[Illustration: THE NAVE OF OLD ST. PAUL'S. _After Hollar._]
The dates of the nave and transepts have already been suggested. After the fire of 1087, Bishop Maurice and his successor built everything afresh on a larger scale. The fire of 1136 did great damage, and restoration on a considerable scale was effected. Mr. E.A. Freeman, by a happy coincidence, touches on restorations at Wells of this time, and contrasts our two dates.[44] After the fire of 1136 the restoration would be in a style "somewhat less massive, somewhat more highly enriched." I have already pointed out Freeman's statement that the custom towards the middle of the eleventh century was to throw a coating of the more refined Romanesque of the day over earlier Norman work, and this agrees with the statements both of Wren and Pepys.
We may, then, assume that while the former ground-plan and general outline remained the same, after 1136 the pillars were encased and more elaborate mouldings added. By another statement of the same authority[45] it would seem that "the vaulting shafts run up from the ground" belong to the second restoration, when the vaulting itself was completed, and the date of this is indicated in Bishop Basset's letter of 1255.
Hence the nave and transepts were restored after the transitional Norman style, and vaulting shafts added in the fully developed Early English style, while the window tracery and other details of the isolated north aisles of the transepts were Geometrical. The four piers supporting the central tower were of a later date; but surely there must have been others, though less massive, before, otherwise it is difficult to understand how the tower and spire were supported.
Dugdale gives only two monuments in the nave. Thomas Kemp, who died bishop, reposed under the penultimate arch in the north side, in a chapel enclosed by a screen and railings. The second was that of Sir John Beauchamp, who died in 1358, and whose monument was under the eastern arch on the south side. Somehow the populace entertained the idea that this latter was the burial place of Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, uncle to Henry VI., who was murdered in 1447 and buried at St. Alban's. The adjacent part of the south aisle was called Duke Humphrey's Walk: and the tomb seems to have been a sanctuary. At dinner-time, needy people who lacked both the means to purchase a meal and friends to provide them with one, and who chanced to loiter about this sanctuary, were said _to dine with Duke Humphrey_, and the phrase was equivalent to having no dinner at all.