Friary

The friary is a settlement housing a community of male population, with buildings and open spaces enclosed by a precinct wall. The religion was based around preaching, evangelism and learning. Documentary evidence and archaeological evidence has been able to show us the layout of the buildings that consisted of church, nave, choir, aisles cloister and tower also a chapter house, dormitory, kitchen, refectory. Library, priors lodgings and guesthouse. The precinct may have stables, orchards, wells and tanneries and workshops. The friary did not have granges unlike the monasteries in medieval England as they relied on financial and material gifts from the outside world.

The English friaries include the Franciscans (Greyfriars), Dominicans (Blackfriars), Austin Friars and Carmelites (Whitefriars), whilst a small number of houses for Franciscan and Dominican nuns were established in the fourteenth century. Friary means encompasses foundations of several orders. The popular one in the British Isles was the Franciscans, who had forty houses before 1240 and soon built up a number to sixty. The Dominicans had twenty houses by 1240, eventually had around fifty. Archaeological excavations of frairies have been acute and fully published such as Austin Friars, Leicester, the Dominican Priory, Oxford and Dominican Friary, Guildford. Autin Friars Liecester Plan of the Friary

The excavations of friaries sites often in many cases uncover areas of cemetery, with their skeletons, pins, and coffin nails and in some cases wooden or stone coffins. Whilst this can show us the diet and health of the community and how they may have died the building rubble can be very informative of how the building was layout, many do contain tiles, building rubble from the demolition, floor tiles and slate. Often we would expect to find window glass and window lead. Small finds from friary sites include: imported and domestic pottery, wooden vessels, coins and jetons, pewter patens and church plate, copper alloy cooking utensils, jewellery and seal matrices, iron keys, buckles and horse equipment, lead spindle whorls, imported glass vessels, ceramic figurines, worked bone handles, and whetstones.

The construction of the friaries was varied with the wealth of individual houses and availability of material to hand. The church was constructed first like with nearly all monasteries and built of stone; many friaries may have maintained domestic ranges of timber or half-timber construction Pontefract. Its seems that most of the stone was generally of rubble masonry with ashlar dressing to quoins and windows. The excavations at Guilford have been able to show us that the walls were of chalk block construction faced externally with flint and internally with plaster. We also have archaeological evidence of wooden roofs for example Gloucester.

More about the Friary coming very soon

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