York Guides

The doorway on the west side of the landing at the top of the day-stairs leads to a short vaulted passage. There was a second door 5ft along the passage fastened by a long cabin-hook or iron stay that has left a circular mark on the wall. Beyond this a doorway leads northward into a well preserved room vaulted in four bays from a central pier like the warming house below. The triplets of lancets in its north wall looked out over the cloister garth, above the roof of the cloister alley. The floor is of medieval tiles found during the clearance of the sacristy passage and set here with others in 1856.

This room was designed with security in mind. Its windows had iron bars, and to break into it the two doors in the passage and the door into the room itself, which had a drawbar, would have to be forced. Being over the warming house it was also one of the driest rooms in the abbey, and the stone vaulting above and below it gave some protection from fire. In all probability it served as a muniment room where the abbey's archives were kept. Its size is not surprising when it is remembered that in addition to the convent's archives (and Fountains had more than 3,500 title-deeds to its extensive lands) it probably housed the deeds and treasure of local secular lords, for the great abbeys often acted as safe-deposits for these. The memory of its former use may explain why the Court of the Liberty of Fountains continued to be held in it for some three centuries after the dissolution.

Between the two doors in the passage there was once a third doorway to spiral stairs that led up to a room over the muniment room. Little remains of this, but it seems to have been used for storage of goods hauled up by tackle into a doorway with a projecting threshold that overhangs the yard.

The south doorway on the day-stairs landing led to another room, now gone, over the wood store in the yard. It was intended for domestic use because it was served by the privy, the corbels of which can be seen in the yard. It probably communicated with the dormitory and may have been a chamber for the prior.