York Guides

Next to the chapter house is a narrow room open at both ends, and having stone benches on each side. It was formerly covered with a ribbed stone vault. This is the inner parlour or place where conversation was allowed, silence being enjoined in the rest of the monastic buildings.

To the south of the parlour is a room of irregular shape, into which the substructure of a stone staircase projects. In its east "wall is a wide arch, and the room served as a passage through the eastern range, leading to the monastic cemetery and the buildings cast of the cloister. The substructure of the reredorter, or monastic latrine, joins the eastern range at this point, and has an arcade opening towards the north, but blocked with masonry in the thirteenth century.

At the east of this arcade is an early thirteenth-century building, built in continuation of the reredorter and at right angles to it; a branch of the drain runs through it from north to south. It is doubtless the substructure of the abbot's lodging on the first floor, sufficiently con¬nected with the dorter to comply with the rule that the abbot should sleep in the dormitory. It was connected with the subvault of the dorter by a pentice or covered passage along the south wall of the reredorter.

The day stairs, by which the monastic dormitory was reached at all times, except at night, when the stairs in the south transept were used, adjoin the entrance to the passage, and in the south-east angle of the cloister is the doorway opening to the rooms under the southern part of the monks' dorter, or dormitory. This extended, on the upper floor of this range, at least 200 ft southwards from the south transept of the church. No part of it now exists, the walls being ruined below its floor level, but part of the pitch of its roof can be seen on the end of the transept.
The subvault of the dorter was of eight bays, vaulted in two spans with a line of piers down the middle. In the two northern bays the vaults were replaced by barrels when the day stairs were re-constructed, and it is noticeable that the south wall of the staircase partly oversails the reredorter drain.