THE ABBEY OF ST GALL
c.820
An Ideal Benedictine Monastery
Nasty, brutish and short: that is how we are used to thinking of life a thousand years ago. For most, there was no formal education, work began in childhood and was grindingly hard, and home was a draughty hovel with no running water, no artificial light and no sanitation; healthcare was minimal and crude. For one group, though, things could be different. Monks and nuns worked hard and prayed hard, but did so in surprisingly sophisticated surroundings. Monasteries might have been cold and spartan by modern standards, but many had clean running water, decent lavatories and the best healthcare available. Monks could read and write, and did so by candlelight. By the standards of the time, they lived in decent conditions.
One astonishing ninth-century manuscript shows what the ideal monastery might have been like. It is an enormous document, 44 × 30in (112 × 77.5cm), on five pieces of parchment, meticulously stitched together. On it is the ground plan of a large and well-equipped Benedictine monastery. It shows the church and all the ancillary buildings – dormitories, workshops, kitchens, infirmary, stables and so on – necessary to support a self-contained community of up to 110 monks, more than a hundred workers and their guests.
This document is known as the St Gall plan, after the abbey of St Gall (now St Gallen) in Switzerland, where it is kept. It is the only surviving major architectural drawing from the period between the fall of Rome in the fifth century AD and c.1250. The scribe who drew it seems to have thought of everything: dedicated buildings for every aspect of the abbey’s farm, for example, and workshops for specialists such as a wood turner and barrel maker. Short annotations on the plan identify these buildings, and areas such as a garden and an orchard. Looking closer, we can see how carefully they have been considered. Everything is arranged in ordered rows. The abbot’s house is linked by a passage to the church. The servants’ quarters are conveniently near the workshops and farm buildings, and well away from the abbot’s house. Some parts of the monastery even have underfloor heating, similar to the hypocausts used by the Romans, and there are plenty of lavatories, sited near the edge of the site to aid waste disposal.
The church of St Gall is shown on the plan with apsidal (rounded) ends. The western end has a square entrance porch in the centre and is flanked by a pair of circular towers.
The large parchment plan includes some forty structures arranged around the church and its adjoining cloister. Each structure, from infirmary to brew house, is identified with its own label.
The plan was drawn up in Austria, at the monastery of Reichenau, and was sent by Reichenau’s abbot to Gozbertus, the abbot of St Gall between 816 and 836, who was planning to rebuild his monastery. As far as is known, the document has remained at St Gall ever since. However, the extensive buildings it depicts would not have fitted the site at St Gall, and scholars believe that it is actually an ideal plan, showing the monastery that both men would have liked to have built, had they had the perfect site and access to enough materials and labour. The parchment bears a dedication to Abbot Gozbertus, and this hints that the plan is for meditation and study rather than a precise blueprint for his new buildings: ‘For thee, my sweetest son Gozbertus, have I drawn this briefly annotated copy of the layout of the monastic buildings, with which you may exercise your ingenuity and recognize my devotion.’
As he began his building project, Gozbertus might have contemplated the plan and tried to incorporate as many of the details of it as he could. In the event, his rebuilding was confined mostly to the abbey’s church, which in turn was replaced in the seventeenth century. Although his buildings do not survive, archaeological evidence has shown that Gozbertus’s church was different in dimensions and design from the one on the plan, confirming that he did not use it as a literal model.
The St Gall plan is exemplary both in the sense that it has every facility and that it embodies the latest monastic ideas – the reforms that the church was introducing at the time, such as providing accommodation for lay workers inside the monastic complex rather than outside. It is a highly ordered plan, and this order is no doubt meant to reflect the order of the Benedictine rule, by which the monks lived. The document represents the ideal version of a very idealistic way of life.
The abbots of most small medieval monasteries would have found the facilities in the plan very lavish. For example, it was usual for monasteries to have dedicated accommodation for the novices (the young monks still in ‘training’ before taking their full vows) and for the sick; in the St Gall plan, both novices and the infirm have their own separate complexes, each with its own cloister, church, refectory and dormitory. Everything else, from the guest accommodation to the profusion of workshops, is on a large scale.
Architectural historians such as Ernest Born have published drawings showing what the monastery might have looked like had it been built. The style is the Romanesque of the period, with thick stone walls, small windows, semicircular arches, and round towers with conical roofs. The interiors would have been very plain, but the church would have had columns in the style of the period, perhaps topped with capitals decorated with carved foliage.
Medieval monks devoted themselves to God’s service, spent much of their time in prayer, liturgy or work, took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and lived mostly within the walled confines of the monastic enclave. Their lives were always those of ideals, and monks strove (in theory at least and often in practice) to live as close to these goals as they could. The plan of St Gall is an architectural picture of these ideals, with every conceivable building provided. It is not surprising that, in the real world, limits of money, space and willpower meant that the plan was never carried out in full.
But in the twenty-first century it might be built, not in Switzerland but in Messkirch, Baden-Württemberg, in southwestern Germany. Here Campus Galli is an ongoing project to build a monastery following the St Gall plan, using the materials and techniques that were available in the ninth century. It is a long-term project, and relies on raising income from tourists who visit the site. It is also a fascinating piece of experimental archaeology, exploring medieval building techniques and telling participants much about the difficulties faced by their ancient predecessors. Finally, it is a tribute to the lasting power of the St Gall plan.
