LAYOUT OF TABLES AND BENCHES IN
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
By contrast to this conspicuous disregard for comfortable
standards in heating, the physical layout of the tables and
benches in the Monks' Refectory is sophisticated and most
carefully planned. The designing architect must not only
have had accurate instructions concerning the number of
people the Refectory was to accommodate in a single
sitting, but also must have been fully aware of the precise
needs in linear length of the tables and benches required to
meet this condition.[126]
He solved his problem, as we have
seen, by placing two tables in the center, and four along
the walls of the room. The details of this concept pose
fascinating, if unanswerable historical questions, into a
discussion of which I enter in full awareness of its highly
tentative and speculative nature.
The desert monks thought so little of eating (or so much
of its dangers!)[127]
that many of them preferred to ingest
their food while standing or walking around. Of Father
Sisoës it is said that he frequently did not know whether or
not he had already taken his meal.[128]
Tables on which to
spread one's food, or chairs to sit upon while taking a meal,
were incompatible with this concept and even the comfort
offered by a simple stone or the crude stump of a tree, in
this mode of thinking, was looked upon as a source of
sensuous self indulgence. But when St. Pachomius took the
epochal step of renouncing his hermitic past and founding,
in a desolate place called Tabenissi, on the river Nile the
first systematically organized community for monks, he
furnished this monastery with a refectory where the monks
took their meals seated at tables. They had to do this in
rigid silence, their heads covered by their cowls, so that
their eyes would only see the bowls from which they ate,
and could not stray aside to look at any of the other monks.
Yet no one was forced to come to the table and St. Pachomius,
in fact considered it to be a higher form of religious
attainment if a monk chose to dispense with the regular
food either through fasting or relying on only the slimmest
diet of bread, water, and salt which his superior, upon
request, could allow him to take to his cell.[129]
While many may have chosen these individual forms of
dietary ascetism as the more desirable path in their search
for salvation, in a community whose population reached at
its peak the staggering figure of 2,500 monks, the number
of those who attended the common meal must still have
been sufficiently large to call for a substantial and carefully
planned arrangement of tables and benches. The only
other sphere of life where men in comparable numbers
assembled for a common meal must have been the eating
halls of permanent Roman military camps, with the layout
of which St. Pachomius must have been well acquainted
from the days when he served in the Roman army.[130]
It is
in this ambient, I presume—the same ambient to which
monachism also probably owed the concept of its wall
enclosure,
[131]
—that we may have to look for the ultimate
source for both the layout of the Pachomian refectory and
its Roman prototypes and Carolingian derivatives.
When monachism spread to the north, however, the
monastic refectory may have been exposed to another
secular influence, namely the large and festive banqueting
halls that played such an important role in the life of the
Germanic kings and chieftains. In the traditional Germanic
eating hall—about which we are well informed by descriptions
such as that of Hall Heorot in the Beowulf poem
[132]
(eighth century; but reflecting a tradition that reaches considerably
farther back) and the realistic accounts of
banquets in the Nordic sagas (ninth to twelfth centuries)
[133]
—the retainers sat at tables and benches ranged along the
walls of the house throughout the entire length of the
building. The host sat on a high seat in the middle of one
of the two aisles of the hall, his guest of honor on a corresponding
seat in the middle of the opposite aisle. A cross
bench at the inner end of the room was taken up by women.
The fire burned in the middle of the center floor, from which
the food and the drinks were served. Only on very rare
occasions, i.e., when the number of guests was so large that
not all of them could be accommodated in the aisles of the
house, was the center floor taken up by an additional row
of tables and benches.
[134]
On such occasions the physical
layout of the Germanic banqueting hall, indeed, bore close
resemblance to that found in monastic refectories, although
there still remained an important difference: in the monastic
refectories, the highest ranking person, the abbot, sat on
the cross bench at the upper or eastern end of the hall; the
entrance was in the middle of the long wall facing the
cloister. This arrangement is more closely related to that
of the later feudal halls (especially well known in England)
where the lord dined on an elevated platform (
dais) in the
uppermost bay of the building, at a table placed crosswise
to the long tables, while his retainers sat at tables ranging
lengthwise down the aisles of the hall.
[135]
The location of
the table for the abbot, "the representative of Christ in the
monastery,"
[136]
at the eastern head of the refectory unquestionably
has its origins in the Christian ritual, which in
turn was deeply influenced by the ceremonial of the Roman
imperial court. The latter was also the ultimate source of
the exalted position of the table of the medieval feudal lord,
to whom I presume, this concept was transmitted by their
royal overlords, after they assumed the successorship of the
emperors of Rome.
