What is a medieval bakehouse?

Answer 1

A bakehouse was more or less a communal place to bake bread. Could be a whole building, or just a room within a building. Landlords often built the bakehouses to avoid adding the feature to every living place. Some survived until the early to 1900's. They worked like the one miller who ground grain for a whole village, or blacksmith that did repair work for th whole villiage.

Answer 2

A cookhouse was a kitchen in a separate building.

Large manors, castles, and monasteries often had separate kitchens. The reason for this was partly that the people of most of the Middle Ages did not have chimneys, and had no good ways to vent large kitchens except to have them outdoors or in separate buildings with very large, open windows. Roasting large cuts of meat, such as a quarter of an ox, required a large fire, and they did not want to do this in a main building.

Smaller kitchens also existed. Baking was often done in outdoor ovens, or in separate bakeries. Preparation of other foods was often done in small kitchens within the main building, and in these there was often a smoke canopy over the fire to gather the smoke and vent it through the wall.

The cookhouses were usually regarded as temporary buildings, and very few of them remain. I saw one once, in an English monastery, but I never saw any others. (I wish I could remember where the cookhouse was, so I could document it, but alas...)