The plateresque style showed its fanciful grace in the door of the cloister, and even the chirruguesque showed at its best in the famous lanthorn of Tome, which broke the vaulting behind the high altar in order to give light to the abside.

One could now see all the elegant and daring beauty of the eighty-eight pillars soaring audaciously into space, white as frozen snow, and the delicate ribs interlacing to carry the vaulting.

Internally Buonarroti altered its decorative panellings, and elevated the vaulting of the roof into a more ambitious cupola.

Abbot Sodbury (1322-35) vaulted the nave, and it was left for one of his successors, Walter Monington (1341-74), to fill in the vaulting of the choir.

Note (1) gallery or parvise over the porch; (2) groined vaulting under tower; (3) wooden roof of N. chapel; (4) sedile, piscina, and squint; (5) fine Jacobean pulpit; (6) mural brasses to Thomas and George Hodges (1583 and 1630).

The buttresses which help the walls to support the vaulting of the nave and choir are the most remarkable feature of the design, and, together with the tower, which rises in diminishing stages to the height of 260 feet and there ends in an embattled platform, account for the singularly feudal and fortress-like character of the building.

Now spring up on the bar, resting on your palms, and vault over from that position with a swing of your body, without touching the ground; when you have once managed this, you can vault as high as you can reach: double-vaulting this is called.