It was surely not meanness and at such a time
and in such a cause that forced the monastery to deny William of Sens
the free hand he desired; it was prejudice and a fear, almost
barbaric; of destruction. The monks forced their builder to
accommodate the new choir to what remained of the old work. They
refused to sacrifice St Anselm's tower on the south or the tower of
St Andrew on the north, therefore the wide choir of Canterbury,
already wider than the nave and growing wider still as it went
eastward, had to be strangled between them, and to open again as well
as it could into the Trinity Chapel and the Corona. All that was old,
too, and that they loved they used; the old piers of the crypt were to
remain and still to support the pillars of the choir, which were thus,
no doubt to William's disgust, unequally placed so that here the
arches are pointed but there round. In many ways William must have
considered his employers barbarians, and in the true sense of that
much abused term, he was right. No man brought up in the Greek and
Latin traditions would have hesitated to destroy in order to build
anew.
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