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]
