I give an illustration of the ground plan,[29] from which it will be seen that the church consists of a nave and aisles of eight bays, transepts, and choir, with two chapels on either side of it opening into the transept, whilst a porch is erected in front of the north transept, and a cloister passage along the whole length of the north aisle. A tower is placed on the north-east of the north transept, and a chapel has been added on its eastern side. There is another cloister court, of which a not very trustworthy lithograph is given in M. Villa Amil’s work. This is within the convent, from which every one but the inmates is rigorously excluded, but, as far as I can learn, it is on the south side of the nave. The central compartment of the transept is carried up above the rest as a lantern, and groined with an eight-sided vault. The choir has one bay of quadripartite and one of sexpartite vaulting, and an apse. The transept chapels are all of them square in the plan but, by the introduction of an arch across the angle (the space behind which is roofed with a small vault), the vault is brought to half-octagon at the east end. This will be best understood by the illustration which I give of one of these chapels: and here, too, it will be seen that the masonry of the vaulting cells is all arranged in vertical lines,--parallel, that is, to the centre of the vault, and that the transverse section of the vault is in all cases exceedingly domical. Nothing can be more peculiar than this description of early vaulting, and it is one which, I believe, originated in Anjou or Poitou, where numberless examples may be found all more or less akin to this at Las Huelgas. This fact is most suggestive, for what more probable than that Alienor, Henry II.’s daughter, should, in the abbey which she induced her husband to found, have procured the help of some architect from her father’s Angevine domain to assist in the design of her building? Yet, on the other hand, there are some slight differences of detail between the work here and any French example with which I am acquainted, which make it possible that the architect was really a Spaniard, but if so, he must have been well acquainted, not only with the Angevine system of vaulting, but also with some of those English details which, as is well known, were in common use both in Anjou and in England in the latter part of the twelfth, and first half of the thirteenth century. A foreigner naturally gives us an exact reproduction of the work of some foreign school, just as we see at Canterbury in the work of William of Sens, and my own impression is strong that he must have been an Angevine artist who was at work here.