Bishop Quivil had only touched the fringe of the choir, but he must have collected much material for its transformation; for his successor completed it, even the vaulting, in fifteen years—the last fifteen years of Edward I. It seems to have been done in two sections; first, the four eastern bays of Bishop Marshall’s work, then the older bays to the west. It is clear that the builders took away both piers and arches from underneath Bishop Marshall’s clerestory wall, and put in new ones, without bringing the wall down—a kind of engineering feat which the mediæval builders undertook with a light heart. The new piers all consist of “vast horizontal slices of Purbeck marble, from nine to fifteen inches thick”; the arches of native sandstone. These immense marble piers give the interior of Exeter a magnificence rare in England, only to be paralleled by the marble churches of Italy. The colour-contrast, too, between the blue-grey marble of the piers, the yellow sandstone of the arches, and the white Caen stone above, is delightful. The mouldings of Bitton’s work are clearly distinguishable from those of Quivil, and were retained, with little variation, to the west end of the cathedral. Bitton got himself into some curious difficulties by retaining instead of pulling down the twelfth and thirteenth-century clerestory walls. The first of the two, the western, was the thicker wall. Hence the piers to support it had to be thicker: they exceed the eastern piers in diameter by nine inches. But by bringing both eastern and western piers to the same line facing the central aisle of the choir the difference of nine inches appears only in the side-aisles, where it is less noticeable. Again, the length of the western bays was 2½ feet greater than that of the four eastern ones. When, therefore, Bitton set out the seven eastern pier-arches there remained an awkward gap of 2½ feet between the last arch and the great pier of the crossing. This he bridged over by the tiny arch which appears at the extreme west of each arcade of the choir, the incongruity of which was largely masked later by the great choir-screen. He seems to have worked to the middle of the choir—first from the east, then from the crossing. When, however, the two sets of arches met, they did not fit, and the clumsy junction had to be botched over by the aid of a stilt. BISHOP STAPLEDON (1308-1327). [Illustration: FROM NORTH-EAST.]