University of Virginia Library

IV. 7

THE MONASTERY AS A
CULTURAL INSTITUTION

IV.7.1

SUPERIORITY IN MORAL AND IN
MANAGERIAL STANDARDS

If there was little difference, then, at the time of Charlemagne
and Louis the Pious between the basic administrative
and economic organization of the great monastic and
secular estates, there remain, nevertheless, a number of distinct
features that set the monastery on a separate, if not
higher plane from its secular counterpart. It is probably
safe to assume that because of its attachment to such inherently
Christian concepts as charity (caritas) and spiritual
discipline (oboedientia),[196] a monastic community was less
susceptible to corruption than the secular fiscs. Moreover,
there is a good likelihood that because of the number of
people it had to sustain as a corporate body, in an architectural
plant that had the appearance of a town rather than a
rural settlement, the monastery reached higher levels of
attainment than its secular counterpart—even in such agricultural
skills as gardening, the scientific management of
crops and viticulture, the art of planting orchards and improving
fruit trees through grafting, as well as in the dissemination
of such important technical devices as water
power for mill and mortar operation, sewage disposal, and
the dissemination of old and new heating devices.

I shall deal with these contributions individually, at their
proper places later on in this study. In the present context
they must be touched upon only to the extent to which they
are part of a general picture, the whole of which does not
emerge in the discussion of its individual components.

IMPROVEMENT OF TREES BY GRAFTING

The Plan gives us an accurate account of the wide variety
of vegetables,[197] fruit-bearing trees,[198] and medicinal herbs[199]
that were grown within the confines of a Carolingian monastery.
The great estates of the crown, as we learn from certain
administrative directives such as the famous Capitulare
de villis,[200] had planting programs of comparable richness,
but it is very unlikely that the average secular manor was
equally prolific and advanced in these standards of planting,
and there can be no doubt that the art of improving trees
through grafting, as it was practiced on monastic lands,
must have had a stimulating effect on the agricultural management
of the secular manors with which its holdings were
interspersed.

IMPROVED METHODS IN MANAGEMENT:
BREEDING OF LIVESTOCK

The same might be said about contributions made by the
monks in setting standards for the management and breeding
of livestock. An analysis of the houses set aside for this
purpose shows that the monastery of the Plan of St. Gall
had room for eleven horses and eleven oxen,[201] forty to seventy
cows,[202] eleven foaling mares and their offspring,[203] seventy
to one hundred sheep,[204] about a hundred goats,[205] and some
twenty-one sows with litters.[206] All of these were breeding
stock and therefore only a small portion of the monastery's
total number of chattel. Again, one might venture the proposition
that by the sheer weight of the number of men it
had to sustain, the monastery would tend to nurture a more
systematic approach to such tasks as housing, breeding,
and feeding of stock. Few royal abbeys had less than 250
men to be fed within the monastic enclosure alone—while
some had as many as 400, 500, or 600. To provide for a
steady flow of supplies for the sustenance of such a concentration
of men was a logistic problem of the first order.

NEW STANDARDS IN MANAGERIAL
PRACTICE AND THEORY

The monasteries, whose schools produced the intellectual
leaders of the period, brought resources of formidable ingenuity
to deal with this problem in a superior and exhaustive
manner. This is attested by such milestones in the
history of managerial organization as the Administrative
Directives of Abbot Adalhard of Corbie,[207] the Constitution of
Abbot Ansegis of St. Wandrille,[208] and the Polyptique of
Abbot Irminon of St. Germain-des-Prés.[209] The two former,
full translations of which are given in our last volume, are
a complete analysis of the volume of revenues and labor
required for the sustenance of a settlement of some 350 to
400 people, setting forth when, how, and by whom these
revenues should be rendered and received; the latter is an
exhaustive inventory of the land, people, chattel, and
produce down to the smallest basket of cheese and eggs
from a web of estates so vast as to accommodate in its
totality as estimated 40,000 human beings.

These documents have parallels in certain directives issued
by the crown, such as the Capitulare de villis or the
Brevium exempla,[210] but there are no equivalents from any

of the lower rungs of the feudal ladder, and even on the
level of the Crown there are no parallels of comparable
complexity until three and a half centuries later, when
William the Conqueror took it upon himself to tighten his
grip over England by instituting that hated survey of people,
chattel and land (1085-1086) to which his Anglo-Saxon
subjects referred derisively as the Domesday Book.

IV.7.2

SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGICAL
STANDARDS

NEW OR UNUSUAL HEATING DEVICES

Because of the number of men it had to sustain, the monastery
must have played a significant role in acceptance and
diffusion of new or unusual heating devices. The primordial
and common way of heating houses north of the Alps from
the Stone Age onward, was the open fireplace that burned
in the middle of the living room emitting its smoke through
an opening in the roof that was protected by a lantern.
This device, as our analysis will show, appears in all of the
guest and service buildings of the Plan of St. Gall.[211] But
the Plan of St. Gall teaches us also that an exemplary
monastery of the time of Louis the Pious was provided
with two further methods for heating. In one of them the
heat is generated by a furnace (caminus) built against
one of the outer walls of the building, conducted into trenches
beneath the floor and from there released through
openings in the room above. This method—an obvious derivative
of the Roman hypocaust system—was capable of
producing an even flow of heat for large spaces and therefore
used for rooms where the entire community of monks
and novices slept or worked together.[212] In the other one,
found in the lodgings of the higher ranking members of the
monastic community as well as in the private bedrooms of
the distinguished guests, the heat was produced by a hooded
corner fireplace (caminata) that emitted its smoke through
a chimney stack.[213] Both these systems are highly sophisticated
and have no parallels in the secular early medieval
world, save for a few isolated occurrences on the highest
social levels, namely in the palaces of kings.[214]

SYSTEMATIC USE OF WATER POWER

Another major cultural contribution made to Western
life by the medieval monastery was its use of water power
for such vital operations as the grinding and crushing of
grain and, perhaps, for fulling. Our analysis of the machinery
used for these purposes on the Plan of St. Gall will
show that they were water-driven.[215] The system was known,
but for peculiar reasons never widely employed in Rome.
Again, it must have been the need for producing basic
staples in bulk rather than the more modest quantities required
for scattered individual households that prompted
monastic planners to use water power and hydraulic machinery
programmatically and from the very outset. The
economic advantages of these power plants were obvious
to anyone who had eyes to see, which explains fully enough
why the secular lords, in imitation of the examples set by
the large corporate organizations of the monks, reserved
the right of milling for themselves and made it a primary
means of feudal exploitation.

IV.7.3

SUPERIOR STANDARDS IN THE ART
OF WINE MAKING & IN LARGE
SCALE PRODUCTION OF WINE & BEER

It would be a grave mistake to overlook in this context
the impact the medieval monastery had on modern viticulture
as a guardian and transmitter of standards established
by the ancients: the art of moving, storing and aging wine in
quantities sufficiently large to guarantee to every member of
the community the daily ration of wine permitted by St.
Benedict.[216] And it would be an even greater mistake to
overlook the contribution the monasteries made to the
modern brewing industry, by producing this beverage on a
scale that had no parallels in the secular world, where beer
in general was brewed in the home, and for the consumption
of small groups of people.[217] Nor can one disregard the
effect which the monastic wine and brewing industry had
on the cultivation of that highly specialized and proficient
skill of manufacturing for the transportation and storage of
these liquids, those large and ingeniously constructed
casks which in addition of being perfectly tight, when filled,
and of resisting considerable internal pressure during
fermentation, must also be capable of bearing the strain of
transportation to great distances.

IV.7.4

SUPERIOR METHODS OF SANITATION

It is equally clear that accounting for the needs of a concentrated
body of people would foster the invention of
superior methods of sanitation. Our account of the privies
attached to the various homes shown on the Plan of St. Gall
discloses that the standards of sanitary hygiene in a paradigmatic
monastery of the time of Louis the Pious were far
advanced not only over those of any of their classical protoand
antetypes, but—with the sole exception of modern deluxe
hotels—even conspicuously superior to common
standards of modern sanitation.[218]

IV.7.5

CULTIVATION OF LINGUISTIC
INTELLECTUAL SKILLS

Yet all of this fades into insignificance if viewed against
the contributions which the monastery made to Western
life in the fields of learning and in the arts. Early monastic
asceticism generated disgust rather than sympathy for
classical learning. But the teaching and dissemination of
the Faith depended on the availability of a substantial body

of sacred texts, which necessitated the establishment of libraries
and of schools of writing both in the secular and the
monastic churches. It was inevitable that the linguistic and
intellectual skills required for the copying and writing of
these books would engender an interest in the study of the
great secular legacy of classical writing as a preparatory education
for religious teaching.[219] The great protagonists of
this school of thinking were such giants of Early Christian
learning as St. Augustine (354-430) and Cassiodorus (c.
490-585). From them a direct line leads to Alcuin (735-804)
who formulated, under Charlemagne, the educational policy
that made the establishment of schools of learning a primary
monastic obligation, and who was himself the founder of
some of the greatest monastic schools of writing, including
the school that flourished at the Palace itself.

To define what went on in these scriptoria would mean
to write half of the intellectual history of the Middle Ages
and half of the history of its visual arts. Apart from the important
task of providing the books that were indispensable
for the conduct of the religious services, there was a demand
for a great variety of original compositions, the writing of
the lives of the saints, the writing of the monastery's own
history, often reaching out to include a rich account of
events that took place in the secular world, the creation of
new hymns, and lectionaries, new antiphons, and numerous
other liturgical innovations. The ever increasing preoccupation
with these concerns—as students of medieval intellectual
history have pointed out—"made men into historians,
prose writers, poets and composers."[220]

IV.7.6

MONASTIC TIMETABLE & ITS
EFFECT UPON THE CREATION OF A
MODERN CONCEPT OF TIMING

Not among the least of the monastic contributions to
Western life is the impetus which it gave to the modern
concept of timing. Max Weber was one of the first to sense
this connection when in his analysis of the role of Christianity
on economic development, he wrote: "In that epoch
the monk is the first human being who lives rationally, who
works methodically and by rational means toward a goal,
namely the future life. Only for him did the clock strike,
only for him were the hours of the day divided for prayer."[221]

The division of day and night into twelve hours is a concept
that the Greeks appear to have learned from the Babylonians,
but one that does not seem to have had a deep effect
on the actual conduct of the daily life of the Greeks.[222]
Because the hour was calculated as 1/12 of the span of the
day, from sunset to sunrise, its length varied not only with
each successive day, but also between each day and each
night. Only during the equinoxes were the hours of day
and night of equal length. Astronomers and scholars could
cope with the daily adjustments subsumed in this system,
but in rural life, both in Greece and in Rome, man continued
to determine time, as he had done in the most
remote ages, by measuring the length of his shadow with
the sole of his foot.[223] Sundials, which measured shadows in
a more systematic manner, as well as water clocks were
well known in ancient times and seem to have been of some
importance in Roman public life.[224] But in the Middle
Ages, the only corporate segments of society where the
whole of the daily cycle of activities was regulated by the
striking of a bell, were the church and the monasteries.[225]
The humble task of seeing that the services began at the
right time, varying with the seasons, required careful
thought and no mean knowledge about the movement of
the stars. St. Benedict considered this task to be of such

extreme importance that he entrusted it to the care of the
abbot, whom he admonished to perform this duty either in
person or to delegate it to a brother so careful "that everything
may be fulfilled at its proper time."[226] Computus, i.e.,
the study and transmission of the knowledge about the
Christian calendar, became a primary curricular subject of
monastic learning, for which Bede (as Charles W. Jones has
shown) played the role of prototypal master as author of
De Temporibus, which became a textbook for centuries to
follow.[227] In later monastic practice the timing of the
religious services, no easy task, became the charge of the
sacrist[228] who, if he struck the bell for the meals or various
parts of the divine office too late or too early, committed a
breach of duty. For such a defection he was bound to give
satisfaction at the next chapter meeting or, in the case of
graver negligence, during the divine service, by standing at
the foot of the steps of the presbytery with his body bent
to the ground (stans incurvus) and retaining this penitential
position throughout the Kyrie eleison until the completion
of the service with the end of the Deo gratias.[229]

On clear days and nights the relative length of each hour
could be established with the aid of a sun dial or by the
position of the stars. Rachel L. Poole published the text of
a monastic star time-table of the eleventh century which
gives accurate instructions to be followed by the night
watchman of a monastery near Orleans.[230] A typical example
follows:

Similar directives concerning the relative position of stars
to predetermined architectural features, at the desired hour,
are given for the nights of all of the other important
offices of the year.

On dull days and nights, however, neither the sun
quadrant nor the stars were of any use. On these occasions
the sacrist's only recourse was the water clock. Excavations
conducted in 1894 in the ruins of the Cistercian Abbey of
Villers brought to light five fragments of slate, incised in a
delicate cursive minuscule of the second half of the thirteenth
century, with a series of minute instructions to the
sacrist of Villers for regulating the monastery's water
clock.[232] The texts disclose that this water clock ran in
cycles of 32 hours, that it had to be refilled when three-fourths
depleted,[233] and that its deficiencies in precision
were checked by the angle of the shadows cast by the sun
upon the jambs of the windows in the apse of the abbey
church.[234]

There was no need in any institution of the secular world
to transmit or nurture similar skills. The life of the medieval
peasant was controlled by such simple and ever recurring
events as the rising and setting of the sun, the waning and
waxing of the moon, events whose seasonal variations
placed little strain on the human ability to time action
through observation. Even in military life where failure to
maintain schedules might become a matter of survival,
there were no timing needs of comparable complexity, comparable
duration, or comparable consistency. Between the
military division of the night by the Greeks and Romans
into watches marked by the change of sentries and the
time-controlled activities of the modern professional man
who regulates the hours of both his work and his leisure
(even his sleep!) by a portable timepiece attached to his
wrist, there lies historically the monastic practice of dividing
the day into a carefully calculated sequence of religious
services (matin, lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, and
compline) in which the 150 psalms could be cited in their
entirety in the course of a week.

IV.7.7

DEVELOPMENT OF NEW CONCEPTS
IN ARCHITECTURE

Our account of the monastery as a cultural institution
would widen into a panorama of kaleidoscopic complexity
were we to raise the question of the monastery's contribution
to the development of western architecture. Up to the
very close of the eleventh century all truly important architectural
innovations were made in the great monastic compounds.
Centula, Fulda, St.-Martin-du-Canigou, Tournus,
Jumièges, Cluny, Santiago, Canterbury and Durham, to
mention only some of the most obvious examples, are highlights
in a spectacular pageant of monastic churches. The
Church of the Plan of St. Gall with its modular schematism
pointing centuries ahead in the development of medieval
church construction—its apse and counter apse, its dual
system of crypts—bears favorably the test of comparison
with any of these great architectural innovations.

[ILLUSTRATION]

263.X CHRIST IN MAJESTY. DETAIL

GOSPEL BOOK OF GUNDOHINUS (A.D. 754). Autun, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS. 3, fol. 12v [after Porcher-Hubert-Volbach, 1970, fig. 62]

Made upon the order of a lady named Fausta and a monk, Fuculphus, this Gospel book was written by the scribe Gundohinus, in an unidentifiable monastery called
Vosevium. The book's historical position at the start of a new era of Western life, marked by the coronation at St.-Denis of Charlemagne's father Pepin by Pope
Stephen II, has been persuasively defined by Jean Porcher (op. cit., 71ff):

"The book was completed in 754, the third year of the reign of King Pepin, the very year in which by a remarkable coincidence the Carolingian dynasty officially
began. . . . Nothing like it had yet been seen on the continent north of the Alps. The history of the Carolingian book begins with Gundohinus, just as the Carolingian
dynasty begins with Pepin."

Drawn with a clumsy hand, in lines intoxicated with a naive sophistication, this sensitive head of Christ—whose frontal stare has distinguished antecedents in Imperial
Roman art—is, among other things, a reflection of the deep cultural shock to which the Northern barbarians, with their nonfigurative art, were exposed in this first
encounter with the anthropomorphic imagery of the Christian South.

[ILLUSTRATION]

MUSÉE D'HISTOIRE ET D'ART, LUXEMBOURG. FIFTH CENTURY A.D.

Two doves confront each other on either side of a vase. The engraved marble fragment from Ettelbrük bears an Early Christian
inscription commemorating a man who, dead at the age of 38, was mourned by his wife Dalmatia.

AN END OR A BEGINNING?

A symbol of expectation of eternal life awaiting the faithful who, as doves, pluck flowers from the fountain of life, the composition
is a fascinating link between Roman, Early Christian, and medieval art. In Roman times, the motif was primarily
decorative. But stripped of the sculptural plasticity and the pictorial realism which it then possessed, enriched with Christian
symbolism, and recast in the flat, linear style favored by the barbarian conquerors of Rome, the fragment displays a freshness
of spirit that heralds the ascendancy of a new cultural mood—a new feeling for life that, interacting with the heritage of
Antiquity, was to generate a cultural synthesis of rich and unprecedented sophistication. The Carolingian Renaissance
which among other great accomplishments produced the Plan to which these volumes are
dedicated, was one of the first great peaks of this cultural encounter.