York Guides

Beyond the presbytery the thirteenth-century work develops into a great eastern transept, completed in the time of Abbot John of Kent, and known in the Middle Ages as the Chapel of the Nine Altars from the number of individual chapels it contained. The only parallel to this remarkable feature is the similar chapel at Durham Cathedral, begun in 1242 in emulation of the work at Fountains.

Many of the ritual arrangements survive in this part of the church. A low platform runs in front of the east wall, and the nine altars stood on this. There were three in the northern projection of the chapel, three more closely spaced in the large central bay, and three in the southern projection. The bases of several of the altars remain, and fragments of the stone paving of the platform. Set in the pavement on the right-hand side of each altar there was once a shallow drain or floor-piscina, and a few of these have survived. Each altar also had its aumbries or cupboards set in the wall behind it. In the thirteenth century the nine chapels were separated from one another by solid stone screen walls just over 8 ft high, with a gabled coping.

These original arrangements underwent several alterations, mostly in the latter part of the fifteenth century. The stone screens were taken down and replaced by wooden ones, and the three altars of the central bay were replaced by a single larger one, the base of which remains. Several of the cupboards were also blocked up. At this time, the northernmost altar was dedicated to St. James the Apostle and a inscription recording this, scratched on the plastered surface of the north wall, survived until the present century but has now weathered away.

As first built, the Chapel of the Nine Altars was vaulted in stone throughout, but its sheer eastern wall did not provide sufficient abutment, and by the late fifteenth century it betrayed signs of being forced outwards. In 1483 Abbot Darnton set about the repair and modernisation of the chapel. He took down the vaults, cutting their springers back to the wall face, and replaced them by wooden roofs, adjusting the gables to suit their lower pitch. In the course of this work he rebuilt the twin arches carried by the octagonal piers in the centre of the chapel, and to give more abutment to the east wall he increased the projection of the two buttresses outside the central bay and stitched up the fractures that had developed in the stonework. A gap in the head of the north window of the cast wall was filled with stonework carved with a head, a rose, and an angel bearing a scroll with the date 1483, and a similar gap in the head of the east window of the south wall has stonework bearing his rebus (the eagle of St. John, the inscription dern and an angel holding a tun or barrel), an abbot's head, a scroll between two fish, a figure of St. James, and an abbreviated form of the abbey's motto: Benedicite Fontes Domino. He also replaced the windows in both storeys of the central bay by a vast traceried window once of nine lights, and either he or his successor, Abbot Huby, replaced the upper windows in both end gables by traceried windows of seven lights.

Abbot Huby was also probably responsible for replacing the window above the south doorway of the chapel by a large round headed arch. This gave access from the upper storey of the infirmary gallery to a wooden pew cantilevered out into the south end of the chapel allowing the abbot, with whose house that gallery communicated, to participate in the offices without coming down into the church,