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.
