At the east end, a most beautiful and well-proportioned composition was the famous rose-window, forty feet in diameter, referred to as a familiar object by Chaucer. The magnificent Norman nave, which well deserved admiration on account of its architectural merit, acquired even greater celebrity under the designation of Paul's Walk as a famous meeting-place and promenade of fashionable folk. Here bargaining and dealing were carried on openly and unchecked. Many English writers refer to this extraordinary desecration of a consecrated building, and from them we learn that the trading carried on in Paul's Walk included simony and chaffering for benefices. Chaucer, in the prologue to his _Canterbury Tales_, when describing the parson, writes:-- "He sette not his Benefice to hire, And lette his shepe accombred in the mire, And ran unto London, unto S. Paules To seken him a Chanterie for soules, Or with a Brotherhede to be withold But dwelt at home, and kept well his folde." The expression "to dine with Duke Humphrey," applied to persons who, being unable either to procure a dinner by their own money or from the favour of their friends, walk about and loiter during the dinner-time, had its origin in one of the aisles of St. Paul's, which was called Duke Humphrey's Walk: not that there ever was in reality a cenotaph there to the Duke's memory, who, as everyone knows, was buried at St. Albans, in Hertfordshire, but because, says Stow, ignorant people mistook the fair monument of Sir John Beauchamp, who died in 1358, and which was in the south side of the body of the church, for that of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. [Illustration: THE CLOTH FAIR SMITHFIELD. _Looking to the south-west, and showing the north side of the street._] Perhaps one of the most vivid pictures, although it has certainly some unnatural colouring, is that given in _The Gull's Horne-Booke_, a satirical work published in London in 1609. Under the heading of "How a Gallant should behave himselfe in Powles-Walkes," one of the chapters gives some details of the place. The following extracts are perhaps the most important:--