For in the year of Our Lord 1265, the main central body of the new cathedral was almost completed. The church, with its simple cruciform design, its long nave, and its light and airy transepts, stood peacefully in the silence of the close – eighty-seven feet tall, nearly five hundred in length, its long lead roof only broken by the single low square tower that rose a few feet above it at the intersection of the transepts – serenely unaffected by all such temporal events. As though by an afterthought, a free-standing tower containing the massive bells to summon the church’s faithful to prayer, had been constructed near the north walk of the close, about forty yards from the main church, and in order that the tolling bells should be heard all over the valley, this stout stone belfry had been made two hundred feet high. In the year of Our Lord 1265 Osmund the Mason was to begin his greatest work, and it was to be the year, also, when he fell under the spell of the deadly sin that almost destroyed him.
