§ 56.
In the cloister, near the entrance to the
frater, was the lavatory (
lavatorium), where the
brethren washed their hands before meals. In some
cases, as at Durham and Wenlock, an octagonal or
circular building, projecting into the cloister-garth
opposite the frater doorway, contained a great laver,
filled by taps from a pipe in a central pillar. Each
monk could wash at his separate tap, the water from
which fell into a basin at the foot of the laver and
was carried away by a waste-pipe. The ingeniously
contrived water-supply at Canterbury served three
such laver-houses and a fourth laver in the so-called
north hall
[9]. The great laver-house in the infirmary
cloister was used by monks on their way from the
dorter to the night-office, when they entered the
church through the eastern transept: this still
remains, as well as the arches and the base of
the trough of that near the frater. At Wenlock
there remains a small apartment in the west
wall of the south transept, close to the eastern processional
doorway from the cloister, which contained
a lavatory for use before the night-office: in this
case, the lavatory evidently followed the more usual
arrangement and was not an isolated laver, but a
trough fed by a horizontal pipe in the wall behind
and emptied by a waste-pipe at one end. This is the
form of which traces most commonly remain in
cloisters, where the lavatory and its towel-cupboards
were placed in arched recesses either, as at Peterborough
or in several Cistercian houses, in the wall
of the frater, or, as at Worcester, Haughmond and
Hexham, in the wall of the western range, not far
from the frater doorway. The lavatory at Gloucester,
on the trough principle, remains within a rectangular
building projecting from the wall opposite the frater
into the cloister-garth: the towel-cupboard was in
the north wall of the cloister next the frater. Towel-cupboards
also were formed by recesses in similar
positions in the south wall at Durham
[10].
