whether they were carried up to the same height as the central portion. The latter has the lower part of a window remaining on its northern summit, and the west wing has two blocked windows (visible internally) on its west side. Above the arch opening from the east wing into the transept is another of large size, now completely blocked, which may have been the west windows of the transept before the wing was built. The openings visible on the north and south sides of the basement are comparatively modern, and did not exist originally.
   It has been already stated that the lowest stories of the tower were vaulted, but there is no staircase giving access to the floor above, * and at first it is not apparent how it was reached. There is, however, a gap in the south wall at the first-floor level, which proves on examination to have been a doorway. Now this door can only have been reached in one way, namely from the pulpitum, or place from which the gospel was sung at the high mass on festivals, the staircase to which thus served a double purpose, as the ascent by which the gospeller and epistoler gained the loft, and the sacrist

the tower to ring the bells.
   The nave, as at Cokersand, Eggleston, Titchfield, Beauchief, and other Præmonstratensian abbeys, is without aisles. It has a west door, and the two usual doors opening into the cloister. The walls are now too much reduced in height to shew traces of the windows, but there must have been two on the north side and four on the south—these last sufficiently high up to clear the cloister roof—and probably a western triplet. In the middle of the north wall is a pointed arch (not a door) leading into the basement of the west wing of the tower.
   The nave opened into the crossing by an arch, supported on short circular shafts ending in corbels at some height from the floor. It is evident, from this, that the two screens usual in our old collegiate and monastic churches existed here; the one, a solid structure of stone, beneath the arch of the crossing, against which the canons' stalls
   * This is a point of favour of the tower being a defensive structure.