University of Virginia Library

V.17.3

HOUSE FOR HORSES AND OXEN
AND THEIR KEEPERS

LAYOUT AND DESIGN

The House for Horses and Oxen and Their Keepers
lies west of the House of the Coopers and Wheelwrights
and south of the Hospice for Pilgrims and Paupers (fig. 9).
Measuring 145 feet in length and 37½ feet in width, it is
the largest of the buildings housing livestock. It contains
in its center the "the hall for the oxherds and horse grooms"
(domus bubulcorum & equos seruantium). This is a large
square room with an open fireplace in the center and
benches all around its four walls, another unique and
distinguishing feature among the buildings used for livestock
and their attendants. The fireplace has unusually

[ILLUSTRATION]

CHICKEN HOUSE

472.B ELEVATION

472.A PLAN

BUILT BY FREIHERR VON ULM-EHRBACH

The complexity of this poultry house may reflect centuries-long skills
in efficient fowl husbandry; it could be a structure identical with that
proposed for the Plan of St. Gall. (see p. 272).

generous dimensions (12½ feet by 16 feet) and has inscribed
into it a

[ILLUSTRATION]

-shaped symbol which appears nowhere else
on the Plan. The size of the fireplace and the seating capacity
of the benches in this hall, both of which exceed by a
considerable margin the needs of the occupants of this
building, suggest that the hall of the oxherds and grooms
might have served as kitchen and dining room for a larger
segment of the monastery's serfs and laymen, perhaps for
all those who were in charge of livestock. The

[ILLUSTRATION]

-shaped
symbol may have been the sign either for a hearth or for a
wooden frame for the cranes from which caldrons were
suspended on chains over the open fire.[610] One might also
consider the possibility that it was a rig for making shoes
for the draft animals, but there is no positive evidence that
the hooves of horses and oxen were shod this early.[611]

The northern hall of the building serves as "stable for
the mares" (stabulum equarum infra). It has overhead, a
wooden ceiling (supra tabulatum), certainly a loft for the
storage of hay.[612] The "mangers" (praesepia) are carefully
delineated on the Plan and seem to consist of a hayrack
and a feeding trough. The grooms slept in an aisle running
along the entire eastern side of the horses' stable (ad hoc
seruitiū mansio).

The southern half of the building contained the "stable
for the oxen, below" (boum stabulum infra) and "overhead,
a hayloft" (supra tabulatū). The "mangers for the oxen"
(praesepia boū), like those of the horses, ran along the
western wall of the stable. The lean-to on the opposite
side served as "quarters for the oxherds" (conclaue assecularum).
The mangers of the oxen are separated by means of
cross divisions into feeding areas 5 feet wide, doubtless to
prevent the animals from striking each other with their
horns. As there are eleven stalls, the stable for oxen was
equipped to stall eleven head (five plowing teams and a
spare). The same number of horses could have been
accommodated in the stable for mares. Modern farming
manuals recommend standing areas slightly larger (6½ feet),
but the length of the stalls for horses and oxen on the Plan
is not incompatible with the requirements of present-day
stock management. There is ample space behind each
animal to serve as a dung trench, and there is a generous
margin of space on the other side of the stall for the storing
of plows and yokes and other equipment needed for the
operation of teams. Throughout the entire Middle Ages
horses and oxen alike were used as draft animals. Numerous

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL. HEN HOUSE. Authors' reconstruction

473.B SECTION

473.A PLAN

473.C ELEVATION

For SITE PLAN showing relationship of the HENHOUSE to GOOSEHOUSE
and to FOWLKEEPERS' HOUSE, see figure 466. X, page 265, and figure 466.

The installation of the monastery's poultry in circular enclosures indicates that this kind of structure was not only in use at the time the Plan
was made, but was sufficiently well known to be proposed as an exemplary solution for a monastic community of some 250-270 people. The
enclosure provided for maximum flock size with greatest economy of space. With eggs a chief source of protein in the monks' diet, the more
haphazard methods of raising poultry—i.e., letting birds run and nest at will all over the farmyard—were inappropriate; there was no time in
so well-regulated a community to search each morning for the eggs of perhaps several hundreds of birds! Feeding, watering, sanitation, and
doctoring were likewise attended to with ease through the architectural sophistication of circular fowl houses. A disadvantage of this type of
enclosure is that it cannot readily be enlarged, and is thus most appropriate for a community of planned population.

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR HORSES AND OXEN AND THEIR KEEPERS

474.

474.X

This house differs from the other guest and service buildings in that its center space with fireplace and benches (designated as the "living room
of the oxherders and grooms") reaches across the entire width of the building. The stables for the horses and oxen do not surround, but extend
laterally away from it. The early and high medieval buildings shown in figs. 477-481 demonstrate that tripartite long houses of this type were
not uncommon in the Middle Ages.

medieval illuminations could be adduced to attest to this
fact; two of the finest examples of this type, from the
margins of the Luttrell Psalter, are shown in figures 475
and 476.[613]

IMPORTANT ROLE OF THE MONASTERY'S
HORSES AND OXEN

The generous dimensions assigned to the House for
Horses and Oxen testifies, not only to the important role
these beasts of burden played in the monastic economy,
but also to the high social standing their caretakers held
amongst the monastery's permanent body of servants.[614]
Columella writes that in his day one farm laborer was
considered enough to look after two yokes of oxen.[615] The
bedrooms of the oxherds on the Plan are large enough to
provide bed space for seven hands; and the same number
of men could be accommodated in the quarters of the
horse grooms.

MEDIEVAL & PROTOHISTORIC PARALLELS OF THE
HOUSE FOR HORSES AND OXEN

The House for Horses and Oxen and their Keepers
differs from all the other livestock buildings shown on the
Plan in that the stabling areas for the animals and the
bedrooms of the herdsmen are not arranged peripherally
around a central living room with a fireplace, but rather,
extend outward on the two opposite sides of that room so
as to form a longhouse. This particular layout is a very
ancient one and was used in the Middle Ages for other
purposes as well.

[ILLUSTRATION]

475. LUTTRELL PSALTER (1340). HARROWING

LONDON, BRITISH MUSEUM, ADD. MS. 42130, fol. 171 (detail)

[By courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum]

The harrow is pulled by one horse and led by a man. A slinger following the harrow tries to drive off two crows flying overhead. Harrows with
iron teeth or tines pegged through a wooden frame (and perhaps originally operated with wooden pegs) are among the oldest animal-powered
agricultural tools. They were used to break up clods after the soil was plowed, to level the earth for seeding, and to cover the seed after it was
broadcast. One horse, properly harnessed, as this drawing shows, was able to draw the harrow.

Royal guesthouses of the Consuetudines Farfenses

An interesting guesthouse for royal travelers, bearing
striking resemblance to the House for Horses and Oxen,
is described in the Consuetudines Farfenses[616] , a literary
master plan for a monastic settlement written around 1043
in the monastery of Farfa in the Sabine mountains, but
now generally believed to record the layout of the monastery
which Abbot Odilo (994-1048) built at Cluny:[617]

The Farfa Consuetudinary describes a guesthouse that is
to be an integral part of the architectural layout of an
eleventh-century monastery. (The mounts and grooms of
the traveling party were to be housed in a separate building.)

The measurements of this building, as listed in this
account, are wholly compatible with the function it was to
perform, as is demonstrated in the reconstruction of its
layout shown in fig. 477, where it is assumed that the
mattresses were ranged side by side at right angles to the
long walls. Laid out in this manner, the two wings of the
building could indeed yield sleeping space for forty men
and thirty ladies, leaving in the center a dining hall 30
feet square. The privies, as the text implies, were separate.
They could not have been arranged in a single line, as that
would have required an outhouse 175 feet long (40 feet
more than the house itself). The proportions are more
reasonable, if we assume that they were arranged in a
double row.[619]

Monks' dormitory in the monastery of
St. Wandrille

There is other, and even earlier, evidence for the use of
a longhouse of this description as sleeping quarters. The
Gesta abbatum Fontanellensium describes a building of this
type erected by Abbot Ansegis (823-833) as a dormitory
for the monks of the monastery of St.-Wandrille (Fontanella):

Again, we are dealing with a building of extremely
elongated shape, with arms reaching out in opposite directions
from a central space whose function differs distinctly
from that of the extended parts. In St.-Wandrille this
central portion served as sunroom (solarium) and therefore
must have been more open than the wings in which the

[ILLUSTRATION]

478.A FONTANELLA (ST.-WANDRILLE) SEINE-MARITIME FRANCE, FOUNDED BY ST. WANDRILLE, 645
SCHEME OF CRITERIA FOR AN INTERPRETIVE STUDY

FONTANELLA (ST.-WANDRILLE)

These studies show in the Carolingian monastery of Fontanella a dormitory that is a
monastic variant of a Germanic long house of very ancient vintage, examples of which
are discussed in this chapter. Our present interpretation, differing from those proposed by
von Schlosser, 1889, Hager, 1901, and in minutiae even from one proposed by Horn
(1973, 46, fig. 47), makes no claim for authenticity in particulars. The design of the
architectural envelope, its fenestration, and its "graceful cloister walks" is an exercise
of imagination. But we feel confident of the interpretation of the disposition of primary
building masses.

The Gesta Abbatum Fontanellensium, written around A.D. 830 and 845,
describes the church of Abbot St. Wandrille, begun in 649 (here translated pending
fuller treatment in a subsequent study):

"The above-said admirable father built in this place a basilica in the name of the
most blessed prince of the Apostles, Peter, in squared stones and having 290 feet in
length and 37 feet in width."

Almost 200 years later Ansegis began construction of the cloister. First to be built was a
new dormitory (see Latin and English text, p. 277). The Gesta describes the erection
of a new refectory and a third structure, the MAIOR DOMUS:

"Thereafter he built another house called the refectory, through the middle of
which he had constructed a masonry wall to divide it so that one part would serve as
refectory, the other as cellar. This building was of precisely the same material and
the same dimensions as the dormitory . . . then he caused to be erected a third
exceptional structure which they called `the larger building'. It turned toward the
east, with one end touching the dormitory, the other adjoining the refectory. He
ordered a supply room to be installed in it, and a warming room, as well as several
other rooms. But because of his premature death this work remained in part
unfinished.

"These three most beautiful buildings are laid out in this manner: the dormitory is
situated with one end turned toward the north, the other toward the south, with its
south end attached to the basilica of St. Peter. The refectory likewise is aligned in
these two directions, and on the south side it almost touches the apse of the basilica
of St. Peter. Then that larger building is placed just as we have said above . . . . The
church of St. Peter lies to the south and faces east . . . ."

The chronicler finished his account by telling us that Ansegis "ordered graceful porches
to be built in front of the dormitory, refectory, and larger house," and that he
added midway along the cloister walk "in front of the dormitory a house for charters"
and "in front of the refectory a building in which to preserve a quantity of books."
On the use of the cloister wing that runs along the flank of the church as a place for
daily chapter meetings, see I, 249ff.

Ansegis's construction of the claustral range
of Fontanella, begun in 823, precedes
Gozbert's reconstruction of the monastery of
St. Gall by only a few years. Like St.
Gall, Fontanella conforms with the claustral
scheme emerging from Aachen in 816-817:
its ranges enclose an open court adjacent to
one flank of the church.

The topography of Fontanella did not allow
Ansegis to place the new cloister on the
south side of the church (as did Gozbert at
St. Gall, in conformity with the Aachen
scheme; cf. below, 327ff) because the old
church of St. Wandrille already stood
against the southern slope of a valley too
steep to permit further construction. But
there was ample space for building on the
flat valley floor north of the church.

In Ansegis's time the Roman supply road
from Rouen ran east of the abbey, and the
unchanneled Seine often flooded the low
valley meadows. These limitations of topography
caused Ansegis to adopt a most unorthodox
order for his claustral buildings—
cellar and refectory to the east; close to
supply routes; dormitory to the west. A
further difference is that in the Aachen
scheme all claustral structures were double-storied
whereas at Fontanella they were not;
hence their inordinate length.

Ansegis's cloister strikingly illustrates the
Carolingian search for a new order in which
a Roman passion for symmetry and monumentality
prevails over loose, casual
assembly of parts. It is furthermore a
testimony to the triumph of Benedictine
monachism over other less ordered forms of
monastic observance, and the role the Benedictine
ideals played in lending new eminence
and vigor to the quest for cultural unity
that pervaded the whole of Carolingian life.

monks were bedded. Perhaps this solarium had the form
of a large transeptal porch with heavily fenestrated gables.

Protohistoric houses of similar design

I mentioned before that this particular layout was a very
ancient one. Longhouses of comparable design were excavated
by Doppelfeld in a Migration Period settlement on
the Bärhorst, near Nauen, Germany;[621] by Bänfer, Stieren,
and Klein in a Migration Period settlement at Westick,
near Kamen, Westphalia;[622] and by Winkelmann, at Warendorf,
near Münster,[623] in a settlement datable by its pottery
to A.D. 650-800 (fig. 478) This building type spread from
the Continent to England, where it is attested by a
Saxon longhall of the ninth century, excavated in 1960-62
by Philip Rahtz in Cheddar, Somerset (fig. 479)[624] and
numerous buildings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
when it became a favorite layout for monastic barns in
the counties of Wiltshire, Gloucester, and Somerset. Figures
480 and 481 are typical examples. The first is a broadside
view of the fourteenth-century barn at Pilton, Somerset,
a dependency of the abbey of Glastonbury; and, the
second, a plan of the fifteenth-century barn of Tisbury,
Wiltshire, one of the outlying granges of the abbesses of
Shaftsbury.[625]

Reconstruction

In our reconstruction of the House for Horses and Oxen
and Their Keepers (fig. 482A-G), we have emphasized the
function of the domus bubulcorum & equas seruantium as
the living, dining, and cooking area of the herdsmen (and
perhaps an even larger segment of the monastery's serfs
and laymen) by giving to this portion of the building the
form of a large transeptal hall, whose ridge intersects the
ridge of the stables. We have interpreted the bedrooms of
the oxherds and grooms as aisles, attached to the flank of
the stables; the stables themselves, as internally undivided
spaces whose roofs are carried by a continuous set of
coupled rafters of uniform scantling. There are other

[ILLUSTRATION]

478.B AN INTERPRETATION BASED ON THE GESTA ABBATUM FONTANELLENSIUM et alii BY THE AUTHORS

possibilities, equally acceptable. In the large transeptal hall
we have introduced four posts, which are not shown on
the Plan; we have assumed them because it appeared
unlikely to us that in a service building of this type the
roof would have rested on beams spanning nearly 40 feet.