The interior of the church was richly decorated. The walls were plastered and painted in white and maroon with geometric patterns and lines designed to give the impression of ashlar masonry. Architectural detail was also picked out in maroon. The floors were covered in polychrome encaustic tiles. These featured foliage, heraldic beasts and coats of arms including those of England, France the Holy Roman Empire, Queen Eleanor of Castile, Richard of Cornwall and many powerful noble families. The chapels in the south transept had tiles with symbols of Edward the Confessor and the Virgin Mary. The windows of the church were filled with painted glass, six panels of which have been discovered. They show scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary, the Crucifixion, monks, monsters and humorous animals.

South of the church stands a cloister surrounded by ranges of buildings on three sides, the church forming the fourth. The cloister was the heart of the abbey, where that the monks spent most of their time when not in church, engaged in study, copying books and the creation of illuminated manuscripts. The monks' desks were placed in the north walk of the cloister, and a cupboard for books in current use was carved into the external wall of the south transept.

The east range, which was started at the same time as the church and probably took about 10 years to build, contained many of the abbey's most important rooms. The vaulted library and sacristy were on the ground floor, adjacent to the church. To the south was the chapter house, where the government of the abbey took place and the monks met to transact business and to listen to a daily reading of a chapter of the Rule of St Benedict. It was a magnificent apartment divided into three aisles with vaults springing from four columns; a stone bench ran around the walls for the monks to sit on, and the abbot's throne was in the centre of the east wall. The entrance to the chapter house from the cloister is via an elaborately moulded arched doorway, flanked on each side by a window of similar size. The windows had sills and columns of Purbeck Marble, the whole forming an impressive composition appropriate to the second most important space in the abbey after the church. The windows on either side of the door would have been unglazed, so as to allow representatives of the laybrothers (who were not members of chapter) to listen to debates. The chapter house was also used for burials, traditionally those of the abbots of a monastery. When the room was excavated, archaeologists discovered scattered human remains and evidence of graves beneath the medieval floor level, indicating that a number of people were once buried there.

The parlour lies south, an austere, barrel vaulted room little more than a passageway through the building. Here the monks could talk without disturbing the silence in the cloister, which Cistercian rules insisted on. South of this runs a long vaulted hall with a central row of pillars supporting the roof. This room was much altered over time and probably served several purposes during the life of the abbey. Initially, it may have served as the monks' day room and accommodation for novices, but as time went on it may have been converted into the misericord where the monks—initially only the sick, but by the later middle ages the whole convent—could eat meat dishes not normally allowed in the main dining hall.

Monks' dormitory - The Mistery of Netley Abbey

The Mistery of Netley Abbey - Index