In the year 1220 a Lady Chapel had been begun at the east end of the Norman church, and when twenty-five years later the Norman apse had to make way for Henry III.’s new structure the Lady Chapel must have been incorporated into the plan. When the King died the presbytery, choir, and transepts had been completed. In 1298 a disastrous fire destroyed the greater part of the Conventual buildings, and thus work and money which might have gone to the completion of the church were diverted to the rebuilding of the monastery. For a century the Norman Nave served the Gothic church, but about the year 1365 the rebuilding of the Nave was seriously undertaken on the initiative of Simon Langham, who had been Abbot from 1349 to 1362 and subsequently Bishop of Ely, Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal. The story of Langham’s generosity does not belong to the present narrative and it must suffice to say that when Islip entered the monastery in 1480 a beginning was being made with the vaulting of three of the four westernmost bays, while the final bay was already raised to the triforium level. Abbot Estney’s enthusiasm for the work is obvious to any who can read between the lines in what are designed to be simple records of receipts and expenditure, and there can be little doubt that Islip caught the infection of that enthusiasm in the course of his association with the Abbot as his Chaplain. Abbot Fascet’s association with the work was honourable if short, and consisted mainly in generously wiping out debts the payment of which he might legitimately have charged on the fabric fund. It is not true as stated in Hacket’s life of Bishop Williams that Islip was responsible for the whole rebuilding of the nave, but his was certainly the glory of its completion. Meanwhile at the other end of the church building of an entirely different character was going on. It is hardly possible to emphasise too strongly the contrast. At the west end were builders “original enough not to seek after originality in their work,” continuing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the style and plan laid down by Henry of Reims in the middle of the thirteenth. At the east end the new Lady Chapel was being erected with all the glories of fan tracery in the most elaborate development of the Perpendicular. If further contrast be desired it can be found in Islip’s contemporary building of the Jesus Chapel, roughly midway in position and style between the severe and the ornate beauties of the opposite ends of the church.