Fountains Abbey: The story of a mediæval monastery

by George Hodges

III. THE CHURCH

The essential purpose for which Fountains Abbey was founded was the pursuit of religion. The prevailing interpretation which was put upon religion made it to consist, in great measure, of the saying of services. Out of the confused noises of the common street, the monks had retired into the quiet of the monastery in the hope of meeting God. And they sought God in the church.

The church had a western porch, a dozen feet in width, extending along the whole front. Part of the porch floor was made of gravestones, beneath which lay the dust of devout laymen, who had begged the privilege of being buried at the door of the house of prayer. The porch roof touched the base of the great window, which was filled with the glorious colours of the inimitable glass of the middle ages. Over the window, in a niche, was a figure of the Mother and Child. Abbot John Darnton had this made, and inscribed his name upon the supporting corbel: an eagle, the symbol of the fourth evangelist, to mean John, perched on a cask or tun, with a scroll beneath marked dern 1494.

Entering beneath the Norman arch of the west door, the visitor found over his head a gallery which carried the great organ. A screen supported the gallery, making a vestibule for the church, keeping out the wind. A fragment of the base of this screen remains on the south side, near a bit of the pavement which was put in by John of Kent. Standing in the screen door and looking to the east, the high roof reached over the nave, the choir, the presbytery, and the chapel of the nine altars, to the splendour of the east window. The Norman nave and transepts, with their great pillars and round-headed clerestory windows, represent the primitive Puritan simplicity of the Cistercians. The choir and presbytery and the nine-altars chapel are in the style called Early English. The great windows, east and west, replacing plainer windows, are, like the tower, in the style called Perpendicular. To-day, by the destruction of the choir and presbytery, the whole church in its great length lies open to the view, but in the middle ages it was crossed by three stone screens.

The first partition, called the rood screen, crossed the middle alley between the seventh pair of pillars, counting from the west door. It had two openings, between which stood an altar. Over the altar, on a beam which topped the screen from pillar to pillar, was a great cross or rood. This screen formed the east end of that part of the church which was assigned to the lay brothers. On the right hand and on the left, this sanctuary was shut off from the aisles by walls, which ran along the inner side of the pillars, making a long narrow chapel, with the stalls of the lay brothers set against them. Thus the pillars were hidden in the aisles, an observer at the west door seeing only the capitals and upper portions of them above the walls.

The second partition, called the choir screen, crossed the tenth pair of pillars, and a door in the middle of it gave access to the choir. The space between these two screens, called the retro-choir, was intended especially for aged and convalescent brethren from the infirmary. There was probably a great bench for them against the back of the rood screen.

In the midst of the retro-choir, between the eighth and ninth pairs of pillars, stood two altars, one on the north dedicated to St. Mary, and the other on the south dedicated to St. Bernard. The reredoses of these altars made a screen between the ninth pillars, having a doorway between them. In this passage, between the altars of the saints, three abbots were buried, in the fifteenth century. From the top of the two reredoses to the top of the choir screen, a loft was built, called the pulpitum, extending from the ninth and tenth pillars on the north to the ninth and tenth pillars on the south, and on the north side carried out over the aisle. Here, over the aisle, stood the choir organ.

Passing under this gallery, through the door of the choir screen, the visitor stood in the central sanctuary, the church of the monks of the cloister. On either side were twenty stalls, and against the screen, facing the east, were three stalls on the right of the entrance, and three on the left. The number of the stalls is determined by the discovery of nine earthen pots buried in the masonry which underlay them. These pots were, no doubt, as in several other churches, an acoustic experiment. The distances between them indicate how many there were in the whole range. In front of the stalls of the monks were lower seats for the novices. In addition to the entrance through the choir screen, there were two other ways of access, at the east end of the stalls, on either side. Here is still on either side a stone step, significantly worn. On the north side, stairs led to a high seat over the door. In the middle alley, where the lecturn may have stood at which the lessons were read at matins, an abbot was buried.

The presbytery, or chancel, began at these choir doors, and was raised a step or two. Across the long space of its shining floor stood the third partition, called the altar screen. Against it was the high altar.

Thus the church was divided into three churches; one for the brothers of the cellarium, ending at the rood screen; one for the infirmary brethren, ending at the choir screen; one for the brethren of the cloister, ending at the altar screen. On the two sides of this three-fold sanctuary ran long aisles, from the west wall to the chapel of the nine altars. In the middle of this distance, the aisles opened into transepts, north and south. The nave aisles, at first unobstructed for passage around the church, were presently cut up by cross partitions into chapels; but the choir aisles continued to be used as ambulatories. The transepts served as antechambers for the chapels which opened out from them to the east.