Exploring Kent's Past

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Monument details

Summary

The Monastic Cellarer was the main provisioner in charge of supplying the Priory's food. In particular large amounts of meat and particularly fish. The cellarer also provided the refectory and other dining-halls in the precincts with more occassional deliveries of poultry, spices, and wine, etc.

Monument Types

• SCHOOL (Medieval - 1070 AD? to 1096 AD?)
• BUILDING (Medieval - 1096 AD? to 1274 AD?)

Full description

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The Monastic Cellarer was the main provisioner in charge of supplying the Priory's food. In particular large amounts of meat and particularly fish. The cellarer also provided the refectory and other dining-halls in the precincts with more occassional deliveries of poultry, spices, and wine, etc. He had private lodgings in a building to the south-west of the refectory, buttery and pantry, on the west side of the Cloister and immediately east of the Great Hall.

The building appears to have been originally constructed between c. 1096 and 1170 as part of Lanfranc's Priory. It was rebuilt during the time of Prior Adam Chillenden 1263-1274 incorporating much of the earlier walls. Nothing remains of this structure other than its eastern wall which forms the west wall of the Cloister itself.

The building termed the Cellarer's Lodging (later Dukes Hall) lined the whole length of the western side of the Great Cloister. Rectangular shaped in plan, it measured some 140 feet in length N-S by 30 feet in width E-W. At the north end a Norman doorway remains, one which Becket passed through the morning of his murder. The cloister face of this doorway is richly moulded. There was alos a doorway opposite leading to the Archbishop's Palace. The Cloister wall has three main doorways to the south end, with internal partions separating there access, these are of 1268-1274 date. The middle door was an entrance to the Cloister from the churchyard and it had a stairway to allow for difference in heights. In the middle of the building's range was a lofty apartment divided into five rooms, with low rooms beneath. At the north end the floor divided the wall into two nearly equal heights and a newal staircase provided access to the upper floor, which at some stage was used as the Novices School. The door to the Cloister at the south end probably opened into a vestible, with a staircase to the upper floor and doors to the ground floor rooms of the cellarer's lodgings, which must have been subdivided into several rooms. These rooms must have been lighted by windows looking into the Archbishop's grounds.

Willis, R., 1868, 'The Architectural History of the Conventual Buildings of the Monastery of Christchurch in Canterbury' (Article in serial). SKE30206.

Sources and further reading