One Gregorio Lourenço seems to have been what would now be called master of the works, and from his letters to Dom Manoel we learn how the work was going on. After Dom Manoel's death in 1521 he writes to Dom João III., telling him what, of all the many things his father the late king had ordered, was already finished and what was still undone. The church consists of a nave of four bays, measuring some 105 feet by 39, with flanking chapels, the whole lined with eighteenth-century tiles, mostly blue and white. There are also a great choir gallery at the west end, a chancel, polygonal [Illustration: FIG. 68. LISBON. CONCEIÇÃO VELHA.] within but square outside, 54 feet long by 20 broad, with a seventeenth-century sacristy to the south, a cloister to the north, and chapels, one of which was the chapter-house, forming a kind of passage from sacristy to cloister behind the chancel. By 1518 the church must have been already well advanced, for in January of that year Gregorio Lourenço writes to Dom Manoel saying that 'the wall of the dormitory was shaken and therefore I have sent for "Pere Anes"--Pedro Annes had been master builder of the royal palace, now the university at Coimbra, and being older may have had more experience than Marcos Pires, the designer of the monastery--who had it shored up, and they say that after the vault of the cloister is finished and the wooden floors in it will be quite safe. Also six days ago came the master of the reredos from Seville and set to work at once to finish the great reredos, for which he has worked all the wood--he must surely have brought it with him from Seville--but the glazier has not yet come to finish the windows.' [Illustration: PLAN OF STA. CRUZ] On 22nd July following he writes again that all but one of the vaults of the cloister were finished--'and Marcos Pirez works well, and the master of the reredos has finished the tabernacle, and the "cadeiras" [that is probably, sedilia] and the bishop has come to see them and they are very good, and the master who is making the tombs of the kings is working at his job, and has already much stonework.' These tombs of the kings are the monuments of Dom Affonso Henriques on the north wall of the chancel and of Dom Sancho I. on the south. The two first kings of Portugal had originally been buried in front of the old church, and were now for the first time given monuments worthy of their importance in the history of their country. In 1521 Dom Manoel died, and next year Gregorio tells his successor what his father had ordered; after speaking of the pavement, the vault of São Theotonio's Chapel, the dormitory with its thirty beds and its fireplace, the refectory, the royal tombs and a great screen twenty-five palms, or about eighteen feet high, he comes to the pulpit--'This, Sir, which is finished, all who see it say, that in Spain there is no piece of stone of better workmanship, for this 20$000 have been paid,' leaving some money still due.