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English Monasteries

Chapter 71: § 64.
By A. Hamilton Thompson
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About This Book

The text surveys medieval monasticism in England, outlining major religious orders and their rules, the evolution of communal life, and the rise and decline of different houses. It analyzes architectural plans of conventual churches, cloisters, and ancillary buildings—showing how liturgy, daily routines, and practical needs shaped church, chapter-house, dorter, frater, infirmary, and gatehouse arrangements. Special attention is given to Cistercian and Benedictine variations, the role of lay brothers, and adaptations for canons, friars, and nuns. The manual closes with discussion of discipline, the daily cycle of offices and work, estate management, and the surviving ruins and archaeological evidence, supported by plans and illustrations.

§ 64.

The warming-house was a rectangular building, which at Fountains is vaulted in four compartments from a middle pillar. The fireplace was usually in a side-wall or, as at Waverley, in the further wall from the cloister. Two huge fireplaces remain in the east wall at Fountains, one of which has been blocked. At Tintern the fireplace was a middle hearth, surrounded by open arches and connected by smaller arches with the end walls. The outer wall was generally pierced by a window and a doorway which led into a yard at the back. Here at Fountains, against the west wall of the dorter sub-vault, was the wood-house from which the fire was replenished. The west wall of the warming-house was part of the east wall of the frater, and two openings in it at Fountains may have been intended to give the frater some of the benefit of the fire. The arrangements of the frater, of which a perfect example, now used as a church, remains at Beaulieu, were similar, allowing for the difference in plan, to those of Benedictine and other houses, but were less elaborate. It was raised a step or two above the cloister, and on one or both sides of the entrance were the lavatory arches. The magnificent frater at Rievaulx had a sub-vault, entered from the foot of the stair to the pulpit; but this is a rare instance of a feature often found in Benedictine houses. At Fountains the frater was divided by a row of columns into two alleys, each with its separate wooden roof; but the undivided plan, as at Beaulieu, was general.