The vaulting of the nave continues to impress, illustrated left. Sadly, all the versions of this snap are crooked (the big deal with telephones being that you can take lots of snaps of the same thing with no extra charge, hoping that one turns out OK), but this one does give the general idea. Rather taken once again with the vigorous vaulting, vaulting which makes the fan vaulting of (say) King's College Chapel (not the London one) seem a little feeble, at least in memory. Even a touch of the enhanced perception noticed at Waterloo (see reference 2). And not as heavy seeming in real life as it comes across in this snap. That said, they had a replica ceiling boss down in one of the aisles, about a yard across. Looked absolutely huge.
By the time of writing this we had visited the large church at Ashburton, the various roofing arrangements of which led to pondering about the various ways to do ceilings, starting with the thought that they are all fake. What you see from below is not, in churches and generally speaking, what you see from the outside. What you see from below is a false ceiling and this from well before the time when you might have services to run in the roof void or when you might be concerned about insulation.
So the Egyptians and Greeks went in for flat, possibly coffered ceilings. The Parthenon, I think, had a low pitched roof above that. Ely Cathedral the same, without the coffering and with the ceiling, structurally at least, much the same as that of a suburban house; plasterboard or some such nailed to the bottom of the roof trusses. The aisles at Ashburton much the same again, but with decorated beams and bosses nailed on top of the plasterboard. Then towards the end of the Norman reign we raised the game and went in for vaults, decorated with a few ribs. While at Exeter, say a couple of hundred years later, the vaulting you can see might actually be what holds the false ceiling up, with the conventional pitched roof above that - although somehow they managed without the bottom chord of a conventional roof truss. Maybe that was what all the fancy buttresses were about. Maybe a visit to TB is indicated, where one might be able to have an in depth discussion of the whole business,
Plenty of memorials, with the size of the memorial for any given grade of dignitary declining as the centuries roll by. Large stone boxes in the early years, down to tablets on the wall now. The previous three posts provide a sample. One of the oldest was for a chap called John the Chanter, whom one might have mistaken for some kind of wandering minstrel, but who actually got his name from being, at one point in his career the chanter, or in posh speak the precentor, of the cathedral. He went on to become the bishop and got his stone box at the end. His gold watch, as it were.
Failed to find the chapter house on this occasion, although there was a very shut looking door next to the café which might have been it. Took tea in the café instead, next to a rather handsome lady trusty who did not look in the least churchy to me, either in dress or manner.
Reading the book of the visit afterwards, I was reminded how seriously the medievals took their churches. The Saxons built a large church on the site. Then the Normans knocked that down and built a new cathedral. Then a couple of hundred years later most of that was knocked down and what you see now was put up, with just the two transept towers surviving from the second build. An awful lot of resource to pour into a house for god at a time when plenty of people starved to death in the winter.
Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=exeter+cathedral.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/rhapsody-in-blue-continued.html.
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