the upper floor of the southern block consisted of the 'upper' frater or refectory, a spacious apartment, which had been used for Parliaments and the legatine trial of Henry VIII's divorce case, and was sometimes known as 'the Parliament chamber'.[1] The ground floor is a little more difficult. The survey of 1548 assigns to it a 'blind', that is, I suppose, a windowless, or at any rate dark, parlour, which came next the buttery block, and a hall, to which the parlour served as an entry.[2] These are said to be 'vnder the seide frater of the same lengethe and breddethe'. This might naturally be taken to mean that they were, together, of the same size as the frater above. In fact it must, I think, mean that they were of the same size as each other, for we know from another source that the south end of the frater was over a room not belonging to Cawarden at all but to Lady Kingston, and itself standing over the infirmary, which, owing to the fall of the ground, formed at that end a lower story of the block.[3] The survey does not say what the sizes of the parlour and hall were, but a later document suggests that together they underlay over two-thirds of the frater and occupied a space of 74 ft. from north to south and 52 ft. from east to west.[4] Under Cawarden's part of the southern block were cellars. To the west lay what was known as the Duchy Chamber, probably from some official use in connexion with the Duchy of Lancaster. This was a two-story building, 50 ft. long by 16 ft. wide, jutting out at right angles to the extreme north end of the frater. South of it was a house, apparently belonging to Sir Thomas Cheyne and occupied by Sir John Portinari, which touched the frater at one end, and at the other had a parlour, interposed between the end of the Duchy Chamber and Water Lane, and bounded on the north, as the Duchy Chamber itself must have been, by the kitchen yard. South of this again were a little chamber and a kitchen, with an entry from Water Lane, probably between Portinari's parlour and another house belonging to Cheyne.[5] The little chamber and kitchen were used in conjunction with the hall under the upper frater. This hall, which was paved and stood 'handsome to' the buttery, had also been a frater, serving as a breakfast room for the friars, and in the little
- ↑ M. S. C. ii. 105.
- ↑ The room is described as 'intrale seu le parlour' in Cawarden's grant of 1550.
- ↑ M. S. C. ii. 105, 124. There was yet another room under the infirmary. One Kempe, an assign of Lady Kingston's heir, tried to claim the Parliament Chamber from Cawarden, on the strength of her grant of the infirmary.
- ↑ Cf. p. 504.
- ↑ On Cheyne's houses cf. p. 499.
