University of Virginia Library

V.8.6

HOUSE FOR DISTINGUISHED GUESTS

THE KING'S CLAIM ON MONASTIC HOSPITALITY

To the north of the Church in a large enclosure, which
forms the counterpart to the court of the Hospice for
Pilgrims and Paupers, is a house whose elaborate layout
reveals it to be a guesthouse for visitors of unusual stature.
It is here that the traveling emperor or king was received,
his court or his agents (missi), and also, perhaps, the visiting
bishops and abbots.

The king's right to draw on the hospitality of the monasteries
for food and quarters while traveling dates back to
the early days of the introduction of monastic life in transalpine
Europe. But the use that the rulers made of it in the
time of the Carolingians was considerably more burdensome
than it had been under the Merovingians.[305] Ever-changing
political necessities, the protection of the boundaries, the
maintenance of peace in the interior, prevented the emperor
from establishing a permanent residence. "Performing his
high craft by constantly shifting around,"[306] he moved from
one of his royal estates to the other—making full use of the
obligations of the abbots and bishops to provide him with
lodging—according to the circumstances that his itinerary
imposed upon him, or simply in response to the necessity
of finding additional subsistance for himself and his court.
The primary motivations for such visits were not always of
an economic or military nature. Gauert's analysis of
Charlemagne's itinerary has shown that the emperor's general
travel schedule often had embedded in it a special
"Gebetsitinerar," at times involving lengthy detours for
visits to religious places where the emperor went primarily
for the purpose of prayer, to participate in important religious
festivals, or to venerate the local saints.[307] The heaviness
of the economic obligations that a monastery took upon
itself on such occasions depended on the frequency of the
visits, the length of the emperor's stay, and the size of his
retinue. Charlemagne and Louis the Pious availed themselves
of monastic hospitality with discretion; under the
later Carolingian kings the burden became heavier.[308] But
even as early as the second decade of the ninth century the
sum of monastic obligations in hospitality had reached proportions
so heavy as to drive the witty abbot Theodulf,
Bishop of Orléans, to remark desperately that had St.
Benedict known how many would come, "he would have
locked the doors before them."[309]

THEIR MAGNITUDE: A REFLECTION OF THE CLOSE
ALLIANCE OF CHURCH AND STATE

The Plan of St. Gall provides for four separate houses
for the reception of royal visitors: 1, a house for the emperor
and his immediate entourage; 2, an ancillary building
containing the kitchen, bake, and brewing facilities pertaining
to this house; 3, a House for Visiting Servants; and,
if my interpretation is correct, 4, a house for the emperor's
vassals and others of knightly rank traveling in the emperor's
train. Plans, sections, reconstructions, and authors'
interpretations for these facilities are shown in figures
396-406.

The total surface area taken up by these houses and their
surrounding courts amounted to 1,360 square feet, or a
little over one-fifth of the surface area of the entire monastery
complex.

The presence of obligatory royal quarters of such magnitude
within the precincts of the monastery is a reflection of
the close alliance that had been struck in the kingdom of the
Franks between the concepts of regnum and sacerdotium, a
development that started with the sanctioning of the Carolingian
house by Pope Zacharias in 751 and reached its
apex with the coronation of Charlemagne in the year 800.
As the appointed successor of the emperors of Rome,
Charlemagne had taken upon himself not only the duty of
protecting the Church in a physical sense, but also the
obligation of safe-guarding its institutions, regulating the
life and education of the clergy, and even ruling in questions
of liturgy and dogma.[310] It is fully understandable that
within the context of a political philosophy so replete with
religious overtones the emperor's presence in the monastery
was as yet not considered a worldly infraction on
monastic peace and seclusion.

THE MAIN HOUSE

Layout and function

The general purpose of the House for Distinguished
Guests is defined by a hexameter which reads:

The conjunction quoque suggests that the building holds a
position of secondary importance with regard to another
facility for guests, which can only be the Hospice for Pilgrims
and Paupers. The modest slant of this verse is obviously
a reflection of the warning given by St. Benedict
that the hospitality accorded to the poor lies on a higher
plane of religious devotion than that extended to the rich.[312]
But the profuse attention lavished on the internal layout of
the House for Distinguished Guests tends to defy this
thought.

The House is 67½ feet long and 55 feet wide. It has as its
principal room a large rectangular hall, which its explanatory
title defines as the "dining hall of the guests" (domus
hospitū ad prandendum). Access to this is gained through a

[ILLUSTRATION]

402. PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR SERVANTS OF OUTLYING ESTATES AND FOR SERVANTS

TRAVELING WITH THE EMPEROR'S COURT (NOT CERTAIN: cf. BUILDING 34)

The house is one of four identical buildings located to the right of the entrance
road where most of the monastery's livestock is kept. Its large central hall, like
those of many other buildings of this group, is referred to as DOMUS, a term used
by the drafters of the Plan not to designate the entire house (as its classical usage
would prescribe), but as a name for the common living room where men gather
around the open fireplace for conversation and meals. The spaces in the aisles
and under the lean-to's are used for sleeping and for the stabling of livestock.

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL

403.C

403.D EAST ELEVATION AND TRANSVERSE SECTION

403.B LONGITUDINAL SECTION

The criteria for reconstructing this house are identical
with those which guided that of the Hospice for
Pilgrims and Paupers (figs. 393.A-E) and the House
for Distinguished Guests (figs. 397.A-F). Being
smaller and of more modest purpose, there is no reason
to assume that any part of the house was built in
masonry, beyond (as sound construction would suggest)
its foundation and a shallow plinth of stones protecting
the roof-supporting timbers against the dampness of the
ground. The traditional building material for this
type of house was timber for all its structural members,
wattle-and-daub for the walls, and shingles or shakes
for the roof.

403.A PLAN

HOUSE FOR SERVANTS OF OUTLYING ESTATES AND FOR SERVANTS TRAVELING WITH THE EMPEROR'S COURT
AUTHORS' INTERPRETATION

[ILLUSTRATION]

404. PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR KNIGHTS AND VASSALS IN THE EMPEROR'S FOLLOWING

Its identification must remain tentative, for the lines and titles of this building were erased in the 12th century by a monk who wrote a Life
of St. Martin on the verso of the Plan, spilling the last 22 lines of text onto the plan of this house. The few fragments of titles that escaped
his knife were obliterated in the 19th century by an attempt to restore them with a chemical substance that left only coarse blotches on the
parchment wherever it was applied.

[ILLUSTRATION]

405. PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR KNIGHTS AND VASSALS IN THE EMPEROR'S FOLLOWING

X-rays revealed the outlines of a colossal variant of the standard house of the Plan, with an entrance in one narrow side. Comparison with
other similar buildings leaves no doubt that the large center room was intended as a common hall for living and dining, with peripheral spaces
serving partly for bedrooms, partly for stables.

[ILLUSTRATION]

406.A PLAN OF ST. GALL

HOUSE FOR KNIGHTS AND VASSALS WHO TRAVEL IN THE EMPEROR'S FOLLOWING. AUTHORS' INTERPRETATION

"vestibule" (ingressus) which lies in the middle of the
southern aisle of the house. The dining hall has in its center
a large quadrangular "fireplace" (locus foci) and in the
corners, ranged all around the circumference, benches and
"tables" (mensae), plus two "cupboards" (toregmata[313] ) for
the storage of cups and tableware. Under the lean-to's at
each of the narrow ends of the house there are the "bedrooms"
for the distinguished guests (caminatae cum lectis),
four in all, each furnished with its own corner fireplace and
its own projecting privy (necessariü). The rooms to the left
and right of the entrance in the southern aisle of the house
serve as "quarters for the servants" (cubilia seruitorum),
while two corresponding rooms in the northern aisle are
used as "stables for the horses" (stabula caballorum). Their
cribs (praesepia) are arranged against the outer walls. A
small vestibule between the two stables gives access to a
covered passage that leads to a large privy (exitus neces-
sarius). The latter covers a surface area of 10 by 45 feet and
is furnished with no fewer than eighteen toilet seats—an
indication of the extraordinary sanitary precautions that,
at the time of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious, must have
been taken for the persons who traveled in the emperor's
immediate entourage.[314]

I have already drawn attention to the fact that the stables
for the horses have no direct access from the exterior. The
entire house has only one entrance, and in order to reach
their stables the horses had to be led through the central
dining hall. This suggests that all the rooms of the house
were on ground level and that the floor of the center room
was made of stamped clay rather than of a boarding of wood.
The large open fireplace in the center of the dining room
makes it unequivocably clear that this house was not a
double-storied structure.[315]

[ILLUSTRATION]

406.B

By making the center hall of this building 45 feet wide by 60 feet long, the drafters of the Plan pushed the structural capabilities of the aisled
Germanic all-purpose house to its limits. Spans of 45 feet, rare even in church construction, were unheard-of in domestic architecture. We
know of only one other medieval building of even comparable dimensions: the barn of the abbey grange of Parçay-Meslay, France (figs. 352-355)
at a width of 80 feet. But the vast roof of that barn is supported, not by the traditional two, but by four rows of freestanding inner posts.
We do not believe that the roof of the House for Knights and Vassals could have been supported successfully by less posting and have therefore
introduced in our reconstruction two additional rows of posts, that reduce the center span of the inner hall from 45 to a more conventional
27 feet.

Incorporating the doubled rows of posting is not in conflict with methods of architectural rendering employed by the drafters of the Plan.
They were not concerned with constructional details, but primarily with establishing the boundaries of each building on the site in terms of its
function and its components. The size of a royal retinue—including its servants, grooms, bodyguard, as well as the principals themselves—
justifies the tentative identification of this house.

In this, as in other buildings of the Plan, details of construction engineering were left to be resolved by the ingenuity of a master builder who
would determine in what ways a building conceived for the purpose of housing up to 40 men and 30 horses, and their attendants, could be
realized as functional architecture. The interaction of planners with builders is elsewhere attested on the Plan, wherever features obviously
intended and needed are absent: staircases, doors and windows, and others (see I. 13, 65ff).

The main point of interest, we believe, in our investigation of this particular building is that the prevailing building type of the Plan of St. Gall,
the three-aisled hall—without loss of the essence of its character—adapts with ease and dignity and possibly with some elegance, to a building of
relatively inordinate size through the device of adding an aisle between the central main space of the nave, and each of the lean-to side aisles.
In effect, a five-aisled hall is thus formed (see fig. 354.A, B, Parçay-Meslay, and Les Halles, Côte St. André, Isère, France).

Materials and mode of construction

In contrast to the Abbot's House,[316] whose typological
roots lie in the South, the House for Distinguished Guests,
as has been demonstrated, is a descendant of a strictly
Northern building type. It may have been built entirely
in wood, or it may have had its circumference walls constructed
in masonry. In our reconstructions (figs. 397-399)
we have chosen this latter solution in order to demonstrate
the possibility of mixed materials on this higher social level
of building. In the interior the roof must have been supported
by two parallel rows of wooden posts, framed into
weight- and thrust-resisting trusses with the aid of tie
beams and post plates. If the roof belonged to the purlin
family of roofs, its basic design cannot have differed greatly
from what we have suggested in figures 397 and 398. For
the thirteenth century this type of roof is well attested, at
least on the Continent, as has been demonstrated by the
examples discussed above on pages 88ff. It may have been
as common in Carolingian times.

That royal timber houses with masonry walls existed in
Carolingian times is known through the Brevium exempla,
for it is doubtlessly to this mixture of materials that the
author of this work refers, when describing the domus
regalis of one of his anonymous crown estates as a house that
was "externally built in stone, and inside all in timber"
(exterius ex lapide et interius ex ligno bene constructam).[317]

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL

406.C

NORTH ELEVATION

HOUSE FOR KNIGHTS AND VASSALS WHO TRAVEL IN THE EMPEROR'S FOLLOWING

Separation of common & private rooms

The internal layout of the House for Distinguished
Guests (fig. 398) is historically of particular interest, as it
shows that at the beginning of the ninth century the timbered
royal hall was sufficiently partitioned internally to
allow the lord to withdraw from the ranks of his followers
to the privacy of separate bedrooms. Dining was still a
communal function. But the establishment of individual
fireplaces with chimneys in the lord's private chambers
made the latter independent from the open fire in the floor
of the hall. Architecturally speaking, this means that the
private bedrooms under the lean-to's at each end of the
hall could have been screened off from the rest of the
building, not only by vertical wall partitions (as they most
certainly were), but also by their own individual ceilings.
If ceilings were installed, the walls required windows,
since ceilings would have deprived the bedrooms of the
principal source of light for the house—the louver over the
fireplace in the ridge of the roof of the hall. The quarters
of the servants, on the other hand, cannot have been provided
with ceilings, since they depended for warmth on the
heat furnished by the communal fire in the center hall.

Housing capacity

The House for Distinguished Guests can accommodate
eight visitors of rank in four separate rooms, each of which
is furnished with two beds, two benches, and a corner
fireplace.[318] These are the rooms for the emperor, the empress,
or any other members of the imperial family who
accompanied the emperor on his travels, and some of the
highest ranking ministers and councilors who were part of
the emperor's permanent staff. The rooms for the servants
in the southern aisle of the house have a bedding capacity
for eighteen men. This is the number of beds of standard
size that could be set up for the servants if they were ranged
peripherally along the walls of their rooms (nine in each).
Eighteen also happens to be the number of toilet seats
available in the servant's privy. The two stables in the
northern aisle of the house can accommodate four horses

[ILLUSTRATION]

406.D

TRANSVERSE SECTION

HOUSE FOR KNIGHTS AND VASSALS WHO TRAVEL IN THE EMPEROR'S FOLLOWING

each (figuring for each horse a standing area 5 feet wide and
7½ feet long). These must have been the mounts of the distinguished
guests, since their number corresponds exactly
to the number of beds available in the latter's private
chambers.

Even the seating capacity of the dining room is closely
correlated with the total number of men who can be accommodated
in the House for Distinguished Guests. The
eastern or upper end of the hall is furnished with two short
straight tables, each capable of seating four of the eight
distinguished guests (if we attribute to each of them a sitting
area 2½ feet wide). The western or lower end has longer,
L-shaped tables with sufficient sitting space to take care of
the eighteen servants.

Number and composition of officers of state
in the emperor's train

There are no conclusive studies on the number or composition
of the officers of state who accompanied the emperor
on his travels.[319] From Hincmar's account of Adalhard
of Corbie's De Ordine Imperii,[320] it appears that the central
administrative body of the Carolingian court consisted of a
staff of six leading functionaries, who by the very definition
of their office were part and parcel of the emperor's personal
entourage, viz., the Seneschal (senescalcus, literally,
"the old servant") who was in charge of provisions and
especially those of the royal table; the Butler (buticularius),

[ILLUSTRATION]

406.E PLAN OF ST. GALL

EAST ELEVATION

HOUSE FOR KNIGHTS AND VASSALS WHO TRAVEL IN THE EMPEROR'S FOLLOWING

responsible for drink; the Chamberlain (camerarius) in
charge of lodging and the royal treasury; the Constable
(comes stabuli) in charge of horses and all other means of
transportation; the Count Palatine (comes palatinus), the
primary officer in charge of the empire's judiciary administration;
and last but not least, the Arch Chaplain (summus
capellanus), the emperor's primary advisor in ecclesiastical
and educational matters, whose office later became absorbed
in that of the Chancellor (summus sacri palatii cancellarius).[321]
Readiness for action involving the state and the imperial
household in its entirety would have required the presence
of all these men. But it is well known that the holders of
these offices were often away from the court in the summer
on special missions.[322] The House for Distinguished Guests,
nevertheless, would have been equipped to accommodate
all these men besides the emperor himself, plus his wife or
one of his children. How many members of his family he
was wont to have with him when traveling is another
question for which we have no ready answer. "Charlemagne,"
we are told by Einhard, "cared so deeply for the
training of his children that he never took his meal without
them when he was at home, and never made a journey
without them."[323] Although this could scarcely have applied
to all the seven sons and daughters[324] that Einhard ascribes
to Charlemagne, it would still suggest that the traveling
emperor was frequently accompanied by one or another of
his sons and daughters.[325] When Louis the Pious stayed in
St. Gall in 857, his sons Karlmann and Karl III were with
him.[326] This is about all that seems to be known on this
subject.

The Plan of St. Gall may actually help us here to close a
gap of knowledge. It discloses that at the time of Louis the
Pious a monastery was expected to be capable of taking care
of a royal party consisting of eight dignitaries of state or
members of the imperial family, their mounts, and eighteen
of their personal servants. In later centuries the figure may
have been considerably larger. The Consuetudinary of
Farfa—in reality the customs of Cluny (written between

1030 and 1048)—prescribed for that monastery a guest
house for forty male and thirty female members of the
emperor's train, plus a stable capable of sheltering some
150 horses.[327] Yet conditions at Cluny were probably
unusual. A fulcrum of revival and reform among the
monasteries of France and unbelievably rich, the abbey
was already well on its way toward wedging itself as an
arbitrating spiritual force into the interplay between the
secular and the ecclesiastical powers of the period.

Other supporting forces

Even in the ninth century, nevertheless, a guest house
with a bedding capacity of eight distinguished guests, their
horses, and eighteen of their servants, is not likely to have
been capable of accommodating the whole of the emperor's
permanent train. To be protected, the king needed a bodyguard.
Such a guard of mounted knights would not necessarily
have had to be very large, yet it is unlikely to have
consisted of fewer than twenty or thirty men. They, too, and
their horses would have to be provided with quarters. One
would have to expect, additionally, a small train of wagons
with emergency rations, kitchens, tents, and other equipment
indispensable to the movement of the court. This
involved another troup of servants who would also have to
be sheltered. The Plan of St. Gall shows two buildings that
may have performed that function, located at the gate of the
monastery in the immediate vicinity of the House for Distinguished
Guests. But before we turn to them, some attention
must be paid to the kitchen, bake, and brewing facilities
of the House for Distinguished Guests.

KITCHEN, BAKE AND BREW HOUSE FOR
THE DISTINGUISHED GUESTS

The main portion of this structure, which covers an area
roughly 50 by 55 feet (figs. 396, 400-401), is identical
with that of the Bake and Brew House for Pilgrims and
Paupers (fig. 392). But its outside appearance must have
been quite different, as it had attached to it on the side facing
the House for Distinguished Guests, two large rectangular
rooms (17½ feet by 22½ feet); one of which served as the
guests' kitchen (culina hospitū), the other as "larder"
(promptuariū). The kitchen stove, a square of 5 by 5 feet, is
subdivided into four cooking areas by two median lines that
bisect it at right angles. The principal space of the house,
measuring 20 by 55 feet, contains in its southern half the
"bakery" (pistrinum) with its "oven" (fornax), two kneading
troughs (not designated as such by inscriptions), and
all around the periphery of the room, the indispensable
tables for the shaping and laying out of the loaves. The
northern half contains the brew house (domus conficiendae
celiae) with fires and coppers for malting the grain (fig.
401A). The aisle in the rear of the house is subdivided into
two equal parts, each serving as an accessory to the work
carried on in the corresponding portion of the principal
space of the house. The room near the bakery is designated
as "the place where dough is made [by mingling flour with
water]" (interndae pastae locus) and for that purpose it is
furnished with a long trough and a circular vat. The other
near the brewery, is described as the place where the brew is
"cooled" (hic refrigeratur ceruisa). It is equipped with two
smaller troughs that stand on either side of a circular vat.