Cistercian monasteries this area under the dormitory was put to various uses: sometimes it provided accommodation for the novices and in other instances it appears to have been utilized as a workshop.¹¹ On the upper floor, the dormitory itself would have extended over the full length of the range, passing above the chapter house up to the south transept.

THE REREDORTER AND DRAIN
   The sanitary arrangements at Boxley seem to have been similar to those at Kirkstall and Valle Crucis where instead of the latrines being housed as usual in a building projecting at right-angles to the end of the dormitory, they were situated in the end of the east range itself with a drain passing beneath.’¹²  At Boxley the drain is well preserved, its course continuing some distance to the east where it is covered by a pointed barrel vault. Water was conducted from a source to the north, where rivulets still run in the fields, and made to flow westward through the vaulted drain. Immediately on the line of the east face of the dormitory range there is a constriction in the drain with vertical grooves on each side where a wooden sluice-gate held back the water before it passed beneath the latrines (Fig. 2). When the gate was raised from above, the water flowed with sudden force to scour the area under the privies, apparently escaping into a ditch running southward for about sixty yards into an existing 

pond. Surface indications of this ditch remain in the field between the pond and the Abbey. In the wall forming the south side of the drain are openings to provide access for the purpose of removing accumulated silt.

THE REFECTORY
  Most Cistercian plans indicate a refectory lying at right-angles to the south side of the cloister, though until the middle cf the twelfth century this building occupied the Benedictine position opposite the church and parallel to it. Where the older plan had been adopted it was almost invariably altered in the late-twelfth or thirteenth centuries and Boxley appears to have been a notable exception in this respect. Neither a resistivity survey nor trenching in positions where a north-south refectory would have stood produced any positive indications.
   The north wall is original, except for external re-facing, and retains two ancient doorways. The one to the west has a weathered chalk internal jamb on the west side with evidence of modern rebuilding opposite. Its two-centred doorcase (Plate IIA) is an insertion, probably
  ¹¹  Ibid., ii, 74.
   ¹²  Aubert (op. cit., ii, frontispiece) shows the Boxley arrangement as typical in his ‘Plan Type des Bâtinients réguliers d’une Abbaye cistercienne’.

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