The great Norman church which Bishop Walkelin built to take the place of the Saxon minster cannot fundamentally have differed very much from the church we see, at any rate so far as its nave and transepts were concerned.  The eastern arm was, however, different.  It consisted of four bays, with north and south aisles at the end of which were rectangular chapels, an apse about which the aisles ran as an ambulatory, and beyond the apse an eastern apsidal chapel.  Of this church all that really remains to us is the crypt and the transept.  In the crypt we divine the old eastern limb of the church, and are doubtless in the presence of the earliest work in the Cathedral.  It is, however, in the double aisled transepts that we can best appreciate how very glorious that first Norman church must have been; there is nothing in England more wonderful; and so far as I know there is nothing in Europe quite to put beside them.  If only the whole mighty church could have remained to us!

The first disaster that befell Bishop Walkelin’s building was the fall of the central tower in 1107, which all England, at the time, attributed to the burial beneath it of William Rufus.  The tower was rebuilt, though not to its original height, but in the reconstruction, the parts of the transept nearest to the tower were also rebuilt, and thus we have here two periods of Norman work; the main building of 1107 and the reconstruction after that date.

Of the Transitional work of the second half of the twelfth century very little is to be seen at Winchester.  It was for the most part the period of that great Bishop Henry of Blois, and he was probably too much immersed in the brutal politics of his time, too busy building and holding his castle to give much thought to the Cathedral.  The font, however, dates from his time, and perhaps a door in the north-western bay of the south transept.

The earliest Gothic work in the Cathedral is the chapel of St Sepulchre, which was built upon the northern wall of the choir before the north transept.  There we may still see wall paintings of the Passion of Our Lord.  Not much later is the retro-choir.  This consists of three bays, and is the largest in England.  It was begun in 1189 by Bishop Godfrey de Lucy, and we must admit at once that it is wholly without delight, and yet to build it the Norman apse was sacrificed.  According to Mr Bond, this was probably a very popular destruction.  The reversion, says he, “to the favourite square east end of English church architecture was popular in itself.  Almost every Norman cathedral ended in an apse; and in the apse, high raised behind the high altar, sat the Norman bishop facing the congregation; the hateful symbol of Norman domination.”  This may have been so, but considering that the monastic choir of Winchester occupied not one, as the choir does to-day, but three bays of the nave from which it was separated by a vast rood screen, though the Bishop had been as high as Haman, he would have been scarcely visible to the populace in the western part of the nave.  Popular or no, however, the apse was sacrificed and the low retro-choir built with the Lady Chapel in the Early English style.