The Plan of St. Gall :: :: University of Virginia Library

Attention must also be drawn to the absence of facilities
for tailors (sartores). This may suggest that the monks themselves
did the main work of cutting and tailoring clothes in
the large Vestiary that occupied the floor above the Refectory—a
conjecture that is corroborated by a remark in
Hildemar's commentary to the Rule of St. Benedict. It is
said there that the monks who are engaged in tailoring
clothes will have to disrupt their work instantly when the
bell for the divine service is struck, and must not even pull
the needle, awl, and thread (seta, literally "bristle" or
"bristly hair") out of the piece of cloth or leather on which
they are working.[434]

Lastly, it must be noted that the monastery has no
facilities for weaving. This is easily explained, because
weaving was historically a craft performed by women[435] who,
of course, had no place in a monastic settlement for men.
Moreover, it is quite possible that most of the monks'
clothing was not woven, but produced by the process of
felting, i.e., the bringing together of masses of loose fibers

199

[ILLUSTRATION]

425.A PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR COOPERS & WHEELWRIGHTS & BREWERS' GRANARY

AUTHORS' INTERPRETATION

The association of two workshops with a granary is seemingly in recognition of the size of the space required for all three activities: no less
than a barn-size structure would provide sufficient floor space for making large barrels and utility carts and fittings and a threshing floor.
Temporary storage of unfinished and damaged carts and barrels was probably one consideration determining the size of this building. We have
reconstructed this house according to the same criteria that guided that of the Annex of the Great Collective Workshop and that of the Abbot's
House.

of wool under the combined influence of heat, moisture,
and friction until they became firmly interlocked in every
direction. This task, of course, could be performed by the
fullers.

It is an interesting commentary on the social and economic
structure of the period that it is within this primarily
industrial environment, composed of laymen and serfs, that
we also find the noble craftsmen, the goldsmiths, who furnished
the church with its sacred vessels and reliquaries
and the library with its precious jeweled covers for books.

The Great Collective Workshop is an impressive example
of industrial organization. Contracting into one establishment
practically all the services required for the community's
material survival, it reveals on the level of the service
building the same propensity for systematic architectural
integration which in the layout of the Church had led to a
combination of liturgical functions that had formerly been
distributed over separate sanctuaries.[436] The same spirit had
produced an equally ingenious combination of functions in
the great architectural complex that encompasses the
Novitiate and the Infirmary.[437]

[434]

Expositio Hildemari, ed. cit., 192.24 and 488.2.

[435]

North of the Alps, the work of weaving was performed in buildings
dug partly into the ground, which also served as storage places for fruit
and other crops. They were described by Tacitus and by Pliny. In
Medieval Latin they are referred to either as hypogeum (in view of their
location) or as genecium (because of the sex of their occupants) or as
textrina (because of the trade carried on in them). For more details and
sources see, Heyne, I, 1899, 46ff. For directives concerning the maintenance
of genicia on crown estates, see Capitulare de villis, chaps. 31
and 49, ed. Gareis, 1895, 42 and 51.

[436]

Cf. I, 187ff and 208ff.

[437]

Cf. I, 311-21.