he had said his first Mass, and whether on this account or another,
his devotion was such that it was he who first established that Feast,
till then merely the octave of Whitsunday. His shrine then was well
placed in the Chapel of the Holy Trinity.

In examining the church to-day one can well understand the beauty of
William of Sens' idea, and see, too, where, and perhaps understand
why, it really fails or at least comes short of perfection.

William of Sens trained in Latin traditions had, and rightly, little
respect, we may think, for the work of the past. He would have had all
new. But by 1174, unlike Anselm in 1096, and still more unlike
Lanfranc in 1070, he had in all probability a genuine English and
national prejudice to meet, an English dislike of destruction and an
English hatred of anything new.

It has been said that the failure of William of Sens' design was due
to the meanness of the monks of Christ Church. But meanness is not an
English failing; on the contrary, our great fault is the very
opposite, extravagance. 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