The mob would, doubtless, have turned out Gardiner’s remains had not some pious Catholics put a skull and bones above them, which were mistaken for the bishop’s. They would have been glad to have put him again to destructive work, not indeed, destroying heretics, but breaking to pieces the saints in the stained-glass windows. In this chantry there is still to be seen a portion of one of the round pillars of the Norman apse. Returning through Fox’s Chantry, and proceeding eastward, we enter the large retro-choir built in the beautiful Early English style by Bishop de Lucy about seventy years after Walkelin’s time. It is erected on piles, so we may be thankful it has stood so long. Immediately at the back of the feretory, we see an arch leading to “the holy hole”--or, as some of our companions called it, “the ’oly ’ole”--in which interments formerly took place. An attempt was made to enter it in 1789, but the masonry had fallen down and the enterprise was relinquished. The Edwardian canopies over it are charming. The area in which we stand is studded with tombs. There are two splendid chantries here--one of Bishop Wayneflete, the founder of Magdalen College, Oxford; and the other, of Cardinal Beaufort. Wayneflete is represented as grasping his heart.[79] Both monuments have suffered. Wayneflete’s head was so much damaged that a new one was lately given him. Beaufort’s figure is supposed not to be original, and “a horse-load of pinnacles” had by Milner’s time[80] fallen or been knocked off this canopy of “bewildering” embellishment. An old gentleman of our company inquired whether Cardinal Beaufort was a Roman Catholic, and I could see by his countenance that the affirmative answer he received greatly altered his opinion of that eminent man. [Sidenote: Altar Tombs.] The other monuments are “altar tombs,” comparatively insignificant, being only two or three feet above the pavement. But to our eyes they seemed a promising array, and proved disappointing. We had read that among others Prior William of Basynge, Sir Arnald de Gaveston, Prior Silkstede and Bishop Courtenay were lying here. On the first we came to, that of Basynge, I deciphered the pleasant announcement that whoever prays for him shall obtain a hundred and forty-five days’ indulgence. “That seems,” observed Mr. Hertford, “as if he was not so anxious about the souls of others as about his own.” The ledger-stone which bears this inscription is the only genuine part of the tomb.