University of Virginia Library

V. 17

FACILITIES FOR THE RAISING
OF POULTRY AND LIVESTOCK

V.17.1

ANIMAL HUSBANDRY:
AN INTRINSIC
PART OF THE MONASTIC ECONOMY

The presence on the Plan of St. Gall of a vast array of
houses for livestock and poultry and their keepers may at
first seem puzzling in view of the monks' essentially vegetarian
diet. It becomes a less surprising phenomenon,
however, when one considers that, although meat was categorically
interdicted to the monks themselves by a rule
that left no margin for ambiguity, it was permitted to
the serfs and workmen, who outnumbered the monks, and
even to the monks themselves in times of sickness and
during the period of bloodletting.[594] But there are other
reasons, and probably more important ones, why the raising
of livestock was a necessary part of the monastic
economy. Animals were needed for hauling and riding.
Without horses and oxen harnessed to plows and carts,
the serfs could neither have tilled the soil nor brought in
the harvest. Saddle horses were an indispensable means of
transportation for the abbot or any other monastic official
whose business took him onto the monastery's outlying
estates. Horses had to be raised for the king as an annual
contribution to the common defense, and horses had to be
kept in readiness for the armed men whom the monastery
was required to dispatch to the king's army in times of
war.[595]

Cows, sheep, goats, and pigs were slaughtered for their
meat, and from the Liber benedictionum of Ekkehart we
learn that the cuts of meat from these animals were as
cherished in his day on the tables of those who could
afford them as they are today.[596] But cows, goats, and sheep
also produced milk, a more important product, because it
was used to make cheese—a staple in everyone's diet.
Sheep's wool was indispensable for making coats and
blankets. Leather was made from the hides of oxen. The
skin of the calf and the lamb yielded a commodity that was
of prime importance for the monastery's religious and
educational mission: parchment. The quill used in writing
the sacred texts came from the wings of geese.

The meat of poultry, as has already been pointed out,
was not subject to the same restrictions as the meat of
quadrupeds. The second synod of Aachen (817) granted
it to the monks for a period of eight days on each of the
great religious feasts of Christmas and Easter. Later the
number of days was reduced to four on each of these

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL, HENHOUSE, HOUSE FOR FOWLKEEPERS, GOOSEHOUSE

466.

466.X

SITE PLAN

The proximity of the fowl runs to the Granary, Vegetable Garden, and
Orchard shows with what degree of skill convenience and necessity were planned
for by the makers of the Plan. Grain for feed could be gleaned or threshed at
need in the Granary and carried to the fowl runs. Proximity to the gardens was
a boon for both birds and their keepers—garden clippings might provide the
chickens and geese with additional food, while in the beds and orchard manure
from the pens could quickly be distributed, enhancing sanitation. In all facilities
housing animals on the Plan of St. Gall, the herdsmen and keepers lived in
close contact with beasts; while the fowlkeepers were spared the literal
necessity of "going to bed with the chickens," their house is separated by only
ten feet from the two poultry enclosures.

The house for fowlkeepers is 35 feet in length (ridge axis E to W) and 42½ feet wide. Its communal hall with fireplace measures 22½ × 35 feet,
allowing two 10-foot aisles at either side for sleeping accommodation.

The form that the pair of circular pens may have taken is discussed extensively on the following pages. Their sheer size, at a diameter of
42½ feet (across the outermost circle) is impressive evidence of the importance that poultry (perhaps including ducks) had in the monastic
economy. A monastery population of the size postulated on the Plan of St. Gall would in itself have required many birds to augment diet; the
guest facilities and lay dependents proposed for St. Gall made planning for fowl pens of this size a necessity. The poultry houses and that for
their keepers are masterpieces of functional planning; they exhibit great charm in the symmetrical composition of circular with rectangular
structures.

[ILLUSTRATION]

467. LUTTRELL PSALTER (1340). GOOSEHERD

LONDON, BRITISH MUSEUM, ADD. MS. 42130, fol. 169v (detail)

[By courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum]

A goose and five goslings are threatened by a hawk; the gooseherd waves his hood and staff at it to drive it off. Geese were not only useful as
food, but kept vermin and garden pest populations down; their raucous and hostile response to strangers, well known since the early days of
Rome, may have added to their utility in the life of a large monastic complex.

occasions.[597] For the rest of the year, when consumption was
prohibited, hens were of vital importance for their capacity
to produce eggs—a year round staple in the monastic diet
and one of its most important sources of protein. For egg
production alone, the raising of poultry was bound to be
one of the most important aspects of monastic animal
husbandry, and the polyptichs and household accounts from
medieval abbeys abound with records of supplementary
deliveries of eggs, chickens, and hens (ova, pulli et gallinae)
from the abbey's outlying farms.[598]

Lastly we must not overlook the fact that these animals
provided the only good fertilizer that was known to the
medieval agriculturalist and one that made a vital contribution
to the enrichment of the community's crop and
harvest.

It becomes quite clear then, that despite the monks'
essentially vegetarian diet, the monastery as a self-sustaining
economic and agricultural entity could not forego
the need to raise livestock and poultry in quantities commensurate
with the number of men whom it had to clothe
and feed. In the spring, summer, and autumn the majority
of monastic animals were unquestionably put out to pasture.
For that reason, the houses for livestock and their
keepers shown on the Plan of St. Gall are likely to define
only that space which was needed to stable the animals
kept under roof and shelter during the harsh winter months
in order to insure the propagation of the species. The
costliness of stall feeding demanded that this be done with
discretion. A thirteenth-century directive recorded in the
cartulary of Gloucester Abbey rules that "no useless and
unfertile animals are to be wintered on hay and forage"
(quod nulla animalia inutilia et infructuosa hyementur ad
consumptionem foeni vel foragii) and the text makes it clear
that exceptions to this ruling should be made only with
regard to such useful and deserving animals as the plow
oxen and breeding cows (talia scilicet de quibus non credatur
posse nutriri aliquis bos utilis ad carucas vel vacca competens
ad armentum).[599] The directive reflects a general condition
of medieval animal husbandry that pervaded all social
strata and the whole of medieval life, with only minor
variations on the highest levels.

The importance of animal husbandry is eloquently
attested by St. Fructuosus in the ninth chapter of his
Galician Rule. As noted in the translation by Barlow, this
chapter does not appear in the Fructuosan Rule for other
areas, presumably because (as Fructuosus acknowledges)

[ILLUSTRATION]

468. MEINDERT HOBBEMA

A FARM IN THE SUNLIGHT (1660-1670)

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON D.C.

[By courtesy of the Trustees of the National Gallery of Art]

then, as now, Galicia required "more work on the soil than
any other land" and the monk in whose charge lay the
pasturing of livestock needed not only firm direction but
also moral support:

The total area set aside for animal husbandry on the
Plan of St. Gall takes up more than one-fourth of the
monastery site. It accommodates six houses for the larger
breeds and two enclosures for poultry, as well as the living
rooms and bedrooms needed for their keepers. The stables
for the larger animals are concentrated in a large service
yard lying to the south and west of the claustrum; the
houses for the poultry are in the southeast corner of the
monastery site, between the vegetable garden and the
granary.

V.17.2

HOUSES FOR POULTRY & THEIR KEEPERS

The monastery's facilities for the raising of poultry consist
of a dwelling for the fowlkeepers and two circular enclosures—one
for hens, the other for geese. They lie in a plot
of land about 60 feet wide and 145 feet long.

HOUSE OF THE FOWLKEEPERS

The House of the Fowlkeepers (fig. 466) lies midway
between the Hen House and the Goose House. It is a
relatively small and simple house, 42½ feet wide and 35
feet long, consisting of a "common hall" (domus communis)
with a fireplace, and two aisles, one serving as "dwelling

for the keeper of the hen house" (mansio pullorum custodis),
the other as "dwelling for the keeper of the goose house"
(item custodis aucaru). The house is entered axially through
doors in its eastern and western gable walls, which assure
the shortest and most direct communication with the Hen
House and Goose House.

The House of the Fowlkeepers is the only example
among the Plan's guest and service buildings in which the
principal room of the house has aisles on only two sides
and is connected directly with the exterior by doors located
in the two gable walls. A fine pictorial record of this type
of house may be found in a painting by Meindert Hobbema
(fig. 468) entitled A Farm in the Sunlight. This small,
relatively modest farmhouse is aisled but has no lean-to's
on the gable side. A chimney in the ridge of the roof suggests
that it has a central fireplace. The entrances, as in the House
of the Fowlkeepers, are obviously in the longitudinal axis
of the building. The frame of timber supporting this roof
may have corresponded, beam by beam, to that of the
House of the Fowlkeepers. Our reconstructions (fig. 469)
are an attempt to interpret this system.

HENHOUSE AND GOOSE HOUSE

Layout and design

The Hen House and the Goose House lie on either side
of the House of the Fowlkeepers, one to the west, one to
the east (fig. 466). They are the same size and identical
in design. Each consists of three concentric circles, drawn
at diameters of 12½, 27½, and 42½ feet. The only entrance
to each is on the side facing the House of the Fowlkeepers.
The enclosures are identified by metric titles written in
capitalis rustica (a distinction not accorded to any other
building housing animals):

and:

The intermediate bands are not provided with titles, and
the inner circle is decorated with an eight-lobed rosette—of
the same design and probably the same apotropaic purpose
as the corresponding symbol in the two church towers.
The interpretation of these two circular poultry houses
poses problems.

Classical, medieval, and modern parallels

I do not know of any classical prototypes. The Roman
hen and goose houses described by Columella and Varro
were buildings of rectangular shape.[601] But the question
arises whether there may be some typological connection
between the hen and goose houses of the Plan of St. Gall
and the circular bird house which Varro built in his villa
at Casinum.[602] There appear to be no medieval parallels,
unless a circular enclosure with two rectangular attachments
on the grounds of the tenth-century royal palace at Cheddar,
in Somerset, England (fig. 470)—which its excavator,
Philip Rahtz, interpreted as a mill with grain bin and
bakery—was in reality a chicken house. The light construction
of its walls, all braided in wattlework, may speak in
favor of such an assumption.[603]

In his model of 1877 Julius Lehmann reconstructed the
poultry houses of St. Gall in the image of a medieval dovecot
(fig. 267). He interpreted the outer circle as a wall, and
the area between this circle and the inner circle as an open
poultry run. Besides the fact that this interpretation completely
disregards the existence of an intermediate circle,
Lehmann's solution involves a conspicuous imbalance between
running and roosting space and would appear to
be incompatible with the functional perspicacity that the
author of the Plan exhibits in the handling of all other
details of this nature.

The clue to the riddle may be found in an octagonal
chicken house built in the nineteenth century by Freiherr
von Ulm-Erbach, and described in 1886 in Bruno Dürigen's
monumental work on poultry breeding (fig. 472).[604]
Dürigen referred to the design of this house as "a formerly
favored" but "now superannuated" form that had a long
tradition and was used in many zoological gardens because
of its specific suitability for exhibition purposes.[605] The
house is 26 feet (8 meters) in diameter and 23 feet (7
meters) high. Like the poultry houses of the Plan, it has
three concentric strips of space and only one entrance. The

[ILLUSTRATION]

HOUSE OF THE FOWLKEEPERS

469.B TRANSVERSE SECTION

469.A GROUND PLAN

469.D LONGITUDINAL SECTION

469.C WEST ELEVATION

AUTHORS' RECONSTRUCTION

Among the guest and service buildings of the Plan, this house is the sole example in which the communal inner hall is flanked by aisles only on
its two long sides. The hall is divided into three bays—a center bay 15 feet deep and two gable bays 10 feet deep. A division into four bays of
equal width would have brought the center truss into conflict with the fireplace and doors leading from hall into aisles. In all other respects our
reconstruction is modeled after the farmhouse in the Hobbema painting of fig. 468.

[ILLUSTRATION]

470. CHEDDAR, SOMERSET, ENGLAND

SAXON PALACE SITE, 10th CENTURY

[Redrawn from Rahtz, 1962/3, 62, fig. 24]

Of the two alternatives considered by Rahtz, the identification of this site as a
poultry house (rather than a corn mill) appears to be the more plausible, unless
it could be demonstrated that an animal-driven mill, common among the Romans
(cf. figs. 441-442), but subsquently used only when water power was lacking
(as during drought), would still have been operating in the 10th century in an
Anglo-Saxon palace. All available literary sources seem to offer evidence to the
contrary. Had the circular component of this structure housed a mill, it seems
likely that the supports of so heavy a mechanism would have left evidence more
tangible than that found on the site.

outermost strip is open to the sky and serves as a daytime
run for the chickens. The intermediate strip is roofed
over and serves as coop, leaving in the center a tower-like
projection, the raised roof of which admits air and light
through clerestory windows. The chickens are fed and
watered from this center space, and the house can be
heated by a stove set up in this area.

The portion serving as coop consists of a lower and an
upper tier, the lower being used for laying and brooding,
and the upper, for fattening.[606] Both tiers have trap doors
toward the chicken run which can be closed at night, with
ladders enabling the birds to descend to the ground from
their roosting pens and to ascend again in the evening.
Freiherr Ulm-Erbach's chicken coop had a housing capacity,
on the lower tier alone, of 192 birds. The Hen House
of the Plan, which is practically identical in dimensions,
could have accommodated the same number—and if it
were meant to be a double-tier arrangement, twice that
number. For the geese and ducks (should anseres be a
generic term for both of these breeds) this figure would
have to be reduced by a ratio commensurate with their
larger size.

In Roman times, according to Columella,[607] one laborer
was considered sufficient to care for 200 chickens. On the
Plan of St. Gall the keepers of the hen and goose houses
are referred to in the singular, but the rooms in which they
sleep are large enough to accommodate beds for three or
four additional hands. The raising of chickens is a year-round
operation; but geese generally mate in December,
so that goslings can be grazed in the open fields in the
spring, without supplementary feed and extra housing
(fig. 467). The guarding of these flocks would require
additional hands.

Materials and location

I am inclined to believe that the poultry houses on the
Plan were meant to be masonry structures (fig. 473), not only
because circular walls are more readily built in stone than
in wood, but also because masonry makes more feasible
the construction of holes into which the birds may retreat
for laying and hatching. Columella rated laying-nests holed
into masonry superior to wicker baskets suspended in
front of the walls.[608] It is likely that a wattlework fence was
intended for the outer fence that enclosed the poultry runs.

The siting of these houses is ideal, as the chickens and
geese are located near their two basic foods. The granary
lies on one side of the poultry enclosure, and the Monks'
Vegetable Garden on the other. The chickens would doubtless
have been eager to eat the weeds and scraps of vegetables,
after these had been cleaned and cropped for the
monks' table, as the gardeners were anxious to part with
them. And the Monks' Vegetable Garden provided a suitable
place to dispose of the birds' droppings when the
poultry houses were cleaned out.

[ILLUSTRATION]

GOSPELS OF ST. MEDARD OF SOISSONS (9TH CENT.) CANON ARCHES

471.A

471.B

PARIS, BIBLIOTHÈQUE NATIONALE, MS. LAT. 8850, fol. 12v (detail)

Two cocks perch on slender columns that rise from the outer edges of the abaci of the two outer capitals of a canon arch; they are typical of
the classicizing style of manuscript painting cultivated in the Court School. For other manuscripts of the Court School see figures 18-23, and
183-184 in Volume I.

V.17.3

HOUSE FOR HORSES AND OXEN
AND THEIR KEEPERS

LAYOUT AND DESIGN

The House for Horses and Oxen and Their Keepers
lies west of the House of the Coopers and Wheelwrights
and south of the Hospice for Pilgrims and Paupers (fig. 9).
Measuring 145 feet in length and 37½ feet in width, it is
the largest of the buildings housing livestock. It contains
in its center the "the hall for the oxherds and horse grooms"
(domus bubulcorum & equos seruantium). This is a large
square room with an open fireplace in the center and
benches all around its four walls, another unique and
distinguishing feature among the buildings used for livestock
and their attendants. The fireplace has unusually

[ILLUSTRATION]

CHICKEN HOUSE

472.B ELEVATION

472.A PLAN

BUILT BY FREIHERR VON ULM-EHRBACH

The complexity of this poultry house may reflect centuries-long skills
in efficient fowl husbandry; it could be a structure identical with that
proposed for the Plan of St. Gall. (see p. 272).

generous dimensions (12½ feet by 16 feet) and has inscribed
into it a

[ILLUSTRATION]

-shaped symbol which appears nowhere else
on the Plan. The size of the fireplace and the seating capacity
of the benches in this hall, both of which exceed by a
considerable margin the needs of the occupants of this
building, suggest that the hall of the oxherds and grooms
might have served as kitchen and dining room for a larger
segment of the monastery's serfs and laymen, perhaps for
all those who were in charge of livestock. The

[ILLUSTRATION]

-shaped
symbol may have been the sign either for a hearth or for a
wooden frame for the cranes from which caldrons were
suspended on chains over the open fire.[610] One might also
consider the possibility that it was a rig for making shoes
for the draft animals, but there is no positive evidence that
the hooves of horses and oxen were shod this early.[611]

The northern hall of the building serves as "stable for
the mares" (stabulum equarum infra). It has overhead, a
wooden ceiling (supra tabulatum), certainly a loft for the
storage of hay.[612] The "mangers" (praesepia) are carefully
delineated on the Plan and seem to consist of a hayrack
and a feeding trough. The grooms slept in an aisle running
along the entire eastern side of the horses' stable (ad hoc
seruitiū mansio).

The southern half of the building contained the "stable
for the oxen, below" (boum stabulum infra) and "overhead,
a hayloft" (supra tabulatū). The "mangers for the oxen"
(praesepia boū), like those of the horses, ran along the
western wall of the stable. The lean-to on the opposite
side served as "quarters for the oxherds" (conclaue assecularum).
The mangers of the oxen are separated by means of
cross divisions into feeding areas 5 feet wide, doubtless to
prevent the animals from striking each other with their
horns. As there are eleven stalls, the stable for oxen was
equipped to stall eleven head (five plowing teams and a
spare). The same number of horses could have been
accommodated in the stable for mares. Modern farming
manuals recommend standing areas slightly larger (6½ feet),
but the length of the stalls for horses and oxen on the Plan
is not incompatible with the requirements of present-day
stock management. There is ample space behind each
animal to serve as a dung trench, and there is a generous
margin of space on the other side of the stall for the storing
of plows and yokes and other equipment needed for the
operation of teams. Throughout the entire Middle Ages
horses and oxen alike were used as draft animals. Numerous

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL. HEN HOUSE. Authors' reconstruction

473.B SECTION

473.A PLAN

473.C ELEVATION

For SITE PLAN showing relationship of the HENHOUSE to GOOSEHOUSE
and to FOWLKEEPERS' HOUSE, see figure 466. X, page 265, and figure 466.

The installation of the monastery's poultry in circular enclosures indicates that this kind of structure was not only in use at the time the Plan
was made, but was sufficiently well known to be proposed as an exemplary solution for a monastic community of some 250-270 people. The
enclosure provided for maximum flock size with greatest economy of space. With eggs a chief source of protein in the monks' diet, the more
haphazard methods of raising poultry—i.e., letting birds run and nest at will all over the farmyard—were inappropriate; there was no time in
so well-regulated a community to search each morning for the eggs of perhaps several hundreds of birds! Feeding, watering, sanitation, and
doctoring were likewise attended to with ease through the architectural sophistication of circular fowl houses. A disadvantage of this type of
enclosure is that it cannot readily be enlarged, and is thus most appropriate for a community of planned population.

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR HORSES AND OXEN AND THEIR KEEPERS

474.

474.X

This house differs from the other guest and service buildings in that its center space with fireplace and benches (designated as the "living room
of the oxherders and grooms") reaches across the entire width of the building. The stables for the horses and oxen do not surround, but extend
laterally away from it. The early and high medieval buildings shown in figs. 477-481 demonstrate that tripartite long houses of this type were
not uncommon in the Middle Ages.

medieval illuminations could be adduced to attest to this
fact; two of the finest examples of this type, from the
margins of the Luttrell Psalter, are shown in figures 475
and 476.[613]

IMPORTANT ROLE OF THE MONASTERY'S
HORSES AND OXEN

The generous dimensions assigned to the House for
Horses and Oxen testifies, not only to the important role
these beasts of burden played in the monastic economy,
but also to the high social standing their caretakers held
amongst the monastery's permanent body of servants.[614]
Columella writes that in his day one farm laborer was
considered enough to look after two yokes of oxen.[615] The
bedrooms of the oxherds on the Plan are large enough to
provide bed space for seven hands; and the same number
of men could be accommodated in the quarters of the
horse grooms.

MEDIEVAL & PROTOHISTORIC PARALLELS OF THE
HOUSE FOR HORSES AND OXEN

The House for Horses and Oxen and their Keepers
differs from all the other livestock buildings shown on the
Plan in that the stabling areas for the animals and the
bedrooms of the herdsmen are not arranged peripherally
around a central living room with a fireplace, but rather,
extend outward on the two opposite sides of that room so
as to form a longhouse. This particular layout is a very
ancient one and was used in the Middle Ages for other
purposes as well.

[ILLUSTRATION]

475. LUTTRELL PSALTER (1340). HARROWING

LONDON, BRITISH MUSEUM, ADD. MS. 42130, fol. 171 (detail)

[By courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum]

The harrow is pulled by one horse and led by a man. A slinger following the harrow tries to drive off two crows flying overhead. Harrows with
iron teeth or tines pegged through a wooden frame (and perhaps originally operated with wooden pegs) are among the oldest animal-powered
agricultural tools. They were used to break up clods after the soil was plowed, to level the earth for seeding, and to cover the seed after it was
broadcast. One horse, properly harnessed, as this drawing shows, was able to draw the harrow.

Royal guesthouses of the Consuetudines Farfenses

An interesting guesthouse for royal travelers, bearing
striking resemblance to the House for Horses and Oxen,
is described in the Consuetudines Farfenses[616] , a literary
master plan for a monastic settlement written around 1043
in the monastery of Farfa in the Sabine mountains, but
now generally believed to record the layout of the monastery
which Abbot Odilo (994-1048) built at Cluny:[617]

The Farfa Consuetudinary describes a guesthouse that is
to be an integral part of the architectural layout of an
eleventh-century monastery. (The mounts and grooms of
the traveling party were to be housed in a separate building.)

The measurements of this building, as listed in this
account, are wholly compatible with the function it was to
perform, as is demonstrated in the reconstruction of its
layout shown in fig. 477, where it is assumed that the
mattresses were ranged side by side at right angles to the
long walls. Laid out in this manner, the two wings of the
building could indeed yield sleeping space for forty men
and thirty ladies, leaving in the center a dining hall 30
feet square. The privies, as the text implies, were separate.
They could not have been arranged in a single line, as that
would have required an outhouse 175 feet long (40 feet
more than the house itself). The proportions are more
reasonable, if we assume that they were arranged in a
double row.[619]

Monks' dormitory in the monastery of
St. Wandrille

There is other, and even earlier, evidence for the use of
a longhouse of this description as sleeping quarters. The
Gesta abbatum Fontanellensium describes a building of this
type erected by Abbot Ansegis (823-833) as a dormitory
for the monks of the monastery of St.-Wandrille (Fontanella):

Again, we are dealing with a building of extremely
elongated shape, with arms reaching out in opposite directions
from a central space whose function differs distinctly
from that of the extended parts. In St.-Wandrille this
central portion served as sunroom (solarium) and therefore
must have been more open than the wings in which the

[ILLUSTRATION]

478.A FONTANELLA (ST.-WANDRILLE) SEINE-MARITIME FRANCE, FOUNDED BY ST. WANDRILLE, 645
SCHEME OF CRITERIA FOR AN INTERPRETIVE STUDY

FONTANELLA (ST.-WANDRILLE)

These studies show in the Carolingian monastery of Fontanella a dormitory that is a
monastic variant of a Germanic long house of very ancient vintage, examples of which
are discussed in this chapter. Our present interpretation, differing from those proposed by
von Schlosser, 1889, Hager, 1901, and in minutiae even from one proposed by Horn
(1973, 46, fig. 47), makes no claim for authenticity in particulars. The design of the
architectural envelope, its fenestration, and its "graceful cloister walks" is an exercise
of imagination. But we feel confident of the interpretation of the disposition of primary
building masses.

The Gesta Abbatum Fontanellensium, written around A.D. 830 and 845,
describes the church of Abbot St. Wandrille, begun in 649 (here translated pending
fuller treatment in a subsequent study):

"The above-said admirable father built in this place a basilica in the name of the
most blessed prince of the Apostles, Peter, in squared stones and having 290 feet in
length and 37 feet in width."

Almost 200 years later Ansegis began construction of the cloister. First to be built was a
new dormitory (see Latin and English text, p. 277). The Gesta describes the erection
of a new refectory and a third structure, the MAIOR DOMUS:

"Thereafter he built another house called the refectory, through the middle of
which he had constructed a masonry wall to divide it so that one part would serve as
refectory, the other as cellar. This building was of precisely the same material and
the same dimensions as the dormitory . . . then he caused to be erected a third
exceptional structure which they called `the larger building'. It turned toward the
east, with one end touching the dormitory, the other adjoining the refectory. He
ordered a supply room to be installed in it, and a warming room, as well as several
other rooms. But because of his premature death this work remained in part
unfinished.

"These three most beautiful buildings are laid out in this manner: the dormitory is
situated with one end turned toward the north, the other toward the south, with its
south end attached to the basilica of St. Peter. The refectory likewise is aligned in
these two directions, and on the south side it almost touches the apse of the basilica
of St. Peter. Then that larger building is placed just as we have said above . . . . The
church of St. Peter lies to the south and faces east . . . ."

The chronicler finished his account by telling us that Ansegis "ordered graceful porches
to be built in front of the dormitory, refectory, and larger house," and that he
added midway along the cloister walk "in front of the dormitory a house for charters"
and "in front of the refectory a building in which to preserve a quantity of books."
On the use of the cloister wing that runs along the flank of the church as a place for
daily chapter meetings, see I, 249ff.

Ansegis's construction of the claustral range
of Fontanella, begun in 823, precedes
Gozbert's reconstruction of the monastery of
St. Gall by only a few years. Like St.
Gall, Fontanella conforms with the claustral
scheme emerging from Aachen in 816-817:
its ranges enclose an open court adjacent to
one flank of the church.

The topography of Fontanella did not allow
Ansegis to place the new cloister on the
south side of the church (as did Gozbert at
St. Gall, in conformity with the Aachen
scheme; cf. below, 327ff) because the old
church of St. Wandrille already stood
against the southern slope of a valley too
steep to permit further construction. But
there was ample space for building on the
flat valley floor north of the church.

In Ansegis's time the Roman supply road
from Rouen ran east of the abbey, and the
unchanneled Seine often flooded the low
valley meadows. These limitations of topography
caused Ansegis to adopt a most unorthodox
order for his claustral buildings—
cellar and refectory to the east; close to
supply routes; dormitory to the west. A
further difference is that in the Aachen
scheme all claustral structures were double-storied
whereas at Fontanella they were not;
hence their inordinate length.

Ansegis's cloister strikingly illustrates the
Carolingian search for a new order in which
a Roman passion for symmetry and monumentality
prevails over loose, casual
assembly of parts. It is furthermore a
testimony to the triumph of Benedictine
monachism over other less ordered forms of
monastic observance, and the role the Benedictine
ideals played in lending new eminence
and vigor to the quest for cultural unity
that pervaded the whole of Carolingian life.

monks were bedded. Perhaps this solarium had the form
of a large transeptal porch with heavily fenestrated gables.

Protohistoric houses of similar design

I mentioned before that this particular layout was a very
ancient one. Longhouses of comparable design were excavated
by Doppelfeld in a Migration Period settlement on
the Bärhorst, near Nauen, Germany;[621] by Bänfer, Stieren,
and Klein in a Migration Period settlement at Westick,
near Kamen, Westphalia;[622] and by Winkelmann, at Warendorf,
near Münster,[623] in a settlement datable by its pottery
to A.D. 650-800 (fig. 478) This building type spread from
the Continent to England, where it is attested by a
Saxon longhall of the ninth century, excavated in 1960-62
by Philip Rahtz in Cheddar, Somerset (fig. 479)[624] and
numerous buildings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
when it became a favorite layout for monastic barns in
the counties of Wiltshire, Gloucester, and Somerset. Figures
480 and 481 are typical examples. The first is a broadside
view of the fourteenth-century barn at Pilton, Somerset,
a dependency of the abbey of Glastonbury; and, the
second, a plan of the fifteenth-century barn of Tisbury,
Wiltshire, one of the outlying granges of the abbesses of
Shaftsbury.[625]

Reconstruction

In our reconstruction of the House for Horses and Oxen
and Their Keepers (fig. 482A-G), we have emphasized the
function of the domus bubulcorum & equas seruantium as
the living, dining, and cooking area of the herdsmen (and
perhaps an even larger segment of the monastery's serfs
and laymen) by giving to this portion of the building the
form of a large transeptal hall, whose ridge intersects the
ridge of the stables. We have interpreted the bedrooms of
the oxherds and grooms as aisles, attached to the flank of
the stables; the stables themselves, as internally undivided
spaces whose roofs are carried by a continuous set of
coupled rafters of uniform scantling. There are other

[ILLUSTRATION]

478.B AN INTERPRETATION BASED ON THE GESTA ABBATUM FONTANELLENSIUM et alii BY THE AUTHORS

possibilities, equally acceptable. In the large transeptal hall
we have introduced four posts, which are not shown on
the Plan; we have assumed them because it appeared
unlikely to us that in a service building of this type the
roof would have rested on beams spanning nearly 40 feet.

V.17.4

HOUSE FOR COWS AND COWHERDS

LAYOUT AND DESIGN

Directly west of the House for Horses and Oxen, within
the fences of a large rectangular yard containing four other
livestock buildings, is the House for the Cows and Cowherds
(fig. 483). Its title makes it irrevocably clear that the
animals that find shelter in this structure perform the dual
role of serving as dairy and breeding stock. The house is
entered broadside by a door leading directly into the "hall
of the herdsmen" (domus armentariorum), which is provided
with the customary central fireplace. Ranged on three sides
around this space, in the shape of the letter U, are the stables
for the dairy cows (stabula); the extremities of this stable

[ILLUSTRATION]

479. CHEDDAR, SOMERSET, ENGLAND. LONG HALL OF THE SAXON PALACE. 9TH CENTURY

[after Rahtz, 1962-63, 58, fig. 20]

The house, slightly boat-shaped (most markedly so on the west side) was 78 feet long externally, and 20 feet wide across the middle. Its walls
consisted of closely spaced posts, 9 inches square, set against the outer edge of a continuous trench, and in certain places doubled by a row of
inner posts of lighter scantling sloping inward. The entrances were in the middle of the long walls, with a minor one toward the north end of the
east side. A spread of burnt clay in the southern half of the house close to the center may indicate the location of the hearth.

arrangement are boarded off to form two small cubicles or
"bedrooms for the servants" (cubilia seruantiū).

Both Keller and Willis[627] interpreted the area designated
as domus armentariorum as an "open court" and the square
in its center as "a small house perhaps inhabited by the
overseer." There would be no need to refer to this superannuated
interpretation had it not been rescuscitated lately
in Alan Sorrell's recently published reconstruction of the

houses of the Plan of St. Gall (fig. 283). Domus, as has been
sufficiently stressed in earlier parts of this study, can only
have referred to a covered portion of ground. It is the
author's favorite term for "hall" or "living room" and
cannot under any circumstances be interpreted as "courtyard."
The square in the center, which is common to all
the guest and service buildings on the Plan, is clearly
identified in some of them as "fireplace" and in others as
"louver."[629]

The House for the Cows and Cowherds is 87½ feet long
and 50 feet wide, but whether this is the length of the
original scheme is somewhat doubtful, since in this corner
of the Plan the parchment contracts, and it is possible that
the copyist found himself compelled to reduce the length
of the building in order to adjust to this condition.

The central hall of the cowherds measures 22½ feet by
52½ feet; its aisle and lean-to's have a width of 17½ feet.
The traditional way of housing a dairy herd was to tie the
cows in pairs in stalls 5 feet long and 7 feet wide.[630] The
aisle and lean-to's of the House for the Cows and Cowherds
are wide enough for the animals to be tied up in two rows,
one facing the outer walls (their customary protohistoric
position) and another one facing the inner wall partitions.
If stalled in this manner, the House for the Cows could
have accommodated a total of seventy cows. If they were
tied in a single row against the outer walls only, this figure
would have to be reduced to forty.

[ILLUSTRATION]

480. PILTON, SOMERSET, ENGLAND. BARN OF GLASTONBURY GRANGE. 15TH CENTURY

[Photo: Quentin Lloyd]

Long barns with one or several transeptal porches are very common in the Midlands and southwest of England. They are rarely less than 100
feet long, often come close to 200 feet; and one example, the barn of the Benedictine abbey grange of Abbotsbury, Dorset, attained the astonishing
length of 267 feet. The building type has never been systematically studied. For individual examples see Andrews, 1900, passim; Horn and
Charles, 1966, Horn and Born, 1969, and Charles and Horn, 1973. F. W. B. Charles and Jane Charles recently measured this barn for us. It
is 108 feet 6 inches long, 44 feet wide, and 17 feet high from floor to wall head.

MILK AND CHEESE:
PRIMARY ITEMS IN THE MONKS' DIET

The primary purpose of this herd of dairy cows was to
provide milk and cheese for the table of the monks. Butter
does not seem to have been an important item in the monastic
diet. The records of the monastery of St. Gall list altogether
not more than one pint of butter.[631] From the same
records we learn that in the territory of St. Gall cheese
came in two sizes: a large round cheese (caseus alpinus) of
the same diameter, more or less, as a Swiss cheese of
today, usually cut into four parts (qui secantur in IV partes),
occasionally into six or eight; and a "hand cheese," which
was cut into two parts only (qui secantur in duas partes).
Cheese was one of the most common articles of tithing
contributed by the outlying farms, especially those in the
mountains which specialized in cattle raising; and the
annual revenue at St. Gall from its possessions in the
territory of Appenzell alone was over 2,000 cheeses.[632]

MEDIEVAL PARALLELS

The external appearance of the House for the Cows and
Cowherds must have been very similar to that of the
Gardener's House (figs. 426-427), except that it was considerably
larger, as one would expect it to be in view of its
different function. It is the standard house of the Plan,
minus one aisle on one of its long sides, which makes the
main room of the house directly accessible from the exterior,
a distinct advantage in buildings where great numbers
of the larger breeds of animals, and especially horned
cattle, are sheltered, because this arrangement reduces the
number of doors through which the cattle must be taken as
they enter and leave their stalls (figs. 483, 486). This house
type must have been very common in the Middle Ages. The
earliest literary evidence for its existence, so far as I can
judge, occurs in a dossier of twelfth-century lease agreements
that record the manorial holdings of the Dean and
Chapter of St. Paul's in London.[633] On a manor located in

[ILLUSTRATION]

481. TISBURY, WILTSHIRE, ENGLAND. PLAN, GRANGE BARN. 15TH CENTURY

[Redrawn after Dufty, 1947, 168, fig. 2]

The barn at Place Farm was part of a grange once owned by the abbesses of Shaftsbury. Its external dimensions are 196 feet long by 38 feet
wide. It is lengthwise divided into 13 bays by roof trusses with arch-braced collar beams meticulously aligned with the buttresses of the masonry
walls. Two transeptal porches in the middle of the barn are original. The masonry of the jambs of the other four entrances is modern; these
openings were probably not part of the original structure. The roof is thatched.

the parish of Wickham, Essex, there is a barn which in
these lease agreements is described as follows:

The barn of Wickham is just a little over half as large as
the House for the Cows and Cowherds on the Plan of
St. Gall, but its layout is identical. It is noteworthy that
the twelfth-century writer in describing this barn makes a
clear distinction between the aisle (ala) which is attached
to one of the two long sides of the barn and the two leanto's
(culatium) which are attached to the narrow ends of the
building. In English this distinction is not always maintained.
Culatium (from culus = pars cujusvis rei posterior[635] )
is a highly descriptive term for that section of the barn which
lies under the hipped part of the roof at the short end of
the building. The writer also makes a clear distinction
between the principal space of the barn, which he refers to
simply as "barn" (orreum), and all the peripheral spaces.
The dimensions listed for all the constituent parts of the
building make it clear that the center space was higher
than the surrounding spaces and that it had a double-pitched
roof (fig. 485A-D). This is strong evidence for
the correctness of our reconstruction of the House for the
Cows and Cowherds (fig. 486A-E) and all the other buildings
on the Plan which are laid out in a similar manner.

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR HORSES, OXEN, AND THEIR KEEPERS. AUTHORS' INTERPRETATION [1:192]

482.B

482.A LONGITUDINAL SECTION

PLAN

The only difference between the medieval long houses with transeptal porches shown in figs. 477-481 and the House for Horses and Oxen (fig.
474) is that the latter is furnished with aisles serving as quarters for the oxherds and horse grooms. Traditionally this building type is single-spaced
and in this form either used as a dwelling, or for the storage of harvest. Aisles were incorporated in the House for Horses and Oxen
because it was intended to accommodate both men and beasts.

The total length of this building on the Plan is 145 feet; the living space measures 35 by 37½ feet and the stables each are 52½ feet long,
suggesting that the roof-supporting trusses were placed at 11½ foot intervals.

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR HORSES AND OXEN AND THEIR KEEPERS

482.D WEST ELEVATION

482.C EAST ELEVATION

SCALE 1/16 INCH EQUALS ONE FOOT [1:192] FOR GRAPHIC SCALE SEE PRECEDING PAGE

AUTHORS' INTERPRETATION

Our reconstruction of this house as a transeptal space the ridge of which intersects the main ridge at right angles and at the same height, is
made in consideration of the fact that the transept extends across the entire width of the structure, bisecting the aisles in which the herdsmen
were to sleep. We are also visually emphasizing the great importance of this transept which may have been intended to serve as dining area for
all of the monastery's herdsmen (cf. above, p. 278).

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR HORSES AND OXEN AND THEIR KEEPERS

NORTH ELEVATION is similar but of opposite hand to
the SOUTH ELEVATION

482.F TRANSVERSE SECTION B-B

482.E SOUTH ELEVATION

482.G TRANSVERSE SECTION C-C

AUTHORS' INTERPRETATION

We saw no functional need to raise the roof over the aisles, where the oxherds and horse grooms were to be quartered, above tie-beam level of the
stables. In this same manner bedrooms are treated in all the other guest and service buildings of the Plan. To extend the main roof across the
entire width of the building would have been considerably more costly and in construction functionally superfluous—unless one can assume that
the full width of the building at floor level was needed as loft above the tie-beam level for storage of straw and hay.

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR COWS AND COWHERDS

483.X SITE PLAN

Virtually all of the houses for monastic livestock lie in a large rectangular yard that extends from the entrance Road to the southern edge of the
monastery site. They consist of the House for Sheep and Shepherds (No. 35); the House for the Goats and Goatherds (No. 36); the House for
the Cows and Cowherds (No. 37); the House for the Swine and Swineherds (No. 39); and the House for Broodmares and Foals and their
Keepers (No. 40). The House for Horses and Oxen and their Keepers (No. 33 and fig. 474) lies outside this yard, but adjacent.

The layout of the House for Cows and Cowherds is identical with that of the House for Broodmares and Foals and their Keepers as well as
with that of the Gardener's House (fig. 426). In each of these structures, the common living room with its traditional open fire place is
surrounded with subsidiary outer spaces on three sides only (variant 3B; see above, p. 85, fig. 33). The entrance is in the middle of the long
wall where the aisle is missing. As in the House for Distinguished Guests (figs. 396-399), in order to gain access to the stables animals have to
be taken through the common living room. For a 12th century structure of the same design see p. 281 and figs. 485. A-D.

[ILLUSTRATION]

484. UTRECHT PSALTER (CA. 830). DEUTERONOMY, XXXII: 1-4

UTRECHT UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, CODEX 32, fol. 86r (detail)

[Courtesy of Utrecht University Library]

The illusionistic Late Antique style was practiced with superb assurance by the illuminator of the lost manuscript after which the Utrecht
Psalter was modeled. Scenes of agricultural life such as this one of a herd of cattle and a man churning butter are of a richness of perception
surpassing any other Carolingian manuscript. This intensely classical style disappeared from the medieval scene almost as rapidly as it was
adopted, giving way to more abstract concepts of painting. It took close to 500 years of gradual reconquest of reality by art for rural scenes
again to be as accurately depicted as in this unique Carolingian manuscript. The marginal scenes of the Luttrell Psalter (figs 467, 475, and
476) are among the high-water marks in this development that, at certain stages, was stimulated by availability of copies of the Utrecht
Psalter that were made in England in the 10th and 11th centuries.

The lease agreements of St. Paul's date from 1114 to
1155.[636] Obviously, they establish only a terminus ante quam,
telling nothing about the age of the barns. Some of them
may have been of relatively recent date, others may have
been centuries old.

V.17.5

HOUSE FOR BROOD MARES, FOALS
AND THEIR KEEPERS

LAYOUT AND DESIGN

The House of Foaling Mares (fig. 487) is identical in plan
to that for Cows and Cowherds. In all likelihood it was
meant to be the same size. The narrowing of the parchment
at the southwestern corner of the Plan, where this building
is located, probably forced the copyist to contract the plan
for this house. The room that contains the hearth is designated
"the horsemen's living room" (domus equaritiae:
"the hall of the stables where horses are bred"[637] ); aisles
and lean-to's that accommodate the horses are designated
"stables" (stabula); the cubicles at their end, as "bedrooms
for the attendants" (cubit custodum).

MATING AND BREEDING

Columella, in his book On Agriculture, states that stallions
and mares of common stock may be mated at any time
during the year, but he advises that the nobler breeds be
mated about the time of the spring equinox so that the
mares, who foal in the twelfth month, may be able to

[ILLUSTRATION]

WICKHAM ST. PAUL'S, ESSEX. BARN 2 OF THE DEAN AND CHAPTER OF ST. PAUL'S, LONDON

485.D.3

485.D.2

485.D.1

485.B

485.C

485.A

Descriptions in 11th-century leases of agricultural buildings maintained by the
Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's on outlying estates (The Domesday of St. Paul's
of the year MCCXII . . . W. H. Hale, ed., London, 1858, 122-39) are so accurate
that the structures can be laid out on the drafting board. Since no 11th- and 12thcentury
barns survive, this material forms a unique link between proto- and early
medieval Wohnstallhäuser (above, pp. 45ff) and the earliest surviving medieval
barns (above, pp. 88ff). The example here shown belongs to what we earlier defined
as Variant 3B of the St. Gall house (fig. 333). For reconstruction of two others
(Variant 4), see Horn, 1958, 12, figs. 24 and 25.

PLAN, SECTIONS, AND AXONOMETRIC DRAWINGS SHOWING SKELETAL FRAMING AND EXTERNAL ENVELOPE

rear their young when the pasture is rich and grassy. He
points out that pregnant mares need special care and
generous fodder and ought to be kept in a place that is
both roomy and warm.[638] Modern breeding manuals prescribe
that maternity stalls be 12 feet by 12 feet.[639] If these
were the dimensions of the stalls used in the House for
Foaling Mares and Foals, it would have been able to
provide shelter for eleven mares and their offspring at any
given time. The hay, straw, and grain required for these
animals were usually stored overhead under the slope of the
aisle roof and were fed into the mangers through openings
in the floors of these lofts.

V.17.6

HOUSE FOR GOATS AND GOATHERDS

LAYOUT AND DESIGN

The House for Goats and Goatherds (fig. 489) lies near the
House for Cows and Cowherds. Its layout is that of
the standard house of the Plan. In the hexameter explaining
its function, the word domus appears in the sole context
of the Plan where it means the entire building. The
living room bears no inscription. It is reached through a
vestibule that divides the eastern aisle into two separate
chambers used as "bedrooms of the herdsmen" (cubilia
pastorum). The lean-to's and the western aisle of the house
are designated as "stable" (stabula). The building is 57½
feet long and 45 feet wide. The living room measures 37½
feet by 25 feet.

Columella recommends that not more than 100 head of
goats be kept in one enclosure. He advises the goatherd to
sweep out the stable every day and not allow any ordure or
moisture to remain or any mud to form. The she-goats
should be covered in the autumn, sometime before December,
so that the kids may be born when spring is
approaching and the shrubs are budding.[640] He devotes a
whole chapter to the making of goat cheese.[641]

MANAGEMENT OF SIZE OF HERD

The House for the Goats and Goatherds could easily
have sheltered one hundred goats. It was probably used
primarily for the purpose of milking and breeding the
goats. Shortly after the young were born in the spring, and
had gathered sufficient strength, they were no doubt taken
out to pasture by the goatherds, a breed of men who,
Columella stipulates, should be "keen, hardy, and bold . . .
the sort of men who can make their way without difficulty
over rocks and deserts and through briers . . . men who do
not follow the herd like the keepers of other breeds of
cattle, but precede it."[642] The rooms in the eastern aisle of
the House for the Goats and Goatherds on the Plan are
large enough to accommodate, besides the permanent goatherds,
a considerable number of extra hands who during
the warmer months of the year took care of the herds that
were out to pasture.

MILK PRODUCTION

Modern farming manuals state that two reasonably well-bred
goats will supply an average household with all the
milk it requires and most of the butter, each goat being
able to produce 250 gallons of milk or 100 pounds of
butter per year.[643] If the House for the Goats and Goatherds
sheltered one hundred goats at a time, these animals must
have contributed considerably to the monastery's daily
supply of cheese.

In layout, design, and dimensions, the House for the
Goats and Goatherds is identical with the House for
Visiting Servants (figs. 402-403), which relieves us of its
reconstruction. The same holds true for the two remaining
buildings of this tract, which we shall discuss presently.

V.17.7

HOUSE FOR SWINE AND SWINEHERDS

LAYOUT AND DESIGN

The House for Swine and Swineherds (fig. 491) lies west of
the House for the Goats and north of the House for Foaling
Mares. Its center room, which has a fireplace, is designated
"the hall of the swineherds" (domus porcariorum). The east
aisle contains a vestibule and the "bedrooms of the herdsmen"
(cubil pastorum). The west aisle and the lean-to's are
not designated. There can be no doubt, however, about their
function. In all the other houses, this area was reserved for
the animals.

A FARROWING PEN

The House for Swine and Swineherds, as its explanatory
title states, was primarily a farrowing pen. It was the place
where the sows were kept during the winter—those sows,
that is, who would produce the litters to make up the
subsequent year's herds. All other pigs were slaughtered
in December.[645] The number of pigs that could be housed
together is determined by available trough space. Feed

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR THE COWS AND COWHERDS

486.B EAST ELEVATION

486.A PLAN

AUTHORS' INTERPRETATION

In reconstructing this building we were in principle guided by the same criteria that governed reconstruction of the House of the Gardener and
his Crew (figs. 427. A-F), but because this house is the larger by over twice the area of the former structure, we decided to furnish it with a
hipped roof on the supposition that it would be needed for greater wind resistance.

As for all structures housing both men and animals on the Plan, it was necessary to lead animals to their stalls directly through the common
living area used by the herders, whose sleeping quarters in the aisles may have been divided from the stalls by little more than a partition.

[ILLUSTRATION]

486.D TRANSVERSE SECTION B-B

486.C LONGITUDINAL SECTION A-A

486.E NORTH ELEVATION

The habit and custom of housing beasts in close contact with man was of centuries' long standing in Northern Europe. Even in the sophisticated
House for Distinguished Guests (Building 11; cf. fig. 396, p. 146), 9th-century social amenities did not yet preclude the arrangement whereby
the visitors' horses were led through the common living and dining area to their stalls.

The length of the center space of the House for Cows and Cowherds is 52½, feet, suggesting that its roof supporting posts were to be spaced at
10½-foot intervals, or within the normal range for bay division in a building of this kind.

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR FOALING MARES AND THEIR KEEPERS

487.

487.X

Lying in the extreme southwest corner of the site, the layout of this structure in all of its basic dispositions is identical with that of the House
for Cows and Cowherds. Virtually without question it was intended to be the same size, but, falling at a point on the tracing where the
parchment corner tapers, the draftsman of the Plan was doubtless compelled to reduce the size of the building slightly in accommodation to the
limitations of his sheet.

All the larger breeds of livestock were quartered in separate facilities lying in close proximity to one another. Outlines on the Plan indicate
that they were separated by fences or other partitions from one another. During the winter, animals would be confined to their stalls; in spring
they could be taken to pasture through secondary exits in the peripheral wall enclosure (which are not shown on the Plan).

Horses and oxen kept in these facilities would be used as draft animals, the former perhaps for riding; the cattle for breeding and milking; the
mares exclusively for breeding. As regards the inclusion of a stud in a monastic community, the relationship of monastic with crown services and
economics is discussed in Volume I, Chapter IV, "The Monastic Polity."

[ILLUSTRATION]

488. UTRECHT PSALTER (CA. 830). PSALM LXXII (73)

UTRECHT UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, CODEX 32, fol. 41v (detail)

[Courtesy of the Utrecht University Library]

This detail is one of the most interesting examples of the method used by the illuminator of the original Late Antique manuscript (after which
the Utrecht Psalter was modeled) to convey general concepts in imagery taken from man's daily life. Verse 22 of the psalm, "So foolish was I
and ignorant; I was as a beast before thee", serves to embody the concept "beast" in the touching representation of a mare suckling her foal. In
this manner the illuminator transmitted to the Middle Ages a composition borrowed from one of the best periods of Roman painting. It has a
striking counterpart in a painting from Herculaneum (now in Naples, Museo Nazionale) showing a doe suckling Telephos (see L. Curtius, Die
Wandmalerei Pompejis, Leipzig, 1929 8, fig. 5).

pigs require an average of 12 inches of trough space; sows
and boars, 18 inches. The required sleeping and feeding
area is 6 square feet per pig. The minimum farrowing pen
is 5 feet square. There should also be a dung passage 3 to 4
feet wide.[646] If the area available for pigs in the House for
Swine and Swineherds on the Plan were to be divided into
farrowing pens 5 feet square, it would accommodate twenty-one
sows with litters (five under each lean-to; eleven in the
aisle). If the housing capacity were to be calculated on the
basis of the available square footage, without allowing
extra space for litters, the number of pigs could easily be
doubled.

MEAT FOR THE SERFS, AND FOR THE YOUNG
AND SICK MONKS

In the Middle Ages swine and sheep were the chief
animals raised for meat. Many monasteries maintained
large herds of both, often under the supervision of the
monks themselves. Swine and sheep were also favorite
items of tithing. In the deeds of the monastery of St. Gall,
published by Hermann Wartmann, sucklings, yearlings,
and fully fattened sows are often part of the regular deliveries
from villagers and other tenants. In calculating these
tithes, a distinction was made between the heavy winter
swine, which had been fattened on acorns and beechnuts
while out to pasture in the forest, and the leaner and
less desirable summer swine. In years when the weather

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR GOATS AND GOATHERDS

489.

489.X SITE PLAN

The House for Goat and Goatherds (36) lies next to that for cattle and cowherds (37) and in the same row of buildings. Its layout is identical
with that of the House for Sheep and Shepherds (35) north of it, that for swine and their herdsmen (39) west of it, and the House for Servants
from Outlying Estates (38), whose reconstruction (below, p. 157, fig. 403. A-D) is applicable to all of these installations of the Plan.

These structures are straightforward examples of what in our previous discussion we have referred to as the "standard house" of the Plan of St.
Gall (i.e., Variant 4; see above, p. 85, fig. 334). Ranged side by side in two rows, with a sense of symmetry that clearly had a classical touch,
they appear to us almost as a village arranged by the ordering mind of an urban planner. For earlier and later examples of non-monastic
clusters of this type, see figures 259, 335, and 336.

[ILLUSTRATION]

490. UTRECHT PSALTER (CA. 830). PSALM XXII (23)

UTRECHT UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, CODEX 32, fol. 45r (detail)

[Courtesy of Utrecht University Library]

The five goats grazing on a hillside are part of a larger scene; it includes a herd of cattle and flock of sheep by the banks of a stream, to
illustrate verses 1 and 2 of the psalm: "The Lord is my shepherd . . . . "

The pen-and-ink depiction of these goats, two of which rise on their hind legs reaching as high as they can to crop the choice leaves, and
snapping at each other in their greed, is a display of posture and behavior so distinctively of goats that it places this scene among the outstanding
pictorial accomplishments of the Carolingian Renascence—a stunning revival in the scriptorium of Reims (816-835) of a type of pictorial
illusionism that even in Late Antiquity was practised only by artists of the greatest skill and accomplishment.

favored the fattening of swine, the tithe was exacted in
kind; in years when the growth was lean, the monks preferred
the corresponding value in currency or in sheep
(quando esca est porcum solido valentem I, et quando esca
non est arietum bonum).[647] A vital prerequisite for the raising
of herds of swine by the monastery itself was the possession
of forests, which might be placed under the care of "monastic
foresters" (forestarii). A guarded copse of wood, reserved
for the specific purpose of fattening swine (quaedam silvula
ob porcorum pastum custodiebatur), is mentioned in the
Life of St. Gall and was apparently the scene of a number
of miracles, all of which perhaps tends to stress the idea
that this branch of the monastery's agricultural economy
held no insignificant place.[648]

Although the meat from quadrupeds was a staple in the
diet of the monastery's serfs and workmen, for the monks
themselves it was allowed only in their early childhood and
in times of illness.[649] This rule appears to have been violated
with such frequency, however, that the monastery of St.
Gall itself, toward the end of the tenth century, drew upon
itself the anger and criticism of Abbot Ruodman (972-986)
of the neighboring monastery of Reichenau. Ruodman's
critical testimony before the Emperor Otto II resulted in a
number of imperial investigations into the conditions at

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR SWINE AND SWINEHERDS

491.

491.X SITE PLAN

In medieval illustrated calendars, the slaughtering of swine at the onset of winter, when pasture in the nearby woods became impossible, was a
favorite subject for portrayal for the month of December. In a monastic community, only those sows and boars were wintered that would
produce the litter of animals to be raised in the subsequent year. Carcasses of the slaughtered pigs were intended to be hung in the Monks'
Larder; for a realistic description of how this was done, see I, 305-307, and Adalhard's directives in the Customs of Corbie, in the chapter
devoted to swine (translated, III, 118f.)

[ILLUSTRATION]

492. UTRECHT PSALTER (CA. 830). PSALM LXXIX (80)

UTRECHT, UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, CODEX 32, fol. 47r (detail)

[Courtesy of the Utrecht University Library]

The picture, drawn in the most delicate scatter of lines, depicts the powerful bulk of a large boar devouring the boughs of a spiraling vine. It is
an illustration to the lament of the Psalmist over his people having fallen in God's disfavor: "Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt: thou
hast cast out the heathen and planted it" (verse 8); "The hills were covered with the shadow of it, and the boughs thereof were like the goodly
cedars" (verse 10); "Why hast thou then broken down her hedges so that all they which pass by the way do pluck her? The boar out of the
wood doth waste it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it" (verses 12-13).

St. Gall. Ekkehart, in his Casus sancti Galli, does not overlook
the opportunity to describe these investigations with
color and tendentious distortion.[650]

V.17.8

HOUSE FOR SHEEP AND SHEPHERDS

LAYOUT AND DESIGN

The House for Sheep and Shepherds (fig. 493) lies between
the Goat House and the road leading to the Church. Its
center room is labeled simply "the main room" (ipsa
domusm);[651] the chambers to the left and right of the entrance,
as "bedrooms of the shepherds" (cubilia opilionum); the
U-shaped area around the living room, as "sheepfold"
(caulae; see fig. 493).[652] The position of this house near
the Church may reflect the symbolic identification of the
Good Shepherd with Christ, and sheep with the faithful.

[ILLUSTRATION]

PLAN OF ST. GALL. HOUSE FOR SHEEP AND SHEPHERDS

493.

493.X SITE PLAN

Sheep and goats were the smaller livestock accommodated by facilities on the Plan of St. Gall; then, as now, they remain important as a kind
of all-purpose animal, their by-products of milk, wool or hair, and meat being prime resources in the life of any self-sustaining community.
In the partly or fully nomadic civilizations of the ancient Near East, power and social standing depended to a large extent on the number and
size of flocks an individual owned. The care and protection of these creatures called for men of brave, hardy disposition, exacting vigilance,
and unremitting devotion. The image of men so qualified who performed these important tasks impressed itself on the inhabitants of the two
great Near Eastern river valleys and their hinterlands with such force that it became an integral part of the concept of sovereignty associated
with ancient kings and gods who, in official imagery, were portrayed holding shepherds' staffs.

The concept was inherited by Christianity and brought close to every faithful soul through the famous parable (Luke 15: 4-7) in which the
Good Shepherd, in forgiving a repentant sinner, rejoicing carries the lost sheep back to the fold. The Church became the herd of God, the
sheep, believers. Later, bishops and abbots both adopted the shepherd's staff as ceremonial emblem of their leadership and guardianship within
the Church

[ILLUSTRATION]

494. UTRECHT PSALTER (CA. 830). PSALM L (51)

UTRECHT, UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, CODEX 32, fol. 29r (detail)

[Courtesy of the Utrecht University Library]

Nathan is portrayed beside a flock of sheep, goats, and cows. Portions not illustrated here show the parable of the ewe-lamb; and Nathan
upbraiding King David for having Uriah slain and taken Bathsheba his wife—events that occurred when Psalm L was written, and which are
described in II Samuel, xi-xiii.

MEAT, MILK, AND WOOL

Like goats, sheep were valued both for their meat and
as milk-producing animals. These values, plus that of their
skin for the making of parchment and their wool for blankets
and winter clothing, made them one of the most useful
species of animals to the monastic economy. As was true of
the other animals, the amount of cheese that could be
obtained from the monastery's own flocks was augmented
by deliveries from outlying pastures and possessions. The
monastery of Corbie maintained ten flocks of sheep, which
supplied the monastery with cheese in the summer, and
Adalhard of Corbie in his Administrative Directives sets
out in great detail the manner in which the sheep, as well
as all of the monastery's other livestock, should be tithed.[653]

A fully grown sheep requires a floor area of 4 to 6 feet
square.[654] The floor space available in the aisle and under the
lean-to's of the House for Sheep would have accommodated
a flock of seventy to one hundred sheep.

In Biblical times, wealth was equated with large flocks.
Images of sheep, shepherds, and flocks recur throughout
the joys and laments of the Psalms. Their symbolic values
of spiritual wealth were carried forward into monastic
recitations of these songs (see caption, fig. 261, I, 346) and
into the canon of illustrations deemed appropriate for
books such as the Utrecht Psalter.

[ILLUSTRATION]

495. PLAN OF ST. GALL

INDIVIDUAL PRIVIES DIRECTLY ATTACHED TO ROOMS
OR HOUSES OF LODGING