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English Monasteries

Chapter 81: § 73.
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.

§ 73.

A special kitchen, where more delicate food (cibi subtiliores) could be cooked for the infirm, was a necessary adjunct to an infirmary, and is usually found divided from it by a narrow yard, crossed by a covered passage, as at Fountains. The infirmary kitchen at Furness was octagonal, but the normal plan was rectangular. The Furness kitchen served the old infirmary: when this was converted into the abbot's lodging and a new infirmary built, it probably served both; but in the fifteenth century a kitchen was made in the abbot's lodging, the octagonal kitchen seems to have been taken down, and the infirmary was probably served from a meat-kitchen which, as has been explained in the previous chapter, also served the new frater and misericord. The misericord or flesh-frater had no fixed position in the plan of the infirmary buildings. At Fountains, it was an aisleless hall, lying between the infirmary hall and the abbot's lodging, and must have been served through the infirmary hall from the kitchen.