A month before his death in 1242, Jocelin de Wells put forth a charter for the increased endowment of the cathedral staff; and it was because of a few chance words in the preamble that he came to be credited with the construction of the whole. Having found the church in danger of ruin, runs the passage, by reason of its age _aedificare coepimus et ampliare--in qua adeo profecimus--quod ipsam consecravimus_. This, which need mean nothing more than extensive building operations, is the sole foundation for the tradition that Jocelin pulled down the old church and built a new one. The condition of the church at the end of the thirteenth century is thus described by Professor Freeman[2]: "By the end of the thirteenth century we may look upon the church of Wells as at last finished. It still lacked much of that perfection of outline which now belongs to it, and which the next age was finally to give to it. Many among that matchless group of surrounding buildings which give Wells its chief charm, had not yet arisen. The church itself, with its unfinished towers, must have had a dwarfed and stunted look from every point. The Lady Chapel had not yet been reared, with its apse alike to contrast with the great window of the square presbytery above it, and to group in harmony with the more lofty chapter-house of its own form. The cloister was still of wood. The palace was still undefended by wall or moat. The Vicars' Close and its chain-bridge had not yet been dreamt of. Still, the church, alike in its fabric and its constitution, may be looked on as having by this time been brought to perfection ... The nave, recast in forms of art such as Ina and Eadward, such as Gisa and Robert, had never dreamed of, with the long range of its arcades and the soaring sweep of its newly-vaulted roof, stood, perfect from western door to rood-loft, ever ready, ever open, to welcome worshippers from city and village, from hill and combe and moor, in every corner of the land which looked to Saint Andrew's as its mother church. The choir, the stalls of the canons, the throne of the Bishop, were still confined within the narrow space of the crossing; but that narrow space itself gave them a dignity which they lost in later arrangements. For the central lantern, not yet driven to lean on ungainly props, with the rich arcades of its upper stages still open to view, still rose, in all the simple majesty of its four mighty arches, as the noblest of canopies over the choir below." "The eastern ending of the presbytery was," Mr Freeman proceeds, "rich with the best detail of the thirteenth century, as can be learnt from the fragments built up in the chapel of the Vicars' Close, and lying about in the undercroft of the chapter-house, which are in the full Early English style of the west front. The existing choir aisle walls prove that a procession-path ran behind the high altar, with most likely a chapel beyond it."