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play0:00 / 1:48-
leedsmuseums This small room was used as a library, it may seem tiny but books were rare and took a long time to produce, a decorated bible could take one monk 3 years to produce by hand. Bibles and other religious works were written on specially prepared calf skin called vellum and inks were produced by the monks in the abbey, some monks would have their own special recipes to produce different colours using natural ingredients such as plant and vegetable extracts, soot and metals mixed with egg white for shine and depth of colour. Precious stone such as lapis lazuli were used to make inks and for decoration as was real gold particularly for the production of bibles. Because books were so time consuming to produce they were rare and precious, and they were kept very carefully. Medieval monasteries invented the library system for cataloguing and signing out books. Some books would be too precious to be kept in the library and would have been locked away separately. The Victorians used the library as a grotto or summer house, they added the fireplace and lined the walls and roof with lead which gives the room its green tinge. The soft metal also made this room easy to graffiti and there are lots of names scratched into the walls probably in Victorian times. Walk through the archway into the church. A punishment for pride was to lie in this doorway and let the other monks walk over you to teach you humility.
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play0:00 / 4:08-
leedsmuseums The Chapter House was the second most important building in the abbey. It was a meeting space where every morning the choir monks would gather to hear a chapter from the Rule of St Benedict, hence the name. This meeting was a bit like a modern school assembly, important information would be given by the abbot who was the head of the monastery, there was an opportunity for each monk to confess their sins or another monk could confess your sins to the abbot for your benefit so you could be corrected! Praise and punishments would then be given. Punishments were usually reflective and gave the monk the opportunity to think about what he had done wrong. They often took the form of social exclusion from meals or worship, or could reflect the sin committed, for example, a reduction in food for greed or less time in the warming house for sloth. Punishments could be physical for serious crimes, there was even a prison cell next to the infirmary but most abbots preferred reflective punishments. One such punishment was to wear a shirt made from horse hair under a habit which would make your skin itch constantly and was intended to remind you of the sin you committed, Abbot Terguis wore this shirt all the time to remind him of man’s sin so he would be constantly itching! Some times the abbots themselves needed punishing, in 1356 Abbot John Topcliffe was accused of leading a band of monks and lay brothers to attack Thomas Sergeant’s house, to steal his goods and imprison him. In 1377, Abbot John Thornberg was accused of attacking servants, destroying trees and hunting game. This is also the place where the monks gathered to surrender the abbey to Henry VIII’s commissioners in November 1539 making it one of the last abbeys to be dissolved. The Abbot John Ripley had fought the dissolution from the beginning, even though the Heads of Monasteries were made generous offers. Eventually, Abbot Ripley retired to the Gatehouse, now Abbey House Museum, with a very generous pension. Today you will be able to see a number of stone coffins at the back of the Chapter House and if you look closely also buried in the walls. It has been suggested that abbots were buried in the coffins in the walls as they were often buried in Chapter Houses, but when people made the holes you can see in the coffins looking for treasure all that they found was rubble! The coffins in the walls were probably just used as a quick stable building material when the Chapter House was extended. There is no evidence that the coffins at the back were ever used either, although people who like ghost stories often disagree! Frequent checks of the chapter house are made today to monitor the number of bats living here. We have 2 types of bats; Pipestrelles, tiny little bats whose bodies are only 3 cm long and are the most common in England, and Daubentons, water bats which have webbed feet to scoop insects from the surface of the water. The bats live in the cracks in the walls and ceiling and are monitored in this area as the stone floor makes it easier to identify and count bat droppings. Our staff are all trained to know the difference between bat and mouse droppings, if you stand on a bat dropping it will disintegrate as they live on a diet of insects, mouse droppings are much firmer! Next door is the Library.
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play0:00 / 1:32-
leedsmuseums The parlour was the room in the abbey where tasks were given out and the only room the monks were allowed free conversion that was not worship, the word parlour comes from the French parlez which means to talk. As with the warming house spending too much time in the parlour was thought to be sinful and could be punished. There was a special piece of sign language that was used to invite another monk to the parlour to discuss perhaps a piece of scripture or monastic business, the parlour was not meant to be used for idle gossip. This action was to put the palms of the hands together then interlock the fingers, again if you would like to try this please pause the player now. If you stand back you can see that the doorway to the parlour has been made smaller. This was done in the late fourteenth century, historians think it was done to make the parlour cosier, again a sign that abbey rules had relaxed and breaking the vow of silence by talking in the parlour was less of an issue. Today this alteration makes the parlour an excellent stone store as it is easy to access and to block out the weather, if you look through the gate you can see lots of interesting pieces of stone from the abbey which can’t be restored to where they originally came from but we still want to protect. The room next to the parlour is the Chapter House.
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play0:00 / 3:00-
leedsmuseums Only the choir monks refectory has survived, monks sat here at long wooden tables and ate in silence with one brother reading a passage from the bible, no-one was allowed to leave until he was finished and monks were encouraged to make a cross out of breadcrumbs to stop their minds wandering. To communicate in their silent world monks devised a system of sign language including several signs for food. The sign for pottage, which was a thick vegetable soup was a mime of chopping vegetables by extending the index finger of the left hand and miming chopping along it with the first two fingers of the right hand. Visitors especially those with children often like to try out monks sign language or invent new signs for other foods. Each monk would have their own eating equipment including a cup and spoon, forks hadn’t been invented yet! They would use the knife that they carried on their belt which was used for lots of other tasks including making quill pens. It was called a pen knife as pen is the Latin for feather. There were lots of rules for behaviour in the dinning room including using 2 hands for your cup to make sure that you did not spill and not blowing you nose on your napkin - this is a strange rule, perhaps cold weather and hot soup made the monks noses run! The floor of this room is laid with original tiles but historians disagree about when these tiles were laid. Some believe that the monks did it themselves when the strict rules about simplicity started to relax, while others believe it was another alteration made by the Victorians. The refectory also gives access to the warming room, on the left hand side of the gate, which as the name suggests is the room the monks used to get warm. Originally it contained the only source of heat that was not used for cooking and the monks were only allowed to be in there for 15 minutes a day, any more was considered to be sinful and could be punished. This fire was only lit in winter and some strict abbots would only allow it to be lit when the water in the laver or lavatorium, where the monks washed their hands was frozen! Later when rules started to relax more fires were added and this room became less important. Carry on walking around the outside of the cloister to get to the Parlour. On the way you will pass the remains of some stone sinks cut into the wall, this is where the monks would wash their hands before meals and wash each others feet each Saturday afternoon in a ritual called Maundy. This was designed to teach the monks humility.
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play0:00 / 1:45-
leedsmuseums Eating was another time when the monks were divided into choir monks and lay brothers, in dining rooms either side of this kitchen. All monks were allowed up to 8 pints of beer a day, they even had their own malt house for brewing which could be reached from the kitchen. As fun as it is to imagine drunken monks, the beer was very weak and known as small beer, even children drank it as it was often safer to drink than water which could easily be polluted by bacteria from humans and animals. Choir monks would only eat once a day in winter with perhaps a light supper being added in summer to reflect the extra hours they would be active and the more physical work that would need to be done like helping with the harvests. As the Cistercians believed in simplicity the choir monks originally had a very basic vegetarian diet of bread and a thick vegetable soup called pottage, meat was considered to be an unnecessary luxury. Each monk got an allowance and if they wanted to eat again they could save some for later. Later, the monks here at Kirkstall petitioned the Pope to be allowed to eat meat, this was granted so long as the monks cooked and ate the meat in a completely separate area, so they built a meat kitchen for preparing and cooking and another floor to the refectory for eating meat, which many think is a sign that the abbey was moving away from its strict Cistercian principals. Reconstructions of some of the pottery found in the kitchens is displayed in the Visitor Centre.
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play0:00 / 3:26tomajda likes this.-
leedsmuseums You should now be standing in the cloister which was the heart of any medieval monastery. The cloister was a large open space in the middle of the abbey precinct surrounded on all sides by covered walkways called arcades. If you look carefully you can still see the square holes in the walls of the cloister where supports for the roof of these arcades once stood. These arcades connected all of the important religious and everyday buildings in the abbey; we will be exploring several of these building during this tour. We will be exploring several of these buildings during the tour. Although now the cloister is a quiet haven in the middle of a busy suburb, 800 years ago when the abbey was built the cloister was alive with people and activity. These activities would include reading or copying religious texts, writing, contemplation, prayer and every day mundane tasks such as growing plants for use in cooking and medicines. If you are lucky enough to be visiting on a bright sunny day you will be able to see why the choir monks did most of their reading and writing in the arcade against the outside wall of the church, which is on your left hand side as you come through the cloister gate. This is south facing and gets the most sunshine, important for both heat and light. This was deliberately done, writing with quill pens was a long difficult task and many medieval monks included foot notes or graffiti to the text they were copying about how cold their fingers were or how their eyes hurt working by candle light. Although the cloister would be full of activity this activity was carried out in silence and the only noises would be the sounds of birds and chanting coming from the brothers singing in church. The Cistercians were a silent order, they believed that talking would distract their focus away from God and speaking was restricted to worship in the church, important monastic business in the chapterhouse and the parlour which we shall come to later in the tour. Later Victorians used the cloister for summer parties, lectures and exercise and made several alterations including adding wooden benches for comfort, blocking exits for privacy and turning the library into a grotto with a lead roof and fire place. There is a picture on one of the interpretation boards in the cloister showing a very solemn looking Victorian summer party in the cloister. Today the cloister is again at the centre of activity in the abbey but in a very different way. It is used by large numbers of visitors and school children, community groups and organised tours for a wide range of activities from birds of prey displays, dog shows, spinning demonstrations and welly wanging. But is also still a place of peace and contemplation, school groups use the tranquillity in specially designed workshops to relax before their exams, other visitors read a book or just enjoy the peace, interrupted by the odd aeroplane or chirping from our resident kestrel. Start walking on the path around the outside of the cloister on the right hand side where the big tree is, to get to the next point of the tour, the Kitchen.
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play0:00 / 3:05-
leedsmuseums Hello and welcome to Kirkstall Abbey, one of the best preserved Cistercian abbeys in the UK. During this tour we will help you to explore the abbey by telling you a bit about its history and how it is used today. You are standing now in what used to be a reredorter or toilet. The reredorter has recently been developed into a visitor centre. Let’s start walking! While we are heading towards the cloister, let us tell you a bit about the history of the abbey on the way. Leave the visitor centre and follow the path around to the left until you reach an open gate on your right hand side. Kirkstall Abbey was founded over 800 years ago by a group of Cistercian monks from Fountains Abbey, making Kirkstall a daughter house of Fountains. These monks originally settled in Barnoldswick near Skipton but moved to Kirkstall less than 5 years later after a series of problems with the land and the locals! The secluded location of Kirkstall was perfect for them, there were no houses, or villages nearby ideal for a Cistercian community who wanted to be free from distractions of men – and women! The area looked very different then than it does today; instead of the busy road imagine lots of trees, open fields with plentiful supplies of wood, stone and water needed to build a monastery. Cistercians were founded as a strict order by a group of monks in France in the twelfth century in response to what they saw as falling standards in other religious communities. As Cistercian abbeys were built away from people they needed to be self sufficient and to help them do this monks were split into 2 groups; Choir Monks and Lay brothers. They both took the same vows of poverty, chastity and obedience to the abbot but they had very different roles in the monastery and although they lived in the same Abbey, they rarely saw each other. They wore different coloured monastic robes called habits, they ate separately, slept separately and even worshipped separately only coming together for important meetings, ceremonies and rituals. Lay brothers did most of the hard manual work in the abbey, including looking after any animals and harvesting crops, they had very different lives to the Choir Monks – who spent most of their day in worship, private prayer and religious reading. A Lay Brother could never become a Monk, if they were caught trying to teach themselves to read and write they were punished for the sin of envy, their job was important as it freed the choir monks for prayer and kept the abbey running efficiently. Ironically this efficient system made the abbeys very wealthy which was against their original principals.
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play0:00 / 3:54samualash likes this.-
leedsmuseums The church was the most important part of any monastery; it was built in the shape of a cross and like all Cistercian churches, was dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Cistercian monasteries were all built to a similar plan, the idea being that a monk could travel between communities and find his way around easily and feel at home. As Cistercians believed in simplicity the church was not decorated, the walls would have been whitewashed and there were no paintings, sculptures or stained glass to distract the monks from worship. Even the altar, the focus of worship, was undecorated with only a simple cloth and cross. Cistercian monks demonstrated to God how important he was to their community through the sheer size of the church and how often they visited it. It must have been an awe inspiring site for a novice monk joining the community at 17, seeing it for the first time and it is hard to believe that this magnificent building was constructed by and for a community of monks that never got bigger than 100 and by the time of the dissolution was only around 30 monks. If you would like the opportunity to spend some time quietly exploring press pause now. The monastic day was built around visits to the church for worship. Choir monks would visit the church at least 8 times a day for services and more if they wished, for private prayer or private mass, the rest of their day was fitted around these services or hours as they were known. They would sing or chant these services as this was a much easier way to remember them. Think of how many songs you know all of the way through compared to how many poems you can recite off by heart. Like the other parts of the abbey we have visited the church was split into sections for choir monks and lay brothers. The choir monks got the top of the church nearest to the altar, and even got a section for sick and old choir monks who would need to sit during worship. The lay brothers were separated from them by a screen and would enter the church and worship in silence so as not to disturb the choir monks. If you look at the top of the columns you can see Victorian signs which show where these screens would be. The screen nearest to the main entrance separated the lay brothers from the public who could come and worship at the very back of the church for certain services though women were not allowed into any part of the abbey precinct until 1401. The main road into Leeds was put through the centre of the church some time after the abbey was dissolved, perhaps as a way of stopping it being used as a church as there were plenty of other places to put a road! The roof and windows had already been removed by Henry VIII’s commissioners to stop this happening and because they were of value. The road passed through the presbytery, where the large window is, which was the most sacred part of the church where mass was celebrated. The road was relocated to its current position in the 19th century and the wall under the large east window was repaired. If you look closely you can see that the mortar doesn’t match the rest of the abbey, particularly from the outside. The parts of the church that make the cross are called transepts.
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