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LAYOUT OF THE BEDS

The layout of the beds in the Monks' Dormitory is complex
and ingenious. We have already discussed the manner
in which it was designed in our analysis of the scale and
construction methods used in designing the Plan.[43] The
number 77 is not likely to be an accident.[44] Yet I have been
able to find only one instance where the number of monks
was confined to this figure.[45]

The Monk's Dormitory, like the two other principal
buildings of the cloister, the Refectory and the Cellar, has
no internal architectural wall partitions whatsoever, and for
that reason must be thought of as a unitary space, open from
end to end. This should not be interpreted to mean, however,
that the beds were in full and open view of everyone
throughout the entire length and width of the building.
They must have been separated from one another by
wooden panels sufficiently high and long to protect the
monks from interfering with one another. The Custom of
Subiaco stipulates "that there be wooden partitions between
bed and bed, so that the brothers may not see each
other when they rest or read in their beds, and overhead
they must be covered [with canopies] because of the dust
and the cold." The same custom also requires "that these

[ILLUSTRATION]

197. ST. RIQUIER (CENTULA). PLAN WITH ABBEY CHURCH & CLOISTER

[after Durand, 1911, 241, fig. 5]

This 19th-century cadastral plan of the city of St. Riquier shows the Gothic abbey church (1) and superimposed in the area to the south the
course of the covered walks that once enclosed its triangular cloister, with the church of St. Benedict (2) in one, and the church of St. Mary (3)
in the other corner. This layout, first suggested by Jean Hubert (1957, 293-309, Pl. 1.C), and again in Hubert, Porcher, and Volbach (1970,
297, fig. 341), on the basis of a documentary study, was confirmed by excavations of Honoré Bernard (Karl der Grosse, III, 1965, 370).

[ILLUSTRATION]

199. LORSCH

FIRST MONASTERY OF CHRODEGANG (760-774)

AXONOMETRIC RECONSTRUCTION [after Behn, 1949, pl. 1]

[ILLUSTRATION]

198. LORSCH

FIRST MONASTERY OF CHRODEGANG (760-774)

PLAN [after Selzer, 1955, 14]

Lorsch is the earliest medieval monastery with a square cloister
attached to one flank of the church. But a layout of similar shape
may already have existed in Pirmin's abbey of Reichenau-Mittelzell,
built between 724 and 750, if Erdmann's reconstruction of its
claustral compound is correct (Erdmann, 1974, 499, fig. TA 4). For
Lorsch see Behn and Selzer, and a more recent summary by
Schaefer in Vorromanische Kirchenbauten, 1966-68,
179-82.

spaces be so arranged, as to be provided with a window
admitting daylight for reading and writing as well as a
small table and a chair and whatever else is necessary for
that purpose."[46]

The Custom of Subiaco is a relatively late source[47] and
already reflects a relaxation of the Rule of St. Benedict in
favor of greater privacy—a development in the further
course of which the dormitory ended up by being subdivided
internally into a sequence of individual cubicles
ranged along the walls of the building, with a passage left
in the middle, each cubicle forming a separate enclosure
fitted, besides the bed, with a chair and a desk beneath a
window. This arrangement, so well known from the dorter
of Durham Cathedral (built by Bishop Skirlaw in 13981404)[48]
was clearly not in the mind of the churchmen who
ruled on the details of the layout of the Monks' Dormitory
on the Plan of St. Gall. Yet even here we might be justified
in counting on at least a rudimentary system of partition
walls between the beds—if not for moral protection, for
purely practical reasons: since the brothers were permitted
to read in bed during their afternoon rest period, they were
in need of at least a headboard against which to lean.