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The Plan of St. Gall

a study of the architecture & economy of & life in a paradigmatic Carolingian monastery
  
  
  
  
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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]

 
[621]

Doppelfeld, 1937/38, 284ff.

[622]

Bänfer, Stieren, and Klein, 1936, 410ff.

[623]

Winkelmann, 1954, 189ff; 1958, 492ff.

[624]

For Cheddar, see Rahtz, 1962-63.

[625]

For Pilton, see Andrews, 1901, 30; Cook-Smith, 1960, 30-31,
and figs. 207-210; and Crossley, 1951, fig. 130. For Tisbury, see Andrews
loc. cit.; Dufty, 1947. The roof of the barn of Pilton was destroyed by
fire in 1963 (cf. Horn & Born, 1969, 162).