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126
GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE
CHAP.
real function is to protect the parts beneath it from the weather, is hardly appropriate to an interior.
FIG. 69.
The existing high vaults are of late English construction, and are ill suited to the lower portions of the building. If the originally intended vaults were ever built over the central aisle, the effect of the interior must have been both grand and impressive, though the scale of the building is not large.
Such a building might lead to the belief that a Gothic development, though not a native one, had begun in England almost as early as in France. But Malmesbury stands an isolated instance, and there is no other contemporaneous building in England like it. It is not, like St. Denis, a link
