The work was not commenced till 1242 (Bishop Farnham), and not completed till about 1280. When it was begun, Lancet windows were still in fashion; when it was completed, they had given way to traceried windows with cusped circles in their heads. Later on, Perpendicular tracery was inserted in the lancets: it is surprising that it has not been hacked out, as in Ripon façade, by architectural “purists.” The circular window, 90 feet across, was rebuilt by Wyatt. The architect was a layman, Richard Farnham, “architector novæ fabricæ Dunelm”; the master-mason “Thomas Moises posuit hanc petram.” The foliated capitals, both here and in the eastern bay of the choir, are of unrivalled beauty. No less remarkable is the perfection of the masonry. The walls are nearly eight feet thick, with huge piers at the angles forming buttresses and weighted by pinnacles; they rise straight from the ground unaided by aisles or flying-buttresses, “yet they have borne the lofty vault (80 feet high) for more than three centuries without the slightest sign of settlement or flaw.” Such was the reverence for St. Cuthbert that not a single person was buried in the cathedral till 1311, when that magnificent prelate Anthony Bek was brought into the Chapel of Nine Altars for interment, through a door on the north of the chapel (now blocked up), not through the cathedral; and even he was not allowed a monument. One sees why there is such a paucity of monuments in this cathedral. [Illustration: CHAPEL OF NINE ALTARS.] The next thing was to pull down the old Norman apse; to join the transept on to the choir; and to break the transition from Romanesque choir to Gothic transept by remodelling the eastern bays of the choir in the fashion of the day. Also a new Gothic vault was put over the choir; its eastern bay is sexpartite. Here also the details are of exceptional beauty. For a long time little was done at Durham; the cathedral was structurally complete. In the CURVILINEAR PERIOD (1315-1360) several large windows with flowing tracery were inserted: _e.g._, the west window of the nave and the north window of the north transept; and four windows (restored) in the south aisle of the choir. The three westernmost windows in the north aisle of the choir were copied in 1848 from the fourteenth-century windows at Sleaford, Holbeach and Boughton Aluph. To this period belongs the tomb of Bishop Hatfield, built in his lifetime (1345-1381), one of the best bits of design in England. The episcopal throne above it looks a little later, and seems to have been designed for some other position, as it does not fit the space between the piers.