William of Sens, however, hampered though he was, is responsible for the work we see.  It is true he died after some four years of work at Canterbury, falling one day from a scaffold, but William the Englishman who followed him only completed what was really already finished.  The design, the idea, and the genius of Canterbury choir are

French, spoiled by English prejudice, but undoubtedly French for all that.

As it appeared when that great Transitional choir was finished, Canterbury Cathedral remained till 1379.  It is true that the north wall of the cloister and the lovely doorway in the north-east corner were built in the Early English time.  It is equally true that the lower part of the Chapter House and the screens north and south of the choir and a glorious window in St Anselm’s Chapel are Decorated work, but the Cathedral itself knows nothing of the Early English or of the Decorated styles.  It stood till 1379 with a low and short Norman nave and transept to the west, and a great Transitional choir and transept to the east.  In 1379 Lanfranc’s nave and transept were destroyed.

It may be thought that at last a great and noble nave would be built north of the Frenchman’s choir.  Not at all.  Again the English prejudice against destruction—­a lack of intellectual daring in us perhaps—­ prevented this.  One of the western towers of Lanfranc was to remain, and therefore the new nave though loftier than the old, was no longer, and it remains a glory certainly without, but within a hopeless disappointment saved from utter ineffectiveness only by the noble height of the great choir above it.  It remains without life or zest, not an experiment but a task honestly and thoroughly done in the Perpendicular style.

To the same period belong the great western screen of the choir, the Chapel of St Michael and the Warrior’s Chapel in the south transept, the Lady Chapel in the north transept, the Chantry and the tomb of Henry IV. in the Trinity Chapel, the Black Prince’s Chantry and the screens of the Lady Chapel in the Crypt, the upper part of the Chapter House, now lost to us by restoration, and the south-west Tower.

There remained at the end of the fifteenth century but one thing needed—­the central Tower.  This, as it happened, was to be the last great Gothic work undertaken in this country, and in every way it is one of the most impressive and successful.  Begun in 1475 and finished in 1503, the Angel Steeple is the last of Catholicism in England, and I like to think of it towering as it does over that dead city, and the low hills of Kent, over all that was once so sacred and is now nothing, as a kind of beacon, a sign of hope until it shall ring the Angelus again and once more the sons of St Benedict shall chant the Mass of St Thomas before the shrine new made:  Gaudeamus omnes in Domino, diem festum celebrantes, sub honore beati Thomae Martyris, de cujus passione gaudent angeli et collaudant filium Dei.