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NORTH TOWER In November 1285, six labourers worked for three days taking down the wall in the North Tower arch in order to turn it into a Transept.215 This would have involved a massive amount of work near the Crossing—so much as to make it unlikely that the clergy were using it after 1285.216 If the Romanesque Towers had been destabilized by the removal of the 60-foot internal wall, they would not have fallen on newly built parts of the Cathedral. The metal rings which still secure the Purbeck marble columns in the corners of the Towers were purchased in 1310-11.217 The half-bosses are of stone, and with the exception of 259A are unambitious. Both Tower vaults are of wood (perhaps because the Romanesque towers made flying buttresses inappropriate). Their complex carpentry has already been studied in relation to the Ely octagon.218 The Bishop’s Palace also possessed wooden bosses in the extension built under Bishop Grandisson and demolished in 1846.219 One, resembling 215 in the Nave, is in the Royal Albert Museum, Exeter, and five are in London, in the Victoria and Albert Museum.220 The eighteen wooden bosses of the Towers were carved in Midsummer 1318 for £6,221 and oil-primed at Easter 1320.222 Iron fittings were purchased at Christmas 1316. The stone half-bosses were presumably in place a little earlier. Each boss has a carpenter’s register mark matching the mark on the end of each wooden rib abutting it. If Richard Digon went to Wells c.1314 (see heading for bosses 172-193), these bosses cannot be his; however, the close relationship of their designs to those in the adjacent stone vault suggests that at least his assistants had a hand in both, offering us a rare opportunity for comparison of similar work in the two media (cf. also entry for boss 189). In the Victoria and Albert Museum are the remaining wooden bosses from Grandisson’s extension to the Bishop’s Palace.223 They have lost their former gilding. The style is more rounded than that of the Tower bosses, for example, a lioness appears to derive from 192, and not from any of the Cathedral’s wooden bosses. These Palace bosses are described in Tracy’s catalogue of medieval English woodwork in the Museum.224 There is one similar lion boss of Grandisson’s time, in stone: 371. All the bosses of the Towers were repainted by Luscombe under the direction of Gilbert Scott. The beasts and faces are predominantly beige, with heavy black detail; the leaves are gilt, the stems a dull, dark green. Many fragments of medieval scarlet are visible at the edges of the 19th-century terra-cotta coloured background. Although solubility tests were made on his paint layer in the hope of learning more about the medieval fragments preserved underneath, no attempt was made to remove his work, since it is largely responsible for the present appearance of the Cathedral. BOSSES 253A-261A
WINDOW CAPITALS The north window of the Tower is flanked by two pairs of simple capitals. The foliage may have been painted yellow; no gold leaf was found, and microscopic examination of the present black surface does not suggest tarnished white metal leaf.+ Presumably some economy was being exercised, as on the green balcony bosses. BALCONY BOSSES Each balcony has twenty-nine very simple green-painted foliage bosses with red backgrounds. They are repetitive and so are not numbered separately. BALCONY CORBELS The conversion of the Tower into a Transept took place during the building of the Presbytery (see Introduction). These corbels in Caen or Beer stone are, with those of the South Tower Balconies, among the loveliest things in the Cathedral. The marked sculptural refinement of these heads suggests the hand that produced boss 77. Compare also the corbels of St Edmund’s Chapel, under the heading for bosses 356A-361A, and the six corbels of the Song School. Not only the sculptural style but also the evidence of the masonry dates the balconies of both the North and South Towers to the late thirteenth century. East Balcony
West Balcony
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