York Guides

This is the next room to the south, with a magnificent group of three elaborately moulded arches to the cloister. It was the administrative and disciplinary centre of the abbey, where the convent met each day under the presidency of the abbot to commemorate the saints and their dead brethren, to hear a chapter of the Rule of St. Benedict, to confess faults and receive punishment, and to transact business as a corporate body. It is one of the largest chapter houses in the country, six bays long, and projecting well beyond the main range of buildings.

These western bays served as a vestibule, and the northern and southern compartments of the westernmost bay were once walled off to serve as book cupboards, entered from the cloister by the two flanking arches, with the central arch alone acting as the doorway to the chapter house.

Beyond the vestibule there are stone platforms in three tiers against the side walls and the east wall. These were the footpaces to support the benches on which the monks sat in chapter, the gap in the middle of the east end being for the abbot's chair.

In most monasteries it was customary to bury the abbots in the chapter house, and their graves can be seen here clustered in the two eastern bays. The first five abbots of Fountains died and were buried away from their abbey, but nineteen out of the next twenty-one were buried in this room, the last being Abbot Copgrove in 1346, after which date they were buried in the church.

Close to the east wall, in front of the gap in the footpaces, there is a group of five graves. The northernmost has been identified as that of Abbot Adam I (1259). The next to the south has lost its cover slab, but may well be that of Abbot John of York (1211). The large slab in the centre belongs to the great builder, Abbot John of Kent (1247), and to the south of him lies Abbot William of Allerton (1258). The last grave on the south has not been identified, nor has any of the four graves in the second row, between the first pair of columns from the east, but it can be seen that these last are probably the earliest ones, for John of Kent and his neighbours have been crowded into the space at their feet. It is therefore likely that this second row contains the graves of Abbot Richard III (1170), Abbot Robert of Pipewell (1180), Abbot William of Newminster (1190). and Abbot Ralph Haget (1203). At the head of the southernmost grave in the second row there is a square stone slab with a socket for the shaft of the lectern, and Abbot William Rigton (1316) is known to have been buried just to the west of this, although there are no remains of his grave. There are two more unidentified grave covers opposite the second pair of columns from the east, the northern one having the matrix of a fourteenth-century brass, and there are fragments of three more graves midway between the second and third pairs of columns. Another grave lies in the westernmost bay on the north side, and this may have belonged to Abbot Henry Otley (1289) who is known to have been buried near the entrance. The stone coffin against the north wall was probably placed there after the chapter house was excavated in 1790-1. The excavations of 1856 also revealed a group of graves, probably belonging to important benefactors, in the east alley of the cloister just in front of the chapter house doorway. These are no longer visible.