I.13.6
PERIPHERAL ENCLOSURE WALL
Whether built of wood or stone, or simply in the form of a
hedge, the outer monastery wall is an intrinsic expression of
the concept of monastic seclusion. In 320, when St.
Pachomius founded the earliest Christian coenobium in
Tabennessi near Dendera in the Upper Nile Valley, he
surrounded it with a wall,[280]
perhaps not so much for
defensive purposes as for insulating the monastic enclosure
from the noise and impurities of the secular world. The
wall became the symbol of monkish self-determination and
collective integrity.[281]
Medieval texts distinguish time and
again between that which is "within" (infra, intrinsecus) or
"without" (extra, extrinsecus, foris, subtus, juxta), which
presupposes a separating enclosure.[282]
In Irish and Anglo-Saxon
monasteries this enclosure often consisted of earthen
ramparts with a moat or ditch in front and a wooden
palisade above,[283]
or even more simply, just a hedge of thorn
(sepes magna spinea, quae totum monasterium circumcingebat),
as at the monastery of Oundle, a foundation of Wilfrid.[284]
A
wooden palisade enclosure existed at the monastery of
Lobbes as late as the twelfth century,[285]
but from the end of
the eighth century, monastery walls were with increasing
frequency built of stone;[286]
and from the end of the ninth
century, many of these walls assume a distinctly defensive
function (murus in modum castri).[287]
In view of these facts, the absence of a peripheral wall
enclosure on the Plan of St. Gall presents a puzzle. Was it a
feature so self-evident to the inventor of the scheme that he
did not bother to include it? Ot should we presume that it
existed on the original, but was omitted in the copy?
There are two reasons why I believe that it existed on the
original. First, the fences that separate the grounds of the
houses to the north and the south of the Church were useless
unless they connected with a peripheral wall enclosure.[288]
Second, our analysis of the scale and construction
methods used in the Plan will show that the location of the
axis of the Church as well as the major site divisions of the
monastery are related to a system of framing lines (fig. 62),
which on the original would only have meaning if they
defined an outer wall enclosure.[289]
The copyist might have dropped this feature for various
reasons: for one, simply because his sheet of parchment
was not large enough to include it; for another, because a
rectangular wall perimeter may have been meaningless on
the reconstruction of the monastery of St. Gall for which
the copy was to be used. The monastery of St. Gall was
wedged into an irregular area shaped by the capricious
course of the Steinach, whose steep embankments may
have served as an acceptable substitute for masonry walls
for a considerable stretch along the southern and eastern
boundaries of the monastery site. No such natural defenses
existed to the west and to the north, where the terrain is
flat. Yet even here there must have been a clear demarkation,
either architectural or topographical, between the
grounds of the monastery and the grounds of the secular
settlement that had begun to rise around it. There is
documentary evidence for the existence, in Carolingian
times, of a protective perimeter of masonry walls. When the
monastery was attacked by the Magyars in 926 the monks
found themselves compelled to throw up a temporary system
of heavy defense (castellum fortissimum) on the spur of a
nearby mountain.[290]
This has been interpreted to mean that
the monastery was not sufficiently fortified to block their
advance.[291]
It was doubtlessly in response to this alarming
event that Abbot Arno, in 953-954, decided to construct a
masonry wall with thirteen towers (muros . . . cum turris
tredecim) that encompassed not only the monastery, but
with it the entire city (urbs) of St. Gall.[292]
