York Guides

This occupied the whole of the first floor of east range, running south from the transept for 178 ft, with a projection 55 ft long over the eastern part of the chapter house. Most of its walls have gone except over the chapter house and the north end of the undercroft. It was entered by two stairways, the night-stairs leading up from the south transept, and the day-stairs in the south-cast angle of the cloister.

At the north end, the part of the dormitory over the eastern bays of the sacristy passage formed a separate little room, at first with a round-headed archway in its west wall, later reduced in size to a doorway. It was once vaulted, and has a cupboard in its south wall. Like the nearby room over the transept chapels, it was probably a treasury or strong room in the charge of the sacrist, who usually had his bed at this end of the dormitory so that he could be near the abbey clock in the south transept, by which he regulated the times of the offices in church.

The part of the dormitory over the chapter house had its floor at a higher level than the rest, and was lit by round-headed windows spaced some 15 ft apart. The rest of the dormitory had similar but larger windows spaced from 18 to 21 ft apart, with smaller rectangular windows between.

In a monastic dormitory the beds were usually placed against the side walls, leaving a central space in which, at Clairvaux, stood great wardrobes for the monks' clothes. In some houses it was the practice to place the beds of the novices between those of the monks, for better supervision, and the alternating types of windows here at Fountains may be a sign of this. Later in the Middle Ages, to keep pace with increasing demands for more privacy, dormitories were usually divided into cubicles by wooden partitions, and some of the holes in the walls between the windows here may have been for that purpose. Another late alteration was the insertion of a narrow doorway in the south wall of the projection over the chapter house, from which a bridge led to the upper storey of the infirmary gallery.

The line of the high-pitched roof of the dormitory can be seen on the south transept gable, with two openings that led from the spiral stairs in the transept buttress to lofts contrived in the roof.

In the early twelfth century the dormitory was much lower, and parts of its east wall remain in the undercroft where they were covered by the stone vault that replaced the earlier flat ceiling of that room. Here it can be seen that the earlier dormitory had much smaller round-headed windows, spaced 13 ft apart. Two pairs of these windows remain, and between them are a blocked round-headed doorway and a small blocked opening to the north of it. The doorway led to the early twelfth-century reredorter which projected eastwards from the dormitory at this point, and the opening was to house the lamp which was kept burning at night to give some light to both reredorter and dormitory.