The tower has three stages above the ridges of the roofs. The lower one has plain windows lighting the lantern; the second has, on each side, two pairs of double windows; and the upper storey has two such windows of large scale. The tower is flanked with pilaster buttresses merging in the upper storey into round turrets. I will next take Winchester Cathedral. York would have claimed precedence as a metropolitan church, but its Norman remains are so small in extent as to neutralise its claims. I may mention, however, that Professor Willis (whose marvellous perception of antiquarian evidence enables him to describe, almost with precision, buildings of which the common observer would conclude that no relic or evidence exists) has shown us that the Norman cathedral at York (begun soon after 1070), was a structure of prodigious magnitude, and exceeded in the width of its nave any church in England; measuring 50 feet from centre to centre of its piers. Winchester may be said, in these early days, to have rivalled London as the capital of England; for it had been the capital of that Saxon kingdom which brought all the others into subjection, and whose kings became kings of England; while London--the capital only of Essex, a kingdom subordinate to Kent--owed its greatness simply to its river. We have already seen that the cathedral, founded by Birinus in the seventh century, had been rebuilt by Athelwold and Elphege in the tenth century. In 1079 it was again rebuilt by Bishop Walkelyn, a chaplain and relation of the Conqueror, and finished about 1093. Walkelyn’s Cathedral exceeded in vastness even Abbot Paul’s stupendous work at St. Alban’s. Its nave was of eleven bays, besides two vast western towers. Its transepts each had four bays; its eastern arm four bays, besides the apse, which had a surrounding aisle, and was flanked by two small towers. Its length, independently of an eastern chapel, was 485 feet; or, including this chapel, 530 feet. The length of its transept was 225 feet (it was double-aisled, that at St. Alban’s being unaisled), dimensions which exceed those of St. Alban’s, and leave those of Lanfranc’s metropolitan church far in the background. The width, too, of the nave and its aisles was greater than that of St. Alban’s. The architecture of this vast temple was of stern simplicity, though, being carried out in stone, it was much more fully developed than that of St. Alban’s. It was, in fact, a full and typical development of the Early Norman, with every feature complete, though all in their plainest garb. All which now remains of this date is the transepts and the crypt (Fig. 257) of the eastern arm, and they may be described as the text-book of Norman in its earlier form. The transepts, as before stated, were doubly aisled, and (as Canterbury, Ely, and at Caen) a gallery crossed the outer bay of each, supported on a massive round pillar, so as to render the upper aisle continuous.