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The monks’ choir
The monks occupied the choir for corporate worship – the Canonical Hours and Mass – and also ceremonies and rituals that demanded a full communal turn-out, such as, funerals, installations, the profession of novices, unction of the sick, and obsequies of the dead. The choir was screened off from the aisles to ensure privacy, and probably also to minimise draughts. During the day the monks accessed the choir from the cloister, but at night-time they used stairs that led from their dormitory. Processions entered through a centre-door in the West façade and left by the door leading to the cloister. The monks’ choir comprised of inward-facing timber stalls. These could be quite ornate, and in 1440 the monks of Melrose, Scotland, commissioned a master carpenter in Bruges to carve oak stalls for their abbey.(9) The abbot and senior monks sat nearest the High Altar at Mass and the Office preceding Mass, but at all other Canonical Hours this order was reversed, underlining the monks’ commitment to humility and equality. Any visiting Cistercian was fully integrated and took his accustomed place in the host choir.(10) Those who were unable to complete the daily round of worship, namely, the sick, the bloodlet, the elderly, and perhaps also novices, occupied the retrochoir that was, significantly, behind the monks’ choir and separated by a screen, the pulpitum. In 1320 the retrochoir at St Mary’s, Dublin, provided a hiding-place for one rather insane monk of the house, William Kedenor, to launch an attack on his fellow brethren. When the monks were singing Vespers, William leapt out from the retrochoir, wielding a dagger, and mortally wounded two of the choir monks; he was later imprisoned for life in the abbey’s jail.(11) |
