We need not dwell on the beauty of this work, which touches exactly the Transition from the first to the second period of English Gothic, on the north doorway, with its array of mouldings and shafts, on the details of the windows, the grotesque carvings of the eaves, the boldness and cleanness of the outlines of buttresses and base-courses. The next work was the completion of the steeple, and this was done well, but apparently with some rapidity, about the year 1300. There is, perhaps, a slight indecision of design in the small stages of arcading and “smocking” above the west window; and the west window itself, with its mullions crossing in the head, is more effective from the point of view of its parade of “ball-flower” than from that of design; but there can be no question as to the beauty of the twin two-light windows above the “smocking” stage, or to the character which the belfry-lights, with their strongly defined central mullion, their crocketed triangular hoods, and the statued niches in the spandrils they form with the parapet, give to the tower.[71] Nor can there be anything but admiration for the great angle-buttresses, rising from their niched lower stages by a series of sloping offsets into four tall crocketed pinnacles round the base of the spire; nor for the method by which the diagonal sides of the spire, which rises from within a plain parapet, are connected by broaches with the pinnacled angles of the tower: nor for the crocketing, plain in detail but elaborate in effect, and the three ranges of lights of the spire itself. The top was rebuilt in 1664, probably a few feet lower than it had been. It was struck by lightning in 1797, and repaired rather timorously.[72] The south aisle was already set out on a scale little less than that of the north aisle, and probably it was completed as far as a point corresponding to the east end of the nave, soon after the completion of the spire. This work was done more hastily, and with less consistent magnificence than that of the north aisle; but it has been so much restored that it is difficult to realise its appearance when it was built. The masonry, however, is of a poorer kind, and seems to indicate that funds were not so easily forthcoming as before. The south doorway and the outer doorway of the porch are thirteenth-century structures, removed from their original positions to corresponding places in relation to the new aisle. The windows, where they are original, show the design of crossing mullions which we have noticed in the west window of the tower, but the shafts used in some of them seem to be re-used from windows in the older south aisle.