York Guides

The last doorway on the east side of the cloister leads into a long room once vaulted in seven double bays from a central row of piers. The northernmost bay, which has a doorway in its east wall, formed a through passage from the cloister to the infirmary, and was shut off from the rest of the room by a wall on the line of the first pier. This wall was pulled down about the middle of the nineteenth century, when the ruins were being cleared of debris.

The fourth bay from the north (including the bay once used as a passage) has a doorway in its west wall, leading to two small vaulted chambers contrived in the block that supports the day-stairs. The sixth bay had doorways in both east and west walls, the latter blocked when the buildings in the yard of the warming house were erected. Just beyond these doorways there are signs that a partition once crossed the room, making a separate chamber out of the southernmost bay, with two windows looking on to the river and a passage through the wall to a privy corbelled out over the 'water. This passage was also later blocked.

This undercroft is a later twelfth-century remodelling of an early twelfth-century building, much of which remains incorporated in its walls. To the north of the doorway from the cloister can be seen the outline of an earlier doorway, blocked up, which once led to the day-stairs that occupied this position in Cistercian monasteries until the middle of the twelfth century. These stairs therefore took up what is now the north bay of the undercroft, and there was a little room beneath them, the window of which survives in the east wall. The passage to the infirmary came next, and its blocked doorways can be seen in both walls just south of the first pier. Opposite the fifth pier there is a straight joint in each wall, and beyond this point the whole of the southern end of the undercroft was completely rebuilt in the later twelfth century. In its earlier form, however, the straight joints were the northern responds of a pair of large arches that pierced the east and west walls of the south end of the room.

The early twelfth-century undercroft was not vaulted, but had a wooden ceiling giving only 7 ft headroom.

The use to which the later twelfth-century undercroft was put is not known, but in its earlier twelfth-century form it was probably a workroom associated with the discipline of manual labour favoured by the Cistercians in their early days. The open arches at the south end would then lead to work yards on both sides of the room.