York Guides

The three arches on the east side of the transept originally led into three chapels that were separated by solid walls. The northernmost of these chapels, which was longer than the others, was destroyed when the eastern arm of the church was rebuilt early in the thirteenth century, but its arch was kept to serve as an entrance to the south aisle of the new presbytery. This arch was altered in Abbot Huby's time, when the state of the crossing was causing concern. The settlement of the southeast crossing pier can be seen in the masonry to the left of the window above this arch, and from that level down to the head of the arch Huby inserted a great 'stitch' of new masonry to bridge a fracture. He also partly blocked the arch itself and put a smaller and massively moulded arch below it to give access to the aisle, placing a shield at each end of its hoodmould. These shields are now heavily weathered, but the northern one bore his initials with a mitre and crozier, and the southern one bore the three horseshoes that were the arms of Fountains in his day.

The central chapel still has its twelfth-century barrel vault, but the lower part of its east wall was removed in the fifteenth century, leaving the upper part and a segment of a round window supported on an arch, and the chapel was extended eastwards. The new cast wall has a Perpendicular window, and a delicately moulded doorway was inserted in the north wall leading to the presbytery aisle. After these alterations the chapel probably served as a sacristy, and a narrow doorway in its south-east corner led to another sacristy of which only the lower stones remain, built by Abbot Huby outside the south aisle of the presbytery. This central chapel now contains the fine early fourteenth-century effigy of a knight of the Mowbray family, a product of the York workshops. It does not belong here, having been moved at least four times since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The southern chapel remains exactly as it was in the early twelfth century. It has a pointed barrel vault and, in the east wall, a pair of round-headed windows with a circular window above. In the south wall there is a recess that formed a combined piscina and credence, and in the north wall a recess for a cupboard. The step of the altar platform also remains. Just in front of the chapel the nineteenth-century excavators found fragments of the grave cover of a late fifteenth-century monk called John Ripon.

There are two doorways in the south wall of the transept. The eastern one led down to the sacristy in the claustral buildings. The western one is set high and led from the monks' dormitory to the night stairs that once came down into the church against the west wall of the transept, but have now gone. This western doorway belongs to alterations made after the middle of the twelfth century when the east range of claustral buildings outside the transept was remodelled to a more ample scale, and the floor level of the dormitory was set higher than before. The remains of the earlier twelfth-century dormitory doorway can be seen below it on the left, with a half-arch reserved in its blocking to give access to spiral stairs that go up the central buttress of the transept to the top of the gable. Part of the way up these stairs a passage in the thickness of the wall leads eastwards to a room that once existed over the vaults of the transept chapels. Similar rooms existed at other Cistercian abbeys, and may have been used as treasuries.

Like the nave, the transepts had wooden roofs which were lowered in pitch in the fifteenth century, when the two round windows at the top of the south transept gable were blocked.