In the fourteenth century the central tower was at last completed, but it ceased to exist in 1749.  Indeed, the resources of Rochester seem to have been small after the third quarter of the thirteenth century.  They had no Lady Chapel and when one was provided it was contrived out of the south-west transept.  Later the north aisle of the choir, always dark on account of Gundulph’s tower, was heightened and vaulted and lighted with windows.  Later still, similar Perpendicular windows were placed in the old nave, the Norman clerestory was destroyed and a new one built, together with a new wooden roof and the great western window was inserted.  In 1830 Cottingham, and in 1871 Scott, worked their wills upon the place under the plea of restoration.  Little has escaped their attention, neither the beautiful Decorated tomb of Bishop Walter de Merton (1278) nor that of Bishop John de Sheppey (1360).  The best thing left to us in the Cathedral and that which gives it its character is the great western doorway with its sombre Norman carving of the earlier part of the twelfth century.  The nave is also beautiful and the crypt is undoubtedly one of the most interesting monuments left in England.  Of the Priory practically nothing remains but a few fragments.

[Illustration:  Rochester]

Doubtless Chaucer and his company did not leave the great church unvisited nor fail to look curiously, nor perhaps to pray, at the shrine of St William, for they, too, were travellers and pilgrims.  But the spectacle in the little city which it might seem most filled their imagination, as it does ours, was not the Cathedral at all, but the great Keep which stands above it, frowning across the busy Medway.  Nothing more imposing of its kind than this great Norman Castle remains in England.  Having a base of seventy feet square, and consisting of walls twelve feet thick and one hundred and twenty feet high, it still seems what in fact it was, almost impregnable by any arms but those of the modern world.  Its great weakness lay always in the matter of provision, but it was perfectly supplied with water, by means of a well sixty feet under ground, in which stood always ten feet of water.  From this well a stone pipe or tunnel, two feet nine inches in diameter, led up to the very roof, access to it being given on each of the four floors into which the keep was divided within.  These apartments one and all were divided from east to west by walls five feet thick, so that on each floor there were two chambers forty-six feet long by about twenty feet in breadth.  That this enormous keep is the work of Gundulph and contemporary with the Tower of London, there seems to be no reason to doubt.  Of the great part it played in English history I have already spoken.  But even in ruin it impresses one as few things left to us nowadays, when everything we make is so monstrous in comparison with the work of our fathers, are able to do.  To stand there on the platform a hundred and twenty feet in the air and look out over the Medway crowded with shipping, ringing, echoing with factories on either shore, to see the great ships in the tideway and the fog and smoke of Chatham and its dockyards down the stream, is to receive an impression of the fragile, but tremendous, greatness of our civilisation such as few other places in South England would be able to give us suddenly between two heart beats.