York Guides

The kitchen is placed at the west end of the south range where it could serve the refectory of the monks on the east and the refectory of the lay-brothers on the west. It has a doorway to the cloister and a service-hatch that looks like a doorway into the refectory. The inner order of this hatch does not extend to the full height of the jambs and is slightly concave, for it was designed to take a dresser door revolving on a pivot. Dishes could be placed on the shelves of this revolving dresser in the kitchen, and it could then be turned for unloading in the refectory.

Most of the kitchen's internal structures have gone, but their arrangement can be made out. The room was divided into two parts by two great fireplaces standing back to back in the centre of the floor and carrying a common flue that went up through the middle of the roof. The spaces between the sides of the fireplaces and the east and west walls of the room were vaulted as passages. The eastern passage remains complete, and the springers for the vault of the western one can be seen on the wall. The main vault of the kitchen was a complicated one. Above the passages there were barrel vaults abutting the central flue on both sides. North of the fireplaces there was a ribbed vault in three bays, and south of them a vault in two bays was later inserted.

The north wall of the kitchen has three small cupboards. The south wall has a single cupboard, and a doorway and large archway to the yard outside. This part of the kitchen has beamholes for a loft at the level of the passage vaults, perhaps used for storage.

There was a room over the kitchen, but it is almost completely gone. It could be reached from the dormitory of the lay-brothers, and was probably a chamber for their master.

The kitchen yard lies between the refectory and the west range. It is separated from the river by a wall with the remains of a privy near its east end. A pentise ran along the south wall of the kitchen and returned down the west wall of the refectory, giving covered access to this privy and to a wooden footbridge across the river, similar to that in the warming house yard. Goods and fuel could be brought from the south bank of the river into the yard by this bridge, and so into the kitchen by the large archway in its south wall.