V.6.2
ROOF CONSTRUCTION:
SOME ALTERNATIVE ASSUMPTIONS
So far we are on fairly safe ground. The range of possibilities
widens drastically, however, as we move from the
main stage of the trusses to the assemblage of the roof itself.
Here, in light of the available historical evidence, we are
forced to make a choice between two radically different systems:
the roofs of the guest and service buildings must
either have belonged to the family of the Sparrendach or to
the family of the Pfettendach. As we have no way of knowing
to which of these two they belonged—rather than decide
this issue in an arbitrary manner—we have chosen to use
both systems. Our reconstruction of the House for Distinguished
Guests (figs. 397-399)[215]
is a typical example of the
purlin roof; that of the Granary (figs. 435A-F),[216]
of the
rafter roof. It is not at all impossible that both types
were used together—and there is also, of course, the possibility
of early hybridization.
We have fashioned our reconstruction after English and
French models rather than Dutch and German, because
the English and French material is older than the earliest
Dutch and German parallels, which do not antedate the
beginning of the sixteenth, or at best the end of the fifteenth,
century.
There is one further alternative to be taken into consideration.
Among the excavated pre- and protohistoric
houses previously discussed are found a small number of
buildings that had their ridges supported by a median row
of posts (see Wijchen, figs. 301-302).[217]
They are few, true
enough, but their existence forces us to take them into
account, the more so since in the territory of the Bajuvarians,
at least, this house was common enough to merit legal
codification (see above, pp. 27ff and figs. 289A-B).
I do not believe, however, that the guest and service
buildings of the Plan of St. Gall should be reconstructed
in this manner, since the houses of the Plan of St. Gall have
vital passageways at the very spot where the construction
of the Bajuvarian standard house calls for ridge-supporting
center posts. I draw special attention to the doorways in
the House for Distinguished Guests connecting the dining
hall with the bedrooms of the royalty housed in this structure.[218]
As one inspects the remaining houses one by one,
one finds that the entrances from the hearth-room to the
two end rooms invariably lie in the longitudinal axis of the
building. This arrangement is incompatible with the ridgepole
construction of the Bajuvarian standard house.
Our choice for the roof skin of the guest and service
buildings is shingle. Thatch and reed, while common in
the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, would have been
an anachronism in the ninth in a monastery of paradigmatic
significance. I remind the reader of the passage already
quoted in the Life of St. Benedict of Aniane where we are
told that he covered the houses of his monastery at Aniane
first with thatch (non tegulis rubentibus, sed stramine) and
then completely redid them in tile (non iam stramine domos,
sed tegulis cooperit).[219]
In the southern, more Romanized
parts of the Carolingian empire, tile was doubtlessly the
customary material. Farther north it is more likely to have
been shingle, probably the larger variety which in vernacular
American English is referred to as "shakes." Numerous
medieval sources could be quoted in support of widespread
use of shingles.[220]
I confine myself to one, the well-known
passage in Ekkehart's Casus sancti Galli, where we are told
how the fire set by a pupil to the roof of the Outer School
of the monastery of St. Gall ignited "the dry shingles"
(tegula arida) of the school and from there was blown by
the north wind to the roof of an adjacent church tower,
which had "a shingled roof superimposed upon a stone
roof" (tegulis ligneis super lapideas tecta).[221]
