York Guides

The choir of the monks filled the eastern bay of the nave and the crossing. It was reached from the retro-choir through the doorway of the pulpitum, which formed its 'lower entrance', and its stalls backed against stone screens which separated it from the aisles and the transepts, and which, like all the screens in the church, have now gone. The nineteenth-century excavations revealed a masonry-lined pit of Abbot Huby's time on each side of the choir, returned against the back of the pulpitum, with recesses in the masonry that had held pottery jars. These pits and their acoustic jars, one of which is preserved in the abbey museum, formed a hollow space beneath the wooden platforms on which the stalls stood, to give more resonance to the singing. They are at present temporarily covered for preservation.

Farther east there is a large grave cover in the centre of the choir with the indent of a late hfteenth-century brass. It represents an abbot under an elaborate canopy, he holds a crozier, but his mitre is shown just above his head instead of upon it, which may signify that he resigned before death. In that case he would most likely be Abbot Thomas Swinton who resigned in 1478.

Clear of the stalls and just beyond the eastern piers of the crossing there were doorways through the screen walls on cither side, forming the 'upper entrance' to the choir. The threshold of the northern doorway remains, and close to it one step of a spiral staircase against the north-east crossing pier, showing that the screen supported a loft or gallery here.

The crossing shows clear signs of the structural failure that resulted in the collapse of its north-east and south-west piers after the dissolution. Its cast arch was originally carried on corbels, but when Abbot John of York rebuilt the eastern arm of the church these corbels were underpinned to give more stability. At this time, in accordance with Cistercian custom, the crossing probably carried no more than a low central tower, high enough only to cover the main roofs of the church. It is likely that in the fifteenth century, when architectural austerity was a thing of the past, an attempt was made to heighten this tower, and that the crossing piers began to fail because they had never been intended to carry such a load. Abbot John's work of underpinning had to be reinforced, and a great stepped buttress was built against the west face of the south-east pier. At the top of it there are three much-weathered figures of grotesque beasts.