§ 72. The infirmary hall in its simplest form was an aisleless oblong, on either side of which was a row of beds. From the east side or end opened the infirmary chapel. The hall, however, was sometimes too wide to be roofed in one span without support, and consequently aisled halls became very usual, divided either by regular arcades with a clerestory above or by upright posts of wood. The beds were placed within the aisles, the nave forming a central gangway. This was a common plan in medieval hospitals, many of which were quasi-conventual establishments following the rule of St Augustine: St Mary's hospital at Chichester, a long hall running east and west, with a wooden roof of one span supported on each side of the nave by upright posts which are bound together by longitudinal trusses, and with an aisleless chapel screened off at the east end, is a famous surviving example of its use. At Ely and Canterbury the Norman infirmaries were divided by stone arcades and clerestoried; while at Gloucester and Peterborough there are substantial remains of aisled infirmaries of the thirteenth century. Most of the south aisle at Peterborough is now included in one of the canons' houses, while the chapel at the east end of the infirmary forms the dining-room of another. In the infirmary hall at Fountains, which ran north and south, with the chapel and kitchen on its eastern side, the arcades were returned across the ends, and there were large fireplaces in the end walls. A fireplace was a necessity, and, where no original fireplaces can be traced in the side or end walls, there was presumably a middle hearth, the smoke from which escaped through a louvre in the roof. As a rule the beds were arranged at right angles to the side walls. At Furness, however, where there were no arcades and the hall was lighted by windows in the upper part of the walls, the north and south walls contained a number of arched recesses near the floor, each lighted by a small window and wide enough to contain a bed with its side against the wall. Similar recesses have been noted in a portion of the east aisle of the infirmary of the lay brothers at Fountains, against the end wall of the lay brothers' rere-dorter. In later days it became the general custom to divide the aisles into separate rooms, often with their own fireplaces. This was usual by the beginning of the fifteenth century: it is known to have been done at Meaux before 1396, and there is much evidence for it in the Lincoln episcopal registers of the next fifty years. At Canterbury the south aisle was walled up before 1400 and divided into rooms as a lodging for the sub-prior. In Cistercian infirmaries, as at Fountains, Kirkstall, Tintern and Waverley, there are abundant traces of this practice. A peculiar arrangement was adopted in the fourteenth-century infirmary at Westminster, where the hall was removed and a number of separate rooms were arranged round a cloister, the aisled chapel of the hall being