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Roche Abbey: the day room
It is not entirely clear how the
area beneath the monks’ dormitory was used in Cistercian
abbeys, but it is likely that the rooms here served as a day-room
for the monks, where the brethren could work and perhaps copy manuscripts.
A novice-house may also have been situated here, providing separate
quarters for the novices to
eat, sleep and meditate under the tutelage of the novice-master,
whose duty it was to make them ‘worthy
vessels of God and acceptable to the Order.’(8) The
undercorft at Roche comprised seven bays and was divided into two
sections;
the first two bays may have accommodated the novices, the other
five bays were probably used as a day room. There is evidence that
the undercroft here was later divided into separate cells.
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