VERSE
With regard to the meters found in the Plan, Charles W. Jones remarks: "The captions include four elegaic distychs[58]
and thirty-five hexameters.[59]
Although of scholastic regularity, they are not pedantically so. In the ninth century, as Leonine
rhymed hexameters were gaining favor, the uniform caesura in the third foot became increasingly standardized. But
among the thirty-five hexameters there are three hephthemimeral caesuras, and no Leonine verses.[60]
Indeed, there are
touches of liveliness. The concluding dactyls of the line on threshing (frugibus hic instat cunctis labor excutiendis)[61]
tend to
match the rhythm of the labor itself. And as Miss Patricia Clark points out, the most artful verses are the two set in the
semi-circular paradises of the church, which she diagrams as follows on the next page:
[ILLUSTRATION]
✫ alliteration of p and s
It is natural to try to explain the presence of verses in this utilitarian Plan as essentially mnemonic; but such an explanation
would be unsatisfactory. No supervising abbot or brother would find any of the common mnemonic aids in these
lines. They are, rather, the product of an artist who is taking joy in his work of art."
We have already drawn attention to the fact that the metric lines are primarily used to designate the general purpose of
a building. In order to make it clear that they define the whole and not part of the building, the author writes metric
verse inscription not into the interior of houses or buildings, but places them outside in a position of prominence (analogous
to chapter headings), parallel to and at a small distance from the entrance walls. There are, however, a few exceptions to
this rule. Some of the smaller guest and service buildings lack these general titles (House of the Physicians, House for
Bloodletting, Gardener's House, House of the Fowlkeepers). Conversely, in a few cases, metric titles are used internally
in places where the signal importance of the object or area they describe calls for special emphasis. All such instances,
except for one (Cross in the Cemetry) occur in the Church, where the inscriptions are associated with primary liturgical
stations (Altar of the Holy Cross, Altar of St. Peter, Altar of St. Paul) or appear in buildings directly connected with
the Church and vital for the regulation of the intercourse of the monastery with the outside world (the three porches of
the western atrium that control entry and exit of the monastic compound).
I can think of only one area in the whole aggregate of textual annotations where one would have wished for more explicit
information. Modern scholarship would have been spared the pains and pleasures of hundreds of pages of controversy,
had the widely spaced title in the longitudinal axis of the Church that reads "From East to West the length is 200 feet"
included in its wording a hint that this was a directive given to alter the original concept, in which the church was intended
to be 300 feet long.[62]
The decision to reduce the length of the Church from 300 feet to 200 feet—as the deposition
of the abbot of Fulda shows[63]
—cannot have been entirely free from emotional undertones. One senses a reflection of this
in a change of syntax, to which Bischoff has drawn attention: in contradistinction to all of the other legends of the Plan,
which are rendered as straight declarative statements, the majority of the titles stipulating that the Church should not be
built as large as was shown on the Plan, were put into imperative form (metire, moderare, sternito).[64]
