Stairway to Heaven: The Functions of Medieval Upper Spaces by Toby Huitson

Author:Toby Huitson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Medieval
ISBN: 9781842178614
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Published: 2014-03-26T04:00:00+00:00

Fig. 5.1 Entrance to the first-floor refectory in the south claustral range at Cleeve Abbey, Somerset

Fig. 5.2 The refectory at Bushmead Priory, Bedfordshire

Fig. 5.3 Upper-level fireplace of c. 1500 at Bushmead, with later blockings

Sleeping

A key consideration in a monastic precinct after eating was room for sleeping accommodation. This would be needed for abbots and priors, members of the community, guests, secular corrodians, and, for some parish churches, rooms for priests and deacons. In some ways, accommodation was a function that was relatively stable and predictable; however, it could also be highly complex and multi-faceted. There is evidence to suggest that places of accommodation, like the refectory, also had associated secondary functions, and likewise that sleep did not necessarily occupy officially designated spaces.

Accommodation in the monastic dormitory was usually sited at first-floor level above the East range. Eric Fernie suggests that the dorter was sited at height because it provided better security and health benefits, and permitted the warming-room to be located underneath.18 These were often large rooms. The Romanesque dorter at Canterbury Cathedral Priory was a rectangular building of 78ft by 148ft (23.8 × 45m), with a vaulted undercroft and central spine wall to the north-east of the claustral complex, making it one of the largest enclosed upper spaces in the precinct. St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, not to be outdone by the cathedral, had a monastic dormitory measuring 44ft by 204ft (13.4 × 62.2m), making it one of the longest examples of its kind in the country. One of the best surviving examples is at Cleeve Abbey, Somerset (Figs. 5.4 & 5.5). Although re-roofed in the seventeenth century, it has the original day-stair for access and the individual windows corresponding to each bed, and gives a good impression of such places. The later medieval dorter at Durham was unusual in its siting over the west range, and much is known about its internal arrangements as the contract for its’ building survives. This reveals that for every two bedchambers there was to be one window for the monks’ studies. Above the top storey of windows were to be alures and parapets, ‘in clean and evenly cut ashlar, both outside as well as inside’ and furthermore ‘there will in a suitable place, be a stairway called the vice, for ascending above the said dormitory’.19 By the sixteenth century, it was divided into partitioned chambers, one for each monk, with sixteen novices’ chambers at the south end. This room was ‘all paved wth fine tyled stone’ and lit by two large square stones, each holding a dozen cressets, ‘beinge euer filled and supplied with the cooke.’20 The function of these cressets was ‘to giue light to the monkes and nouices when they rose to their Mattens [or ‘matters’] at midnight and for their other necessarye uses’ – doubtless a pun on the necessarium or lavatories (see below).21

Office-holding obedientaries sometimes had their own separate accommodation, including as at Canterbury. The north end of the west claustral range perhaps functioned as the cellarer’s lodging after c.

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