§ 53.
Wainscot partitions divided the dorter internally
into a series of cubicles with a passage down
the centre. Each cubicle was lighted by a window,
and at Durham each contained a desk at which
monks could work, if, as for example at the mid-day
siesta in summer, they were unable to go to sleep.
This was the ordinary late arrangement: it is probable
that in early monasteries the beds stood against the
wall between the windows without any partitions.
Although several monastic dorters are still roofed, as
at Westminster and Durham, where they are in use
as chapter libraries, at the Cistercian abbeys of
Cleeve, Ford (where the dorter is now divided into
many small rooms) and Valle Crucis, and at the
Premonstratensian abbey of Beeleigh, the internal
partitions have disappeared. At the further end of
the dorter or at right angles to the further wall
from the cloister, there was always a building known
as
domus necessaria,
necessarium, or in English the
rere-dorter, which was a long gallery with a row of
seats against one wall, each lighted by a window and
divided by a partition from the next. Beneath the
seats was a drain or running stream, above which the
partitions were carried by transverse arches: on the
ground-floor the drain was shut off by a wall from
the vaulted undercroft of the gallery. The
necessarium
at Canterbury, known as the third dorter, was 145
feet long: it opened from the north-east corner of
the great dorter, and was at right angles to the east
wall, parallel to the second dorter, in which the
obedientiaries or officers of the house slept. It
contained 55 seats at first, 50 later. At Lewes the
later
necessarium, a separate building on lower ground
than the dorter and connected with it by a bridge
and stair, was 158 feet long and contained 66 seats.
At Furness the
necessarium stood east of the dorter
and parallel to it, with a two-storied building connecting
the two. Here the seats were arranged back
to back against a middle wall, with a passage at
either side.
