The Plan of St. Gall a study of the architecture & economy of & life in a paradigmatic Carolingian monastery |
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SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS |
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 | The Plan of St. Gall |  |
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
If we review the evidence obtained from the analysis of the
legal and administrative documents discussed on the preceding
pages, we find ourselves confronted with results of a
widely varying nature. The most illuminating of the considered
sources is doubtlessly the Lex Bajuvariorum. It has
furnished us with a body of specific and detailed architectural
information that enables us to reconstruct the Bajuvarian
standard house of the beginning of the eighth
century. The Lex Alamannorum conveyed a clear idea of the
297. EZINGE (GRONINGEN), THE NETHERLANDS
INTERIOR, HOUSE B, CLUSTER SETTLEMENT, Warf-layer V, 4th-3rd centuries B.C.
[author's reconstruction redrawn by Walter Schwarz]
House B of Warf-layer V played a dominant role in our attempt to identify the constructional features of the guest and service buildings of
the Plan of St. Gall (see below, 77ff). Like the majority of the latter, it is entered broadside through a long wall, and in layout consists of a
spacious inner hall with open fireplace in the axis of the house, and a peripheral suite of outer spaces accessible only from the center floor and
used for more specialized functions such as sleeping, or the stabling of livestock.
This is a reconstruction of the interior of House B, which appears at the bottom right of the plan of Warf-layer V, fig. 296 (and at a larger
scale in fig. 327). The drawing first published in Horn, 1958, 7, fig. 13, was made before the excavator realized that the animals stood with
their heads not inward, but toward the outer walls of the dwelling (cf. below, p. 53 n. 64). The braided wattle mats running along the posts on
either side of the center aisle were found to be manure mats, not fodder mats as previously supposed. Since the artist is no longer alive, and
since his handsome drawing portrays quite persuasively the general character of the space in the dwelling, we decided against trying to retouch
the drawing; the animals remain incorrectly positioned.
period with its principal living unit, the domus or sala, and
its variety of special service structures scattered throughout
the yard and the fields. But they told us little, if anything,
about the architectural design of these structures. The
Capitulare de villis gave us an insight into the administrative
complexity of a Frankish crown estate. The Brevium
exempla, finally, provided us with a precise statistical
account of the number and type of buildings to be found
on five such Carolingian crown estates, and illustrated how
on this highest level of Frankish society a new material,
stone, began to intrude into the northern tradition of building
in timber. They told us a good deal about the number
and type of rooms of which the individual buildings were
composed—but they told nothing about the constructional
features of these rooms, or the houses of which they were a
part.
Thus we would still remain thoroughly ignorant about
the architectural layout and design of a Carolingian residence
and its agricultural service structures were it not for
the light that has recently been thrown on this question by
our colleagues in the field of archaeology.
| The Plan of St. Gall | |