At the north-eastern shoulder of the church, between it and the tower in the city wall already mentioned, is the fine rectangular chapel of Santiago, built in the time of the Catholic sovereigns--on the site, it would seem, of a twelfth-century chapel. The pillars are borne on the shoulders of various figures, among them being Samson, the Queen of Sheba, Laocoon, and a monk with a book on which is the derisive motto _legere et non intelligere_. The details of the architecture are capricious and graceful. The chapel is lighted by colossal windows, filled with gorgeous stained glass--blue and gold, purple and emerald--the reflected colour producing a magical effect. The spacious cloister, which conceals the northern façade of the cathedral, was built in the early fourteenth century, but it has been rebuilt, restored, and altered into what Street calls ‘a very poor and weak kind of Renaissance.’ The ornamentation is profuse and not in bad taste. The inner walls have not been much altered, and the pillars supporting them are sculptured in the Gothic style. The bays are painted with an extremely valuable and interesting series of frescoes, so well drawn that they were more likely the work of some fifteenth-century Italian artist than productions of native talent. The subjects are all from the history of Christ and Mary, the Crucifixion curiously enough being omitted. When Street saw these paintings forty years ago, he spoke of the colours as pure and good, but they have now been almost entirely obliterated by the damp. The cloister contains several sepulchral monuments, some mere slabs, but one--that of the Canon Juan de Grajal (1447)--elaborately and artistically sculptured. Some colossal idiot has cut off the heads of the angels shown in this fine piece of work. Near the beautiful Gothic entrance to the cloister is an image of our Lady of Regla, to which at one time the people used to proceed in procession to return thanks for the mythical victory of Clavijo, a choir of damsels representing the equally mythical tribute of one hundred virgins said to have been paid by Mauregato to the Moors. In the archives of the cloister are preserved a fine collection of codices and documents, throwing light on the history not only of Spain but of the Catholic Church. Specially valuable is a Gothic Bible written _sub umbraculo Santae Marie et Sancti Martini in monasterio vocabulo Alb ... in DCCCCLVIII._ [920 A.D.], by John the Deacon, who transcribed on the intermediate pages the life of San Froilan.