Originally each bay of the aisle had a transverse roof ending in a gable, as originally on the south side of Chichester nave. The monastic buildings are numerous and important; the library contains precious MSS., touching relics of St. Cuthbert, and a wonderful collection of Pre-conquest crosses and “hogbacks.” For all these the visitor should consult Canon Greenwell’s admirable handbook. The Cathedral Church of St. Ethelreda, Ely. [Illustration: ELY, SOUTH-WEST.] “The vast and magnificent cathedral of Ely,” says Mrs. Van Rensselaer, “looms up on the horizon, as we come westward from Norwich, like a great solitary ship at sea. As we draw nearer it preserves its isolated clearness of outline, lifted visibly above the plain, yet so little lifted that its bulk seems all the greater from being nearer the eye. As we enter the little town from the south-west we realise its enormous length, the grace of its octagon, and the stern majesty of the tall tower, which rises like a great cliff in a land where men might well build cliffs, since Nature had built none. But there is in truth no spot whence the great monarch of the fenlands may not be admirably seen, until we get so far off that it drops behind the horizon’s rim. Wherever it may reveal itself it is always immense, imposing, majestic: only upon the plains of Egypt or Mesopotamia has Nature assisted the effect of man’s work by such entire suppression of herself.” Ely, like Peterborough, Ramsey, Thorney, and Crowland, and like Glastonbury, the greatest of all the English monasteries, goes back to early Anglo-Saxon days, when communities of monks and nuns sought solitude and safety in the recesses of far-spreading marshes and fens. In the beginning the monastery was founded as a nunnery, in 673, by Ethelreda, who became the first abbess and Ely’s patron saint. From the nuns it passed to secular canons, and in Dunstan’s time to Benedictine monks. In 1109 the abbot gave way to a bishop, and the Benedictine church became a Benedictine cathedral. The Bishop of Ely in his island, like the Bishop of Durham in his hill-fortress, possessed powers which no other English ecclesiastic was allowed to share. His territorial possessions included the whole Isle of Ely: and this, “the Liberty of the Bishops of Ely,” was subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the bishop. It is in these two facts—the possession of a local saint, St. Ethelreda or St. Audrey, of high repute through all England; and in the enormous revenues derived from the Isle of Ely—that the explanation lies of the vast scale on which the abbey-church was planned in the eleventh century, of the unparalleled richness of its thirteenth-century presbytery, and of the enormous works undertaken and rapidly carried out in the fourteenth century. [Illustration: CHOIR]