Abbot John's atelier (where I went today)

I think you’d like Abbot John’s atelier — his work room. There’s a big oak table, very well used. It looks as if it’s been there a long time. It has plenty of ink stains, that I sometimes glimpse between stacks of letters and scraps of vellum with notes on. He has an ink horn in a stand, a small container of sand, two quill pens, his seal and a sack of sealing wax, some vellum to write on, a breviary and a missal, with a gospel on top of them. I told you it was a big table! 

There’s a candle on his table too, securely fixed in a very stable holder. The wood of the table has been polished with beeswax times beyond counting, and in fact the whole room has a vague fragrance of beeswax and woodsmoke, and the smell I can’t really describe, of stone.

It’s a spacious room, but not big. There are actually four doors leading into it (or out of it, of course). One is the way in from the cloister, one opens out onto the abbey court; then there’s a low, not very obvious, narrow door in the shadows, that goes out onto the land between the cloister buildings and the river, where there’s a small grove of silver birch.

The abbot’s chair is not especially massive or imposing —comfortable, more. He sits there long hours every day, engaged in all the study and preparation and administration to be done. There are two low stools near the hearth, and two chairs, also comfortable, but they don’t have cushions. 

The windowsills are deep and low. There’s a scribe’s desk under one window to catch the light. Around the room in half a dozen place there are candle sconces, and a hook near the cloister door for the lantern that burns through the night.

Oh — I didn’t tell you about the fourth door. I leads into what used to be Father Peregrine’s bedchamber; he needed to be all at ground level because stairs were tricky for him, and in a spacious enough room to accommodate a bed for his esquire as well. Abbot John inherited this room, but over time they changed that to be a dining room where he could receive guests; it saved moving all the stuff o his work table and re-organising the furniture all the time. So Father John has his bedchamber up that little stone staircase that opens out of his atelier and winds up to a modest sized room above. It’s nice and snug up there, built against the chimney from the abbot’s atelier, as also is the prior’s cell next door to it.

The fireplace in the abbot’s atelier is large and beautiful. I’ll find a picture from modern times to give you an idea of the kind of thing. Oh, no I can’t. Just about everything is copyrighted. Boo. Well, you’ll just have to imagine — the rough stone walls, and the amber light coming in from the western and southern sides in the afternoons (the abbot’s house is on the south-west corner of the square), and the great big stone fireplace with logs glowing on its floor and a hearth stone big enough to sit on. 

What with the fire and the candles and (depending on the time of day) the light filtering through the windows, the whole place has a kind of comforting glow, if you can imagine that. It feels peaceful and lifts care away. It's like how going home is supposed to feel.

Anyway, that was where I went today in search of Abbot John, to ask him about what Abbie wanted to know. But trying to help you imagine it has all gone on a bit long, so I’ll tell you what she said and what he said in the next post.