York Guides

Next to the library comes the chapter house, square-ended as usual in Cistercian abbeys, and having had a stone ribbed vault in three bays and three spans, springing from corbels in the walls and from round pillars with foliate capitals; only one of these latter has survived. The chapter house projects eastwards by one bay from the line of
the eastern range and has had three windows in its cast wall. Two ranges of seats run round its walls, for the use of the monks at the daily meeting in the chapter house; the base of the stone lectern used at the meetings was found when the room was being cleared. Only one grave was found within its walls, but as it was the customary place of burial of the abbots it seems most unlikely that there were not others. A thirteenth-century coffin lid with a plain crozier upon it, which many years ago was removed to Myton by the then owner of the abbey, under the impression that it covered the tomb of Roger de Mowbray, the founder, doubtless witnesses to the burial of an abbot here. In the west wall of the chapter house is a doorway of three orders, and on either side the remains of unglazed windows which were subdivided by a central shaft and opened directly to the cloister walk. Beneath them, on the cloister side, were stone benches set against the wall.