The Bishop'S Chapel And The Bishop'S Palace

The Bishop’s Chapel, part of the Bishop’s Palace, was built between 1275 and 1292 for Bishop Burnell. The building is constructed of local stone rubble with Doulting stone dressings, and has a shallow-pitched roof hidden behind a crenellated parapet. It is a single-story, three-bay structure situated at a right angle to and on the southwest corner of the Bishop’s Palace. The west elevation features a semicircular arched doorway with a trefoil inner arch, flanked by a pair of 19th-century plank doors with decorative iron straps. Above the doorway is a segmental pointed-arched window with five cusped lights, and a sexfoil vent in the gable. The corner turrets have arched doorways, with the southwest corner turret being octagonal in plan. The east elevation has a large, segmental-headed window with six lights grouped in threes, incorporating interlaced tracery and a central octofoil, all beneath a moulded drip. Each side of the east elevation contains three windows with geometric Decorated tracery.

Inside, the chapel is a single, undivided space, with a lierne vault featuring naturalistic foliage to the bosses, supported by triple shafts on 19th-century carved corbel heads, and paired shafts to the window reveals. It has a stone floor. The rere-arch to the west doorway is cusped. A five-bay reredos features blank two-light openings with quatrefoils, beneath the main sill. The chapel also contains restored sedilia and a piscina, renovated in 1834 by Buckler, which include Purbeck shafts and cusped arches. Windows contain mainly 19th-century grisaille glass, but some fragments of medieval glass remain in the tracery lights. Modern fittings include coved cresting carried on slender paired colonnettes to the west returns of the stalls. This chapel represents an important contribution to the development of the Decorated Style in the late 13th century.