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

If we presume that St. Benedict's allowance of a daily
pound of bread for each monk applied to the monastery's
serfs as well, the monks' bakery on the Plan of St. Gall
would have to have been capable of producing 250 to 270
pounds of bread per day.[568] An analysis of the dimensions
of its oven and the amount of space required for this output
discloses that this volume of bread could be produced in a
single cycle of firing and baking.[569]

A passage in Ekkehart's Casus sancti Galli, which has
consistently been misconstrued, reads that the monastery
of St. Gall had an oven (clibanum) capable of baking a
thousand loaves of bread at once and a bronze kettle
(lebete eneo) and drying kiln (tarra avenis) capable of
holding one hundred bushels of oats.[570] This is not a
statement of fact, but a passage in a speech by Abbot
Solomon III, which Ekkehart himself refers to as "boastful"
and "fraudulent."[571]

[568]

For the rationale behind this figure see I, 342.

[569]

I am relying on the calculation of my friend Thomas Tedrick who
assures me that an oven 10 feet in diameter on the inside is capable of
baking 356 loaves of bread, each weighing one pound, in a single process
of baking if all available space is utilized and the loaves, after their
expansion during baking, are allowed to touch each other. After some of
the oven's space has been subtracted for wall thickness and more for a
narrow margin of space to be allowed between the loaves to prevent them
from sticking together, the dimensions of this oven turn out to have been
planned to meet exactly the daily baking requirements of the monks and
serfs of the monastery shown on the Plan of St. Gall.

[570]

First quoted as a fact by Keller (1844, 14), but without exact
reference to the place and context in which this statement occurred,
and subsequently repeated by scholars who failed to look up the original
source. Even Bikel (1914, 119) is guilty of that error by omission.

[571]

See Ekkeharti (IV.) Casus sancti Galli, chap. 13, ed. Meyer von
Knonau, 1877, 51-54; ed. Helbling, 1958, 40.