University of Virginia Library

V.7.2

CORNER FIREPLACES WITH CHIMNEYS

A PREROGATIVE OF HIGHER-RANKING MEMBERS
OF THE MONASTIC COMMUNITY

In addition to the central open fireplace which forms the
primary—and in the majority of houses, the only—source
of heat, some of the guest and service buildings are provided
with another device for heating individual rooms. Its
symbol is an ovoid loop (fig. 371 A and B) always found in
the corner of a room. In the Abbot's House, it is designated

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL

371.A ABBOT'S HOUSE

371.B HOUSE FOR DISTINGUISHED GUESTS

CORNER FIREPLACES

Corner fireplaces with chimney stacks are installed in double-storied structures and
in houses where the seclusion of separate living or bedrooms deprives occupants of
the heat of the central fireplace (as in the House for Distinguished Guests).

as caminata. Caminata (short, presumably, for camera
caminata) is the medieval word for a room that has its own
fireplace (caminus).[242] In this sense the term is used to indicate
the bedrooms for distinguished guests (caminata cum
lectis; fig. 371B) and the bedroom in the Porter's lodging
(caminata portarii). By contrast, in the Abbot's living room
as well as his bedroom, both of which are heated by corner
fireplaces, the word caminata is inscribed into the interior
of the loop-shaped symbol that indicates the presence of
these heating devices, and therefore must have been used,
in these two instances, as synonyms for caminus, i.e. the fireplace
itself.

Individual fireplaces indicated in this way on the Plan
are found either in buildings having no central hearth, or
in rooms separated from the common hall by wall partitions
for the sake of greater privacy. Such fireplaces were the
prerogative of the higher ranking members of the monastic
polity and of the sick. They are primarily associated with
masonry structures. Besides appearing in the Abbot's
House, they are also found in the living quarters of the
monastic officials next in rank: the Porter, the Master of

the Outer School, the Master of the Novitiate, the Master
of the Infirmary, and the Master of the Hospice for Pilgrims
and Paupers.[243] For reasons of health they occur in
all the sick wards (Novitiate, Infirmary, House for Bloodletting,
House of the Physicians). They are found with less
frequency in the guest and service buildings. Here again
their presence is determined by considerations of rank or
functional necessity. We find them in the bedrooms of the
noblemen in the House for Distinguished Guests, in the
bedrooms of the Physician and the Gardener. Conversely,
they never occur in the buildings that accommodate the
humbler members of the monastic community. They are
completely absent from the houses for the workmen and
craftsmen, the Hospice for Pilgrims and Paupers, and the
houses that shelter serfs or livestock and their keepers.

ETYMOLOGY AND SHAPE SUGGEST DERIVATION
FROM THE OVEN

Caminus comes from the Greek κάμινος, which meant an
"oven, furnace, or kiln for smelting, baking, or burning

[ILLUSTRATION]

373. LE PUY-EN-VELAY (HAUTE-LOIRE), FRANCE

WALL FIREPLACE, 12TH CENTURY

One of the earliest and most elegant of the surviving medieval fireplaces, it is set
against a flat wall, its conical hood constructed with consummate skill supported by
cusped brackets rising from two short columns.

earthenware and bricks."[244] In classical Latin the term
apparently had come to mean "a furnace which supplies
the heat for a room or an apartment."[245] On the Plan of St.
Gall it is used in this sense in connection with the large
firing chambers (caminus ad calefaciendü) of the hypocausts
which heated the Monks' Dormitory and Warming Room
as well as the living and sleeping quarters of the novices and
the sick. In medieval Latin caminus is the standard term for
a wall or corner fireplace with a chimney, as may be inferred
from Old High German glossaries, where it is translated
both by "oven" (ofan) and "chimney" (scorenstein).[246] The
etymology of the term caminus—its original meaning of
"kiln" or "oven" and its eventual change to mean chimney
(French: cheminée; German: Kamin)—suggests that the
medieval wall or corner fireplace is, developmentally, an
offspring of the baker's oven or potter's kiln. This assumption
makes sense for functional as well as etymological
reasons. When the fire was moved against the wall, it had
to be enclosed, and the age-old solution for enclosing a fire
was the ovoid or round oven of the baker or potter. When
the baking oven had, in this manner, been transformed into

[ILLUSTRATION]

374. FRANKFURT-AM-MAIN, GERMANY

RÖMERTURM, CORNER FIREPLACE, 13TH CENTURY

The hood has the shape of a beehive. Other examples of this design are found
in the Berchfried of Castle Schönburg, near Naumburg (by some ascribed to the
11th century) and in the Berchfried of Petersberg near Freisach (see Piper,
1895, figs. 476 and 480).

a heating unit that formed an integral part of the living
room, the proper functioning of the fire and the health of
the people whom it served required a smoke flue. At precisely
what point in history this feature was introduced is
as yet uncertain.

[ILLUSTRATION]

375. PLAN OF ST. GALL. CORNER FIREPLACE

HOUSE FOR DISTINGUISHED GUESTS

Our reconstruction of the corner fireplaces in the bedrooms of the guests is
related to the design of the chimney shown in fig. 373. The hood masonry rests
on a lintel fashioned by contilevered curved stones seated deep in the masonry,
separated on corbels likewise deeply embedded. A voussior as illustrated, or a
joint, may occur at center.

TIME OF INVENTION OR ADOPTION
IS PROBLEMATIC

Moritz Heyne[247] and Joseph Schepers[248] ascribe its invention
to the Romans, but this supposition has recently
been shattered by André Parrot's extraordinary discovery
of two fireplaces from the bathrooms of the Palace of Mari
in Mesopotamia, which date from the beginning of the
second millennium B.C. (fig. 372).[249]

The smoke flues of these fireplaces consist of conical
hoods encasing a vertical stack of tubular flue tiles, with an
opening at the bottom for the fire which burned on a platform
that formed a quarter of a circle. Hence the Romans
cannot claim to be the first inventors of this device. They
may have rediscovered it, but until a chimney-type Roman
corner fireplace has actually been excavated—and so far no
one has had the good fortune to find one—even this assumption
must remain hypothetical. Conversely, it must be
stressed that wall or corner fireplaces with chimneys were
not a feature characteristic of Germanic house construction,
and were not known at all in the northernmost areas
held by Germanic peoples. We know this is so not only
because of hundreds of house sites that have actually been

[ILLUSTRATION]

377. SANNAP, HALLAND, SWEDEN

[after Erixon, 1947, 426, fig. 545]

CORNER FIREPLACE WITH OVEN
SURMOUNTED BY CONICAL
HOOD

excavated, but also because, when chimneys were finally
introduced at the Norwegian court during the reign of Olaf
Kyrre (1067-93), this was an event so unusual that it was
considered worthy of being recorded in Snorri's Lives of the
Kings of Norway: "It was an old custom in Norway that
the King's high seat was in the middle of the long bench.
The ale was borne round the fire. King Olaf was the first
to install corner fireplaces."[250] (Ofnstofur, the Old Norse
term, like the Latin caminus retains etymological consciousness
of the fact that the masonry fireplace is an offspring of
the oven !) Iceland resisted this innovation even longer. The
first masonry-built Icelandic wall fireplace was constructed
in 1316, in the timbered hall of Bishop Laurentius at
Hólar.[251]

EARLIEST VISUAL & LITERARY EVIDENCE
IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE

The Plan of St. Gall, to the best of my knowledge, offers
the earliest visual evidence of the use in Europe of corner
fireplaces with chimneys. Literary evidence, however, of
such heating devices in individual rooms goes back as far
as the sixth century. In 584, in connection with a donation
to the church of St.-Marcellus ad Cabillonum (Châlons-sur-Saône),

[ILLUSTRATION]

378. MUSEÉ CONDÉ, CHANTILLY,
FRANCE

LES TRÈS RICHES HEURES DE JEAN DE
FRANCE DUC DE BERRY.

FEBRUARY: DETAIL.

The miniature depicts rural life during the month of
February, portraying a snow covered landscape with a
farmhouse, a pigeon house and a stack of beehives. Inside
the farmhouse the mistress and two servants warm themselves
before a crackling fire. The hood and mantle of the fire
place are built in masonry. The chimney shaft is braided
in wicker-work, presumably daubed inside to prevent it
from catching fire.

The manuscript, one of the finest of its kind, was illuminated
between 1411 and 1416 by Pol de Limburg, the most
distinguished of a small group of Flemish artists who,
trained in the tradition of French illumination of the
fourteenth century, under the inspiration of contemporary
Italian painting laid the foundations for the realistic style of
the brothers van Eyck.

the Frankish king Gunthram I directed the
construction of a royal guesthouse (hospitole), the description
of which (solarium cum caminata and lobia, galleried
porch) is strikingly reminiscent of both the Abbot's House
on the Plan of St. Gall and the royal residence at Anappes
of the Brevium exempla.[252]

EARLIEST EXTANT MEDIEVAL
CORNER FIREPLACES

The earliest extant Continental chimneys date from the
twelfth century. They form niches in the masonry walls and
are surmounted by conical hoods often braced at the sides
by pillars and brackets. They are usually constructed on a
full circular plan, the heating chamber forming the rearward,
and the hood the forward, segment of the circle. Two
typical examples of this species, dating from the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, respectively, are found in Le Puyen-Velay
(Haute-Loire), France (fig. 373)[253] and the so-called

[ILLUSTRATION]

379.A SAALBURG, HESSE, GERMANY. FORTIFIED ROMAN FRONTIER CAMP

"PILLARED" HYPOCAUST [after Fusch, 1910, pl. xv]

Although slow in making warmth felt in the rooms served
by the system, the hypocaust had the great advantage,
once the building was warmed by convection and
conduction, of providing through radiation from walls and
floor an even temperature for long periods of time, in
relatively large spaces, using only a small amount of fuel.
Ideally suited for the large warm and hot rooms of
Roman baths, the hypocaust was used in the northern
provinces of Rome almost universally in private homes.

Römerturm in Frankfurt a.M., Germany (fig. 374).[254]
This hooded circular fireplace, in my opinion, is the type
that the draftsman of the Plan had in mind when he used
ovoid symbols for the private heating units of the leading
monastic officials and the monastery's distinguished guests
(fig. 375). In this connection attention must be drawn to
certain oven-shaped corner fireplaces still in use today in
rural buildings of Sweden, two typical examples of which
are given in figure 376 and 377.[255] Both of these are, in fact,
oven and fireplace combined.

I do not doubt that the corner fireplaces of the Plan of
St. Gall were intended to be built in masonry, although
there is evidence for the existence in the Middle Ages of
fireplaces with wooden hoods. A group of wooden chimneys,
mounted on frames of oak and filled with wattle and
daub, was published in Nathaniel Lloyd's History of the
English House.[256] We may assume that fireplaces constructed
entirely of wood or of both wood and stone were equally
common on the Continent, because of their appearance in
late medieval manuscripts and paintings. A typical example
of this mixed technique is the fireplace of the farmer's
house in the charming winter landscape of the February
representation of Jean de France's Très Riches Heures (fig.
378),[257] and an example of a fireplace built entirely of wood
is the one at the rear wall of a wooden cottage in the Livre du
Cuer d'Amours Espris of René, Duke of Anjou.[258] These
medieval wall and corner fireplaces with wooden chimneys
were, in my opinion, not an original conception, but rather
an adaptation to Northern building materials, performed on
a relatively humble social level, of a heating device that
formed no part of the Northern building tradition.

WESTWARD DIFFUSION FROM THE NEAR EAST
BY-PASSING ROME?

Roman custom of heating a house or its individual apartments
by means of hypocausts stands in marked contrast
to the open fire that burned on the floor of the Germanic
house. The Roman heating unit was not only enclosed; it
was concealed. The medieval open chimney combined the
advantages of both; the fire was enclosed, as in the Roman
type, and yet it was visible, as in the Germanic open fireplace.
We do not know exactly when or where this combination

[ILLUSTRATION]

379.B ST.-REMY, BOUCHES-DU-RHÔNE (NEAR ARLES), FRANCE

RUINS OF A "PILLARED" HYPOCAUST IN A HOUSE OF THE ROMAN SETTLEMENT OF GLANUM

These two illustrations show typical use of the Roman
hypocaust system in houses of transalpine Europe. No
Roman villa of any significance in the vast stretches of
land that extended from Provence to the borders of
Scotland lacked such a facility.

first took place. One might be tempted to guess that
it occurred in an area where Roman and Germanic culture
merged. But Parrot's discovery of corner fireplaces with
chimneys in the Mesopotamian Palace of Mari, dating as
early as the beginning of the second millennium B.C., suggests
that we have to contend with a third influence, from
the East. It is possible that the medieval wall or corner
fireplace is a Near Eastern idea, cast into Roman masonry
in Merovingian times, which permitted the installation of
open fires in individual rooms, without endangering the
safety of the building. Perhaps it was the close ties established
between the Near East and the West through the
monastic conquest of Merovingian Europe, in the fifth
century, as well as the ubiquitous presence in the ports and
inland cities of Gaul of Syrian, Egyptian and Jewish tradesmen
that opened up the channels for the westward diffusion
of this heating device which seems to have bypassed
Rome.[259]

[ILLUSTRATION]

380. SILCHESTER, HAMPSHIRE, ENGLAND

Roman hypocaust of the channeled type. The floor of the room is removed to reveal the hypocaust substructure. This system, although not
quite so common, was as widely diffused as the pillared type.

[after Joyce, 1881, pl. vii]