§ 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].