NOVITIATE
Another innovation made at Cluny that seems to have been
permanently adopted in later monastic planning was the
transfer of the novitiate to a location more closely related to
the quarters of the regular monks. The Constitutions of
Lanfranc reflect a growing tendency to integrate the novices
with the regular monks in the eleventh century English
Benedictine monasteries: "The novice shall sleep in the
cell of the novices, or, if the monastery have no such special
cell, in the dormitory.[115]
"He shall be taken into the church
and a place assigned to him. From the church he shall be
taken to the dormitory and the place shown him where he
is to rest, and he shall be taken beyond the dormitory, and
the cells shown him to which he is to repair when nature's
ways demand it . . . on that day the novice shall follow, and
a seat in the refectory shall be assigned."[116]
These passages
by Lanfranc suggest that in the late eleventh and twelfth
century there was not always a separate building for the
novices and that they often shared the buildings of the
regular monks. In the English plans there is no indication
of a special court of building set aside for novices.
The novices were probably often integrated with the
monks for economic reasons and perhaps also because there
were not as many oblati in the eleventh and twelfth centuries
as there were in the ninth century. According to
David Knowles, despite Lanfranc's attempts to perpetuate
the age-old institution of child oblation, it was everywhere
on the decline fifty years after his death.[117]
