York Guides

The main buildings of the abbey lie to the south of the church and form ranges enclosing three sides of the rectangular court known as the cloister, the nave of the church forming the fourth side.

The east range has on the ground floor a passage, the chapter house, the parlour, and then a long room projecting south beyond the cloister. The whole of the first floor was occupied by the dormitory of the monks.

The south range has the refectory of the monks in the centre, with the warming house and day-stairs to the dormitory on its east side, and the kitchen on its west side.

The west range has the cellarium or storehouse of the abbey on the ground floor, prolonged far to the south as the refectory of the lay-brethren. The whole of the first floor is the dormitory of the lay-brethren.

The cloister is about 125 ft square, and once had a covered alley on each side, the lean-to roof of which has left marks on the surrounding buildings. Fragments of the alley walls survived until 1770, but there are no visible remains today, although the foundations were traced in the nineteenth-century excavations. These alleys were rebuilt by Abbot John of Kent, and fragments found in the excavations show that the walls had open arcades standing on twin shafts with marble capitals carved with conventional foliage.

Near the centre of the cloister garth there is a massive octagonal stone basin on a rough platform. It was brought here from the cellarium in 1859, where it had been in use as a cider press. Its original position and purpose are not known.

The north alley of the cloister was used by the monks for reading and study, although there are now no remains of the benches on which they sat against the church wall. Immediately west of the doorway from the church there was a large recess in the wall with a smaller one on each side of it, all later blocked with masonry. The arm of the south transept that overlaps the cloister has in its wall a large round-headed recess that served as the cupboard for the books used in the cloister. On the face of the buttress just south of it a shallow rectangular recess has been cut into the masonry; this is a very rare feature indeed, for it was intended to hold the wooden frame containing the tabula or wax tablet on which were written the names of the monks with special duties for the week.