EAST RANGE
In Cluny, as on the Plan, the monks' dormitory (dormitorium)
occupies the second floor of the east range. The Farfa
text describes it as 160 feet long and 34 feet wide, with walls
reaching to a height of 23 feet. But in the space below the
dormitory some important innovations have been made.
On the Plan of St. Gall, this entire space is occupied by the
Monks' Warming Room coextensive with the dormitory of
40 feet by 85 feet overhead. In Cluny, this space is internally
divided into a chapter house (45 feet long and 34 feet wide);
an auditorium (30 feet long); and a camera (90 feet long).
The Monks' Warming Room (calefactorium) has been reduced
at Cluny to a surface area of only 25 feet by 25 feet
and shifted into the south range. This amounts to complete
reassignment of the space beneath the dormitory, a modification
for which an explanation will later be offered.[49]
Chapter house
In the monastery shown on the Plan of St. Gall the chapter
meetings were held in the northern cloister walk, which
was made wider (15 feet) than the other three walks (12½
feet) and furnished with benches.[50]
The same arrangement,
as has been shown above, prevailed at Fontanella, which
might indicate that the cloister walk next to the church was
the common location for the capitulum in Carolingian
times.[51]
Attempts made by Hager and others to show that
a separate chapter house existed at Jumièges in the seventh
century, at Reichenau in 780, at Fontanella by 823-833,
and in the monastery of St. Gall after 830, can be shown to
be based on faulty textual exegesis, and in one case on the
use of a corrupted text.[52]
To use the northern cloister walk for chapter meetings,
however, had disadvantages. Although warmed by the
rays of the sun in the winter, when the arc of sun is in
the southern hemisphere, and sheltered from the north
wind by the church, the open cloister walk offered little
protection from inclement weather. The physical discomforts
endured in the winter or on rainy days must have
called early for a more protected location for the chapter
meetings.
Certain passages in the Casus Sancti Galli of Ekkehart IV
(980-1060) suggest that in the abbey of St. Gall chapter
meetings were then held in the Monks' Warming Room.
It is quite possible that the special room for chapter meetings
at Cluny II owes its existence at the head of the east
range to the desire to convert into a separate space a portion
of the former warming room that in the earlier days had
served temporarily for chapter meetings during inclement
weather. Ekkehart mentions that on the order of the abbot,
a raging monk was punished during a chapter meeting by
being "bound to a column of the warming room and
harshly beaten," (ad columpnam piralis ligatus acerrime virgis
caeditur).[53]
Another passage indicates that the pyrale was
the traditional place for punishment in the monastery,
since it was there that the whip was kept.[54]
Punishment
was traditionally carried out in the chapter house in the
Middle Ages. This practice seems already to have been
current in the time of Ekkehart IV, since a text from
Paderborn of 1023 explicitly states that punishment was
administered in the chapter house.[55]
Inner parlor
Its name (auditorium) in the Farfa description suggests that
it served as an area where monks might talk to one another
when silence was being observed in the rest of the cloister.[56]
Supply room
The largest architectural entity in the east range after the
dormitory is a space 90 feet long and 34 feet wide which in
the Farfa text is designated as camera, that is, "store-" or
"supply room".[57]
It is too far away from the kitchen to be
interpreted as a pantry or larder. Since the Farfa description
lacks any reference to a vestiary in which the clothes
of the monks are kept, it is possible that this room was a
storehouse for clothing and such other material necessities
that were furnished by the camerarius (chamberlain) who
was in charge of the workmen and craftsmen. On the Plan
of St. Gall, the monks' clothing was kept, and perhaps even
tailored, in the large vestiary which formed a second story
over the refectory (40 feet by 100 feet). Since the generous
clothing allowance provided by the synod of Aachen in
816 was adopted by Cluny, the storeroom for clothing would
need to be about the same size as that of the Vestiary on
the Plan of St. Gall.[58]
One of the primary changes necessitated by the inclusion
of the chapter house and inner parlor in the east range was
that these additions made this range along with its annexes
(the monks' bath and privy) extend southward well beyond
the cloister square. In other respects, the relative position
of the dormitory, privy, and bathhouse are identical with
those on the Plan of St. Gall.
