Chapter House Meetings
Alongside prayer, study, and work, every monk was expected to attend a daily meeting in the chapter house — so called because a chapter of the Rule of St Benedict was read aloud there each day. These meetings combined practical business with a good dose of humbling self-examination.
The monks sat on the stone floor or on benches around the walls, with the abbot or presiding monk on a raised seat at the east end, at least at Westminster. Business included the running of the abbey and the formal sealing of documents, but the meeting also dealt with the monks’ faults. Monks confessed their failings publicly in front of the community, whose members, in one vivid medieval image, acted as the “razor of God,” shaving away the “unsightly hairs” that spoiled the penitent and making him “more pleasing to God.”
The chapter house could also be a place of real beauty. Both Westminster and Coventry Cathedral Priory had chapter houses decorated with fine inlays and wall paintings, and Coventry’s included scenes from the Book of Revelation. There is a certain irony in the fact that the room the monks probably dreaded most was so often the most beautifully decorated in the entire monastery.
Step into 14th-century England—start reading The Draychester Chronicles today.