The present cathedral is recorded to have been commenced by Abbot Serlo in 1088, and to have been completed and consecrated in 1100. This statement seems to be generally accepted; but the chief evidence for it, as for the architectural history of the cathedral generally, is the chronicle of Abbot Froucester. Froucester, however, lived two hundred years after the foundation of the Norman cathedral, and his authority on this point can hardly be considered decisive. The plain architectural facts tell a very different tale. In the first place, the design of the nave and presbytery is totally different; the presbytery is archaic and rude, the nave highly advanced in design and elaborate and rich in ornament. The former may well belong to the last decade of the eleventh century; the latter is a whole generation later. In the presbytery the piers are low and of enormous bulk—such vast wasteful blocks of masonry as are to be seen in the nave of St. Alban’s, the choirs of Hereford and Chichester and Norwich: all of them commenced in the eleventh century. In the nave of Gloucester the piers rise to the exceptional height of 30 feet; for a parallel one must go to Tewkesbury, which was not consecrated till 1121; and even that consecration does not necessarily include the nave, where alone these towering cylinders are found. Again, in the presbytery of Gloucester the pier-arcade and triforium are about equal in height. So they are also in the eleventh-century work of Winchester, Norwich, and elsewhere. The diminutive triforiums of the naves of Gloucester and Tewkesbury are without a parallel in English work, though the Abbaye-aux-dames at Caen may be quoted on the other side. Again, the pier-arches of the presbytery are in two square orders, and the vault of the aisle is unribbed. In the nave the orders of the pier-arches are enriched with pairs of rolls and zigzag; the vault of the north aisle has diagonal ribs of late Norman character; and the string-course of the clerestory is a twisted cable elaborately enriched. The aisles, too, are very broad and very lofty.