“Let us see how far we have any authority for considering this building a ‘Promptuarium,’ that is, a store-room or buttery. All that Ormerod says of it is, that ‘it is a kind of crypt, consisting of a double row of circular arches, springing, with one exception, from short cylindrical columns. This building was probably used as a depository for the imported stores of the abbey, of which we may form no mean idea from a charter from the King of the Isles to the Abbot of St. Werburgh, granting ingress and egress to the vessels of the Monks of the Abbey of St. Werburgh, with sale and purchase of goods, toll free, and right of fishing upon his coasts.’ (Vol. I. page 218.) But he gives us no authority for the use ascribed to it; only his own unsupported supposition hazarded when the building was not so far cleared or intelligible as at present. The name “Promptuarium” was bestowed on it by Mr. Ashpitel when it was cleared out and restored to its present condition at the expense of the British Archæological Association, under the direction of the Local Committee, preparatory to the Congress of 1849. He derives the name from a sentence in Henry the VIII’s. charter (dividing the properties between the Bishop and the Dean and Chapter,) and speaks of this building in the _plural_, which agrees with his reading of the charter, but does not agree with the fact. He says, in his lecture on Chester Cathedral, ‘These are vaulted apartments of early Norman work, and are described in the charter of Henry VIII., by which he divides the properties between the Bishop and the Dean as _Promptuaria et Pannaria_, the former derived from a word denoting a butler or steward, probably a buttery, and the latter from _pannus_, a cloth, probably the place for clothing.’ The sentence to which Mr. Ashpitel alludes, and which he applies to this building, is the one describing the chamber which was called the “_secunda aula_”—“_nec non secundam aulam_, _seu interiorem cum suis pannariis_, _promptuariis_, _et ceteris ejusdem membris_.”