Of “Conrad’s glorious choir” (it was commenced by Prior Ernulph _c._ 1096 and finished _c._ 1115 by Prior Conrad) a considerable amount remains. The round-arched work in the crypt is nearly all of this date, except the carving of many of the capitals, which was executed later; and from the extent of his crypt one can plot out the exact shape and dimensions of the Norman choir. Much of it is seen outside, especially in and near the south-east transept with its intersecting semicircular arcades, and the most charming little Norman tower imaginable. In the interior many Norman stones, “cross-hatched,” may be seen in the aisle-wall immediately after entering the choir-aisle by the flight of steps; the lower part of the vaulting-shaft in this wall, built of several stones and not of solid drums, as it is higher up, is also Norman. In the eastern transept the triforium occurs twice over; the upper of the two was Conrad’s clerestory. Much of Conrad’s semicircular arcade also remains on the aisle-walls. Conrad’s choir was not only far longer than Lanfranc’s, but it had the curious peculiarity (preserved in the French choir) that it was broader than the nave, and moreover widened out as it proceeded to the east. The double apses of each of his transepts were copied by St. Hugh at Lincoln a century later. A very noble feature of Canterbury choir is its elevation, necessitated by the construction of the crypt below it. The raising of the floor adds great dignity to the choir (one misses it painfully at Bristol); and was still further added to by the French architect, so that now at Canterbury one goes eastward from height to height. We climb from the nave to the choir, from the choir to the sanctuary, from the sanctuary to the eastern chapels. One gets a bathos at Durham and Worcester, where at the east one plunges into a hole. II. TRANSITIONAL.—But Conrad’s glorious choir was destroyed by a great fire in the year 1174, amid much mediæval cursing and swearing, and the tears of all the people of Canterbury. Then the monks did an abominable thing. Instead of being satisfied with our home-bred English architecture, of which such a beautiful example was just being completed at Ripon, they sent for a foreigner. The present choir of Canterbury, like that of Westminster, was “made in France.” The only consolation one has is the fact—which is a fact—that with that stolid insularity which from the twelfth century has insisted on working out its own salvation in its own way—English architects ignored them both. The new French choir was to be a rock on which the main current of English art struck and parted asunder only to meet again on the other side. English design passed on, as if Canterbury choir had never existed, from Ripon and Chichester and Abbey Dore and Wells to Lincoln Minster. The coupled columns, the French arch-moulds, the Corinthianesque capitals of Canterbury were un-English; no one would have anything to do with them anywhere.