V.16.1
SYMBIOSIS OF BAKING & BREWING
In large medieval monasteries, the community's baking
and brewing facilities were almost without exception installed
in the same building. This is an intrinsically medieval
arrangement that has no parallels in Greco-Roman life.
Up to the time of the second Macedonian War (200 B.C.197
B.C.), Pliny informs us, the women of Rome used to
bake their bread themselves in their homes,[544]
as had been
customary in the country since the remotest times, and
continued to be among the peasants for ages to come. The
flour was ground in mills operated by mules or by slaves.[545]
From 180 B.C. onward, however, as Rome began to develop
into a megalopolis with multistory apartment houses, the
millers began to usurp the task of baking, because the
architecture of the city and the social conditions of their
inhabitants no longer permitted each family to operate its
own oven. Baking became a professional activity and its
association with milling gave rise to the appearance of
shops, where both of these operations were combined.[546]
A
typical example of this industrial symbiosis is a house in
Pompeii, the plan of which is shown in fig. 460. The forward
half of this establishment, facing the street, is a typical
Roman atrium house (1) with the rooms ranged peripherally
around a central court. The rearward part consists
of a court with millstones and baking troughs (2); a baking
oven (3); a room for storing flour (4); a room for kneading
and leavening dough (5); a shop for selling the finished
product (6). This tradition of combining milling and baking
in one and the same shop was not adopted by the Middle
[ILLUSTRATION]
460.X ROME. MUSEO CHIARAMONTI. MONUMENT OF P. NONIUS ZETHUS, OSTIA (LATE IST CENT.)
[courtesy of the Archivo Fotografica dei Musei Vaticani]
This large slab of marble (1.37 × .46 × .75m) imitates the form of a sarcophagus with two rows of conical sockets in the upper surface to receive
incinerary urns. Reliefs illustrate the symbiosis of the trades of milling and baking in Roman life. In the center of a framed panel, the inscription,
resolved of its abbreviations, reads:
PUBLIUS NONIUS ZETHUS AUGUSTALIS
FECIT SIBI ET
NONIAE HILARAE CONLIBERTAE
NONIAE PUBLI LIBERTAE PELAGIAE CONJUGI
PUBLIUS NONIUS HERECLIO
My colleague, Arthur E. Gordon, translates:
Publius Nonius Zethus, an Augustalis, has made [this monument] for himself and nonia hilaria
his fellow freedwoman, [and] Nonia Pelagia, freedwoman of Publius, his wife.—Publius Nonius Hereclio
The donkey in the lyre-shaped wooden trace, the hourglass-shaped mill and its meta and catillus are typical in form (cf. figs. 441. B, 442); an
assortment of standing containers of different capacities are doubtless measures for grain and flour, with additional containers hung on the wall.
A sieve is also depicted, and two or three wooden battens used to level flour or grain to the rim of the container into which it was poured.
The dating of the monument to the end of the 1st century A.D., Gordon informs me, is suggested by both style of writing and Zethus's title,
"AUGUSTALIS," which in the late 1st or early 2nd century was changed to "SEXVIR" or "SEVIR AUGUSTALIS" (see Russel Meiggs,
Roman Ostia, 1960, p. 217, and Wolfgang Helbig's Führer durch die öffentlichen Sammlungen Klassischer Altertümer
in Rom, I, 1963, 245, No. 316.)
Ages. Milling, by increasing its efficiency through water
power, became a highly specialized professional function
and a privilege jealously guarded by the feudatory who
owned the land and the stream over which the mill was
raised.
[547]
Baking was dissociated from this craft and entered
instead into a symbiosis with brewing—at least in all those
cases where there was a need for the production of bread
and beer in quantities that required using industrial
techniques, as inevitably was so in a monastic community—
and this association lead to the creation of a new architectural
entity: the monastic bake and brew house.
An impressive example of such a dual-purpose structure,
dating from the end of the eleventh century, is portrayed
on the plan of the waterworks of Christchurch Monastery
(fig. 461), drawn up by the engineer Wibert around 1165.[548]
Measuring approximately 40 by 170 feet (its foundations
can still be traced[549]
), this installation was more than twice
the length of the Monks' Bake and Brew House on the
Plan of St. Gall (fig. 462). Inscriptions tell us that half of
the building was used for brewing (bracium) and the other
half for baking (pistrinum). Precisely when the association
of these two crafts came about historically I do not know.
On the Plan of St. Gall it is an accomplished fact. The
paradigmatic character of the Plan may well have contributed
greatly to the adoption and continuance of this
architectural solution in later monastic planning.
