[7] His building of the hall is mentioned in Anglia Sacra, i. 567, as also the advancement of his own family. So Godwin, 299, who speaks of "That goodly hall of the pallace at Welles, pulled downe some fifty yeeres since by a knight of the court, that for a just reward of his sacrilege, soone after lost his head." This means Sir John Gates, of whom more anon. Robert Burnell was first Treasurer and then Chancellor of England, and in 1278 was elected Archbishop of Canterbury, but the election was annulled by Pope Nicolas IV. In Rymer's Foedera, vol. i. part ii. p. 559, will be found a letter of Edward I. to the Pope on behalf of his Chancellor. He speaks of the "fidelitatis suæ constantia quam ad recolendæ memoriæ dominum, Henricum Regem Angliæ, illustrem genitorem nostrum, et nos ac totam ecclesiam Anglicanam semper hactenus habuit incorruptam, et a quâ nullo umquam tempore nubulo vel sereno flecti potuit seu etiam deviare." He also calls him "vir tam in temporalibus quam in spiritualibus circumspectus, vir mitis, affabilis, vir benignus, vir etiam misericordiæ, mansuetudinis, caritatis, et pacis." Two of his brothers were drowned in 1282, in the Welsh war; see Trivet, p. 305. On the works of Gower at St. David's, see the History of St. David's, pp. 190-194. [8] I must again quote Professor Willis, in the Somersetshire Proceedings, xii. 19. "In 1326 a grant of the land at the east end of the Cathedral by the bishop to one of the canons, measures its length of fifty feet eastward from the wall of the _newly-constructed chapel_ of the Blessed Mary." This plainly means the Lady chapel at the east end, distinguished as a new building from the older Lady chapel in the cloister. The Bishop is, of course, John Drokensford, Bishop from 1309-1329. In the Bristol report of Professor Willis (p. xxix.) he is strangely called _Tokenfield_, which I am sure is not the Professor's own description of him. [9] Of the coved or waggon roofs of the West of England and South Wales, which modern church-restorers generally think it such a great feat to get rid of, I have written and spoken till I am nearly tired of the subject. The arch employed is of all manner of forms, but in a wooden construction the semicircular arch has the best effect. A roof of this sort is the same thing in wood which a barrel-vault is in stone, and the vault of the choir at Wells is a barrel-vault, modified by the clerestory windows. Earlier barrel-vaults of Romanesque date, identical in principle with the Somersetshire wooden roofs, may be seen in Saint Sernin at Toulouse and the chapel in the White Tower of London, and, to come nearer home, in the priory church of Ewenny in Glamorganshire.