The nave dates from about 1378 to 1411, in which last year the builder of it, the aforementioned Prior Chillenden, died, “who after nobly ruling as Prior of this church for twenty years twenty-five weeks and five days,” says his epitaph, as given by Willis, “at length on the day of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary closed his last day.” As it was written of Christopher Wren, so here it might be of Chillenden--“If monument be asked for, look around.” The architecture here is Perpendicular, contrasting exquisitely with the early work of the choir; it is no new simile--but there is no call to provide a new when the old is so good--to say that these splendid pillars, rising from their firm, fixed roots in the stony floor and springing up into the grey heights far above, strike deep upon the imagination as being akin to the glorious pillars of a stately forest.
A curious and oft-repeated error is to say that Canterbury is unique among churches, in that from the nave we look _up_ to the choir, the latter being raised on the crypt. A precisely similar cause and effect are to be found, for example, at Worcester.
The stained glass which once adorned the nave, is gone, smashed by zealous Puritans, and all of olden colour that we now see is in the great west window, compiled of fragments from those that have departed.
Of the tombs and monuments in the nave the most noteworthy are in the north aisle--those of Charles the First’s famous organist, Orlando Gibbons; of Sir John Boys, founder of the hospital for the poor near the North Gate of the city; and the altar tomb of Archbishop Sumner. Also to be noted, a window to the memory of Dean Stanley, sometime canon of the Cathedral and writer of that famous work, _Historical Memorials of Canterbury_.
As we stand in the choir of to-day, we would indeed be of dull imagination did we not see and drink in the poetic beauty of such a growth as this, beautiful in its association with the centuries, with countless thousands of worshippers; beautiful intrinsically and as a record of faithful labour, of splendid artistry, of devout perseverance. There are other cathedral choirs more perfect as specimens of one or other style of architecture, but not one more hallowed by sacred and stirring memories. Here stands Norman and Early English work side by side, melting, as historically they did, from one into the other; the work of French and English hands and brains. Here the mind is forcibly carried back to the far, dim ages, when on this very ground the rude Saxons worshipped--this ground which Augustine found already dedicated to the worship of Christ, upon which he reared his new temple,