St Apollonia - patron saint of dentistry
Green man with surviving medieval colour
Tom the one eyed cathedral cat
The Ambulatory, the Speke and Oldham Chantries, and the St. Andrew and St. James Chapels
The East Ambulatory
The bosses of the ambulatory, deeply and brilliantly carved from Caen stone before 1300, have a combination of natural and mythical themes.
The 15th century screen of St Gabriel's Chapel was beautifully restored by the late Anna Hulbert in 1978. Its paintings include the Annunciation and St Apollonia, patron saint of dentistry. On a wall adjacent to the screen is an excellent early 16th century painting showing the Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin Mary.
The Speke and Oldham Chantries
At the north end of the ambulatory is the chantry chapel of Sir John Speke (d1518) and at the south end, that of Bishop Hugh Oldham (d1519), founder of Manchester Grammar School. The chapel is decorated with many carvings of his eponymous (owl + dom) rebus, an owl. The effigy of the bishop himself is crudely carved. It is interesting to compare this sculpture, presumably carved around 1515, with the magnificence of the nearby Bronescombe effigy, carved between 1270 and 1280. The fine chapel reredos was badly damaged during the Reformation.
The North Ambulatory
Lined with fascinating tombs and memorials including those to bishops (Carey d1626 and lay-people (Sir Richard Stapeldon d1332, brother and business partner of Bishop Stapeldon, Anthony Harvey (d1564), Rachel O'Brien (d1800) and many others. A little east of St Andrew's Chapel is a fine C15th cadaver tom - a very gruesome corpse.
St Andrew's Chapel
Formerly the chantry chapel of Dean Andrew Kilkenny, whose floor tomb is at the south end of the chapel. This is now known as The Chapel of Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation. Those who died in the sinking of HMS Exeter in 1942 in the Java Straits are remembered in this chapel. A post-war window by Sir Ninian Comper is dedicated to them.
In pre-Reformation times the room above the chapel was the cathedral exchequer.
The South Ambulatory
The wooden screen opposite the St James Chapel was almost completely destroyed by the bomb-blast in 1942. Indentations at the top of a northern quire column, where wood from the screen impacted, give an idea of the force of the bomb. Surviving pieces were sieved from the rubble and Herbert Reed re-assembled the screen using these and some new wood in the late 1940s. Some of the bosses here retain much of their original colour (best seen in a crowned head and a fine green man).
Among many outstanding tombs and memorials are: those of two unidentified knights wearing the surcoat armour of the late 13th/ early 14th centuries, the large brass of Sir Peter Courtenay KG (d1409), Lt General John Graves Simcoe, founder of Toronto (d1806) and Bishops James George Lavington (d1762), William Cotton (d1621) and Stephen Weston (d1742). Crazing caused by bomb damage can be seen in some memorials on the south side; this was made good in the late 1940s.
On the north side of the aisle is a life-sized model of the central boss of the whole cathedral with a central figure of a knight on horseback representing the forces of good under attack by three dragons representing the forces of evil - the world, the flesh and the devil.
St James Chapel
On 4th May 1942, during a heavy air raid on Exeter, a large high-explosive bomb hit the cathedral, exploding in the St James Chapel. The chapel itself, the muniment room above it, three bays of the south ambulatory and two flying buttresses were completely destroyed.
The rebuilding of the chapel, the muniment room and the flying buttresses outside was started soon after the war ended and was completed in 1952, in a style very similar to that of the features they replaced. The mason in charge of the work was George Downs, whose head can be seen on a label stop to the right of the south window.
The label stops on the arch leading out of the chapel are amusing. That on the west shows the head of Tom, the virger's cat in the 1940s. He has only one eye, losing the other to an owl in a dispute over a rat (shown on the eastern label stop).
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