Spatial Aspects of the Almonry Site and the Changing Priorities of Poor Relief at Westminster Abbey c. 1290-1540

Abstract

… spatial organization is a function of the form of social solidarity; and different forms of social solidarity are themselves built on the foundations of a society as both a spatial and a transpatial system. The almonries of English religious houses are among the least understood of monastic buildings and spatial areas. Unlike the main ritual areas of church and cloister and the domestic ranges, very few monastic sites retain any structural remains of almonry buildings, and those that do have been much altered in the five and a half centuries since they last performed their original function as outlets of social welfare. Only two Benedictine houses, Ely Cathedral Priory (Cambridgeshire) and Evesham Abbey (Worcestershire), contain extant substantial structural elements from what were their almonry halls, and even here nineteenth- and twentieth-century additions obscure much of the original appearance of the fabric at both places. The Benedictine Glastonbury Abbey (Somerset) retains structural remains of a late medieval date within the precinct inside the west gate, which belonged to the complex of buildings constituting the almonry. It is unclear, however, how the arrangement of this almonry was altered when a row of almshouses (St Patrick’s Almshouses) was built slightly to the east, extending over the site of the present museum, in c. 1517. Recently it has also been suggested that a small single-storey building on the precinct periphery of the Premonstratensian abbey at Titchfield (Hampshire) was an almonry schoolhouse.