The nave is blocked behind the altar with a =Rood screen=, of Fourteenth Century work, much restored. It is pierced by two doors (also Fourteenth Century), through which processions passed into the choir. Upon it the organ is placed. The eastern part of the nave was rebuilt after the calamity that happened on St. Paulinus’s Day (October 10), 1323. Mass had just been celebrated, and the church was still crowded with men, women and children, when two of the great piers of the main arcade on the south side fell outwards, crushing the south wall of the aisle and cloisters. Soon the wooden roof of the nave also fell. Strange to relate nobody was injured; and although the shrine of St. Amphibalus was damaged, still the chest that contained his relics suffered no harm. All this part of the church had to be rebuilt; and, of course, the south arcade differs from the northern one. A massive pier, either the original Norman or one rebuilt in the Norman style, divides the five Early English bays on the west from the Decorated ones on the east. West we find the characteristic tooth ornament; and east, the characteristic ball-flower. When the pestilence was raging in London (only twenty miles away) in 1543, 1589, and 1593, courts of justice were held in this nave. On the north side a pier bears an inscription to the memory of Sir John Mandeville, the famous traveller, who was born at St. Albans in the Fourteenth Century and educated in the monastery school. The massive piers were coated with plaster and then painted. Each has traces of the same picture of the Crucifixion, with a second subject below it. This subject differs on every column. The soffits of the arches were also bright with colour, so that the severity and plainness that we now feel were originally missing. “Although in the four western bays of the main arcade the Early English work is very plain, yet the triforium is ornate. The arcading consists of two pointed arches in each bay, each comprising two sub-arches; the supporting columns are slender and enriched with dog-tooth mouldings, with which also the string-course below the triforium is decorated. The shafts, which probably were intended to support a stone vault over the nave, should be noticed. “The triforium over the Norman main arcade consists of large, wide-splayed, round-headed openings, in which the tracery and glazing introduced in the Fifteenth Century, when the aisle roof was lowered in pitch so as to expose the north side of the triforium to the sky, still remains. One of the triforium arches, namely, the third from the tower, was simply walled up at this time, and so retains its original form. The clerestory in this part of the church consists of plain, round-headed openings. Between each bay the outer southern face of each Norman pier is continued in the form of the flat pilaster buttress up to the roof.”--(T. P.)