Of bishops and abbots, prior and parsons,
Of earls and of barons and of many knights thereto,
Of sergeants and of squires and of his husbandmen enow,
And of simple men eke of the land—­so thick hither drew.

So was St Thomas vindicated and God avenged.  And St Thomas reigned as was thought for ever on high, in the new sanctuary of his Cathedral Church.

I say he reigned on high.  The choir and sanctuary of Canterbury had even in St Anselm’s time as we have seen, been high above the nave.  William of Sens designed the new choir, as high as the old, but very nobly raised still higher, the great altar, and higher yet the Chapel of the Trinity in which stood the shrine.  St Thomas had an especial devotion to the Holy Trinity.  It was in a former Trinity Chapel that 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 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.  The English cannot do that; they patch and make do, and what must be new they cannot love until it is old; their buildings are not so much works of art as growths, and there is much to be said for them.  Only here at Canterbury their prejudice has been a misfortune.  Not even the most convinced Englishman can look upon the twisted and constricted choir of Canterbury and rejoice.