York Guides

Above the central doorway, the west front is filled by the great Perpendicular window, once of seven lights, inserted by Abbot Darn-ton in the year before his death, and above this again is a niche holding a headless statue of the Virgin and Child, standing on a corbel carved with the abbot's rebus.

Inside the church, the lower part of the west front had three large recesses, the central one occupied by the doorway and the side ones formerly having benches. Above them the arrangement of the twelfth-century windows can still be recognised near the edges of Abbot Darntoii's great window. There were three round-headed windows with a circular one above, all enclosed in a round-headed recess the full width of the nave. A doorway in the west wall of the south aisle gives access to spiral stairs that lead up to a passage in the thickness of the aisle wall and so to a gallery across the nave at the level of the sill of this upper recess. From here another set of stairs leads up to the eaves of the nave roof. The main span of the nave always had a wooden roof, the pitch of which was lowered in Abbot Darnton's time, but the aisles had pointed barrel vaults set transversely over each bay, a Burgundian characteristic.

The aisles at this time served only as passages. In the south aisle the west bay has an inserted doorway, later blocked, that led to a pentise outside the cellarium; the second bay has a doorway into the cellarium itself; and the third bay has a doorway to the night-stairs leading up to the dormitory of the lay-brothers over the cellarium. The position of this last doorway was altered slightly when the cellarium was widened later in the twelfth century, and the jamb of its predecessor can be seen just to the east. In. the north aisle there is a broad doorway in the sixth bay that perhaps served for bringing materials into the church whilst it was being built, and that was blocked soon afterwards.

After the fourteenth century this part of the church was no longer needed for the lay-brethren. The rood screen amd its altar were retained, but the lay-brothers' stalls and the screens behind them were removed throwing the arcades open. The western bays of the nave were now only used regularly for processions, and the nineteenth-century excavators found beneath the turf a row of 2} limestone slabs of Abbot Huby's time on each side of the nave between the first and fifth piers, with three more in the sixth bay. Each slab had a circle incised on it, and their purpose was to mark the places where the convent made its station before the nave altar towards the end of the Sunday procession.

When the aisles ceased to be used as passages, individual bays were screened off to form chapels. Holes and cuts in the masonry show that five bays of the south aisle and three bays of the north aisle were used in this way. There are also the bases of altars against two piers on the north and two on the south, brackets for statutes on the fourth pier on the north and the fifth on the south, and holes for the reredos of an altar on the west face of the sixth pier on the south. Larger traceried windows were inserted in some of the aisle bays to give more light to these chapels.