But there is another factor besides the personality of William of Sens. Having engaged a foreigner to do the work, the next step of the monks probably was to distrust him. The choir, as it appears now, bears unmistakable marks that not only William of Sens was at work, but also a British building committee. Being a Frenchman, William of Sens must have been an iconoclast, and would have liked to clear away the ruins and start _de novo_. His British employers, here, as in nearly all our cathedrals, parsimonious in the extreme, insisted on retaining every inch of old wall or pillar that could be utilised. The towers of St. Anselm and St. Andrew still stood, more or less stable, to the east. William therefore had to constrict his choir to pass between them. The result is the awkward twisting of the arcade and clerestory of the choir. The choir starts with becoming wider as it advances from the east; then it suddenly contracts to pass between St. Anselm’s and St. Andrew’s chapels; then it expands once more into the Trinity chapel. No Frenchman, if he had had his way, would have permitted his cathedral to be so distorted. Again, the building committee insisted on utilising the piers of Conrad’s crypt as far as possible as supports to the arcade of the choir above. The result is that the piers of the choir are not equally spaced; and the narrow arches are pointed, while the broad ones are semicircular and stilted. William must have been ashamed, too, of all the zigzag and billet ornament. But the building committee had probably a large stock of it collected from the debris after the fire, and wanted to work it off. One beautiful feature, however, is to be placed to English credit—viz., the profuse use of Purbeck marble shafts. On the whole we may take it that what we have is not William’s design as he would have wished it, but his design criticised, fettered, altered and ignored by a clerical building committee. [Illustration: CHOIR.] [Illustration: BLACK PRINCE’S TOMB.] At the beginning of the fifth year of his work, William of Sens was seriously injured by a fall from the scaffold, and soon after returned to France. An English William was appointed to succeed him. He completed Trinity chapel, Becket’s corona, and the crypt beneath the two. It is usual to attribute to the English William an important part in the design of the eastern chapels and crypt. The facts point the other way. These eastern portions are less English and more French than the western work. There is not a single trace of English influence in the design, except solely the rounding of the abacus and the moulding of the capitals in the crypt. With these two minor exceptions, everything was completed in strict conformity with the French design.