(III.1.1)
LAYOUT
IN proposing that a monastery should "be so arranged that all necessary things, such as water, mill, garden, and
various crafts may be within the enclosure,"[1]
St. Benedict made the monastery economically independent of the
secular world. The administration of the self-sufficient estates which emerged from this concept, however, brought
into the monastic community a host of seculars, whose very presence threatened to subvert the monastic ideal of
seclusion from the world and its preoccupations. As the monastery came structurally to resemble a large manorial
estate, monastic integrity demanded the creation of an inner enclosure that would isolate the brothers from the serfs
and the laymen and, at the same time, make it possible for the latter to live as close to the brothers as their tasks
required. Creating a cloister answered this problem. It established a monastery within the monastery. Moreover
in meeting the complex needs of monastic living, it created an architectural scheme that added to the glorious
history of the colonnaded classical court a new, and perhaps its most accomplished, embodiment.
The cloister is the monastic enclosure which serves as living, eating, working, and sleeping quarters for the monks
(figs. 191, 192, 193).[2]
In its fully developed form it consists of a large square yard attached to the southern flank of
the church, entirely surrounded by a covered walk, and enclosed on the three other sides by a solid range of large
(usually double-storied) structures laid out so as to form a solid architectural enclosure. This ensemble of buildings
comprises, in addition to the dormitory and refectory of the monks, a warming room, a cellar, a larder, a storeroom
for the monks' clothing, and various smaller dependencies, such as a privy, a bath and wash house, a kitchen, and a
bake and brew house. Except for the times when he worked the fields or helped to reap the harvest, or those rare
occasions when he was away on journeys, the entire life of the monk was spent in this enclosure.
The origin of the layout of this well-ordered and symmetrical architectural scheme is as yet not clarified, since
many of the intermediary forms of its development are missing.[3]
It has been connected with the peristyle court of
the Greek house, the colonnaded atrium of the Roman house, the monumental galleried atria of the large Early
Christian churches, and certain semi-galleried courts attached to the flanks of Syrian churches. In one way or
another, all these forms may have shared in its formation.
It is obvious that the concept of an open galleried court with living units around it, is a Mediterranean one. The
ubiquitous character of this motif in the Greek and Roman world needs no further comment. It is equally clear that
the concept of double-storied masonry structures, exhibited in the primary claustral structures (Dormitory,
Refectory, and Cellar) has its roots in Rome, and not in the vernacular architectural tradition of the Franks. The
consummate order and symmetry characterizing the claustral scheme was, in its ultimate form, classical and had
little to do with the scattered layout of the contemporary northern manor. But after full allowance is made for these
classical influences, it is equally clear that nothing quite like the layout of a medieval cloister existed in antiquity.
The medieval cloister differs from the Hellenistic peristyle and the colonnaded Roman atrium in that it is not a
court enclosed by a dwelling, but rather an aggregate of edifices, so arranged as to form a solid architectural frame
around a court. From the atria of the large Early Christian basilicas, to which it is related in design and in size, it
differs in function. The Early Christian atrium was a large formal plaza for the reception of the worshiping crowd;
it was never meant to form the nucleus of a cadre of dwellings. In Syria here and there we find monastic courts
attached to the flanks of the church—and these courts may indeed be one of the germinal prototype forms of the
medieval claustrum—but unlike the later medieval cloister, in Syrian monasteries the open courts were in general
not enclosed by buildings on all four sides. Often these courts were not even square, but L-shaped, or of irregular,
and undefinable shape, with vast openings between the houses of the monks giving free access to other segments
of the monastery grounds. There are, nonetheless, two notable exceptions: the convent of SS. Sergios and
Bacchos at Umm-is-Surab and the convent of Id-Dêr, both in Southern Syria. In the former (fig. 193) the monas-
tery church (489 A.D.) had attached to its northern flank a symmetrical range of residential buildings with a paved
court in the middle "colonnaded on all sides in two stories and completely surrounded by rooms, large and small,
in one or two stories, about twenty in all, forming an ideal monastic establishment."
[5]
In the latter (fig. 194) also of
fifth century date, the church had in front of it a great open atrium, with colonnaded apartments in two stories
symmetrically ranged around three sides of the court, plus a connecting colonnaded porch along the facade of the
church.
Although there is no tangible archaeological evidence to support such a conjecture, it is entirely possible that
together with the more common open plan of the Syrian cloister, the closed and highly symmetrical schemes of
Umm-is-Surab and of Id-Dêr may also have found their way into Western Europe. If they did, however, these
schemes would have found themselves in oppressive competition with the infinitely more common lavra system
adopted by the monks of Lerins, and diffused throughout the entire pre-Carolingian West by the Irish mission
which professed to the same ideals of anchoritic withdrawal and individualistic piety. To combat, repress, and
eventually wholly supersede this powerful tradition depended on the rejection of the scattered and semi-hermitic
forms of living of the Irish monks in favor of the highly controlled and ordered form of communal living prescribed
by St. Benedict. The evolution of this concept required first and above all that the formerly scattered
houses of the monks be brought together into an ordered architectural system, which in turn could be merged with
the concept of the colonnaded classical court. The creation of a tightly closed monastic range of buildings, however,
was only a part of the total need. The same ordering genius that led to the invention of an inner enclosure for the
monks was also to be applied to the layout for the cloisters of the novices and the sick, as well as to the problem of
meaningful interrelation of these three nuclear monastic blocks with the other indispensable monastic installations:
facilities for the reception of visitors, houses and workshops for the craftsman and serfs, and houses for
the monastic livestock and their keepers.
It is possible that the ultimate crystallization of this scheme does not antedate the reign of Charlemagne. Its
adoption depended on the abolishment, through binding acts of legislation, of the mixed forms of monastic living
that prevailed in pre-Carolingian times, and their replacement by the single, exclusive and universally binding
rule of St. Benedict. This striving toward uniformity of custom had been from the outset a prime objective of the
ecclesiastical policy of Charlemagne. It became again, under Louis the Pious an overriding goal of the monastic
movement, as evidenced in the legislation issued at the two synods held at Aachen in 816 and 817. To presume,
however, that the "Plan of an ideal City for Monks" that emerged from these efforts was a product wholly of
the Carolingian reform movement may be stretching the point. The individual elements and many of their combinations
are of a considerably earlier date, but the consummate order of the scheme, its binding perfection that was
to affect the entire future course of monastic planning may have been dependent on the codification of certain details
in the relation of monks to serfs, which was not undertaken prior to the two synods of Aachen.[6]
The novelty of this concept is thrown into full relief when it is compared to the monastic settlements which
the Irish holy men established during the sixth and seventh centuries in relatively inaccessible and often hostile
places of Ireland and western England.
