carvings was given by the late Canon Wickenden in the thirty-eighth volume of the _Archæological Journal_. The stalls are in two rows, the upper of 62 seats, and the lower of 46; the former number has now been increased by six, and the latter by two. The upper stalls have elaborate trefoiled canopies, surmounted by an intricate maze of buttresses and pinnacles, rising to a height of 24 ft. 6 in. above the choir floor. The niches above the canopies have recently been filled with statues of saints in the Anglican Calendar. The stalls in both rows are provided with hinged seats or _misereres_, intended to serve as supports in the long services during which the occupants of the stalls were required to stand. These seats, as well as the elbow-rests and finials, are richly carved with those grotesque subjects in which the mediæval artist so greatly delighted. The carver has given full scope to a most fertile imagination. Scriptural subjects do certainly occur on some of the _misereres_ in the upper row, but others are of a playful character. The fox is seen preaching to birds and beasts, and then running riot among them; monkeys are at play, or occupied in the more serious business of hanging one of their number and burying him afterwards; we also find men