THE WEST FRONT PORCHES AND CHAPEL

In spite of the fact that this material does not treat exterior sculpture, we include items found under the cover of the porches, because they are arguably interior, and because they are not well covered elsewhere.

The archaeology of Exeter’s West Front is complicated.245 Internal evidence of the building sequence from masonry joints, etc., suggests that before planning the lower two registers of the present figure screen, Grandisson originally envisaged a mere modification of the earlier late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century west wall. This modest beginning was expanded into the elaboration present construction, which accounts for the way in which a number of architectural details in the present structure cut across or are not keyed into the masonry behind them.

The three porches and Grandisson’s Chantry Chapel are contained within the thickness of the West Front figure screen which in turn is superimposed upon the earlier West Front. As the Fabric Rolls for the period of the present screen’s construction are defective, it cannot be certainly dated: it was added after the completion of Witney’s West Front c.1342. Detailed comparisons between weathered Porch bosses and the those repainted in the Nave can be extremely difficult.

These porches are at the base of the West Front, whose gable must have antedated the construction of the timber roof at the west end of the Nave, on the beams of which the necessary machinery for constructing the vaults would have rested. It is noteworthy that whereas the Grandisson bosses of the west end of the Nave are increasingly repetitive in style, those of the porches show great variety, with occasional stylistic links to bosses in the eastern part of Grandisson’s Nave (see heading for 194-252A). 

WEST FRONT NORTH PORCH

The porch of the northern doorway has a miniature fan-vault, without bosses.