§ 45.
An entirely aisleless plan, in which the church
was a mere parallelogram without transepts and
without an arch between presbytery and nave, is found
at the Cistercian abbey of Cymmer, near Dolgelly,
where, however, a short north aisle or chapel was built
later near the west end of the nave. Such a plan may
have been used in many small houses, where there
were only two or three brethren in priest's orders,
and very few altars were needed in addition to the
high altar. It was, in fact, the characteristic plan of
the churches of certain orders. (1) Nuns' churches,
such as Nun Monkton in Yorkshire, were very
generally planned as aisleless rectangles, for the
obvious reason that little more than one altar was
necessary. It is rare to find a nunnery church
planned on the scale of Romsey, with a full complement
of aisles and transepts and a carefully contrived
processional path. Sometimes, as at Lacock, a chapel
was added to the church, but this was an excrescence
which did not conceal the character of the original
plan. (2) The ascetic Carthusian order preferred
this plan, which was adopted at Mount Grace. It
was modified, however, some years after the church
was built, by the insertion of a tower upon arches
between the presbytery and nave, west of which
transeptal chapels were built out from the nave walls
on either side. Still later, a long chapel, containing
two altars, was built at right angles to the south wall
of the presbytery. (3) The plans of friars' churches,
which frequently, as at Lynn and Richmond, had a
tower between the nave and presbytery, bear a strong
family likeness to that of Mount Grace; and in some
cases, as at Brecon and at Hulne, near Alnwick, they
were without a structural division. The naves, however,
of some of their later town churches, where
large congregations attended the preaching of the
Dominican order, were built, as in the splendid
example at Norwich, with north and south aisles.
(4) It is evident that churches of Gilbertine canons,
as at Malton, sometimes followed an ordinary aisled
plan. But in the double houses of the order, if
Watton is typical of the rest, the church was a long
aisleless building on one side of the nuns' cloister,
and was divided lengthways by a wall, the division
next the cloister being appropriated to the nuns, and
the outer division, which had its own doorway, to the
canons. There was a doorway in the wall between
the two altars, which could be used for processions
and by the celebrant at the nuns' altar; but the
seclusion of the two portions of the convent was
carefully maintained, and the holy-water and pax
were passed from the nuns' to the canons' quire
through a turn-table in the wall. The canons also
had a chapel on the south side of their own cloister,
which was a simple aisleless rectangle.
