NUMBER AND HOURS OF MEALS OF THE MONKS
The number and hours of the meals of the monks are
regulated in Chapter 41 of the Rules of St. Benedict.[137]
The schedule set forth there is, as Dom David Knowles has
put it, "so foreign to anything in modern life, even among
religious orders . . . that it is difficult, when reconstructing
it in the imagination, to appreciate where its physical
handicaps lay and where use had become second nature.[138]
During the winter, beginning with the thirteenth of
September and ending with Ash Wednesday, the monks
were allowed a single full meal per day which was eaten
about two o'clock in the afternoon. The same schedule
prevailed for the time of Lent, but in this period the meal
was served after Vespers, i.e., about half past five or six.
During the summer months, and on all Sundays and Feast
Days, the monks ate two meals, one at midday, the other
about six o'clock in the evening. This schedule made
allowance for a rest after the midday meal.
The most perplexing aspect of this schedule of meals, in
the eyes of a modern observer, "is the assignment of the
first meal to a time never less than ten, and throughout the
winter of about twelve hours after rising."[139]
The change
from a winter schedule of one meal to a summer schedule
of two, providing for a midday rest, is of course the product
of the Mediterranean climate, in which monachism
originated. There "the heat of the summer makes a siesta
after the midday meal all but a physical necessity."[140]
North of the Alps this routine was senseless, yet the force
of tradition was so strong that it remained unmodified by
any difference of climate or latitude throughout the entire
Middle Ages.
