, UK The early medieval cloister had several antecedents: the
peristyle court of the
Roman domus, the
atrium and its expanded version that served as forecourt to early Christian
basilicas, and certain semi-galleried courts attached to the flanks of early
Syrian churches.
Walter Horn suggests that the earliest
coenobitic communities, which were established in
Egypt by
Saint Pachomius , did not result in cloister construction, as there were no lay serfs attached to the community of monks, and thus no need for separation within the walled community. Horn finds the earliest prototypical cloisters in some exceptional late fifth-century monastic churches in southern Syria, such as the Convent of Saints
Sergius and Bacchus, at Umm-is-Surab (489), and the
colonnaded forecourt of the convent of Id-Dêr, but nothing similar appeared in the semi-eremitic Irish monasteries' clustered
roundhouses nor in the earliest
Benedictine collective communities of the West. In the time of
Charlemagne () the requirements of a separate monastic community within an extended and scattered
manorial estate led to the development of a "monastery within a monastery" in the form of the locked cloister, an architectural solution allowing the monks to perform their sacred tasks apart from the distractions of laymen and servants. Horn offers as early examples Abbot Gundeland's
"Altenmünster" of Lorsch abbey (765–774), as revealed in the excavations by Frederich Behn. Lorsch was adapted without substantial alteration from a
Frankish nobleman's
villa rustica, in a tradition unbroken from late Roman times. Another early cloister, in the
abbey of Saint-Riquier (790–799), took a triangular shape, with chapels at the corners, in conscious representation of the
Trinity. A square cloister sited against the flank of the abbey church was built at
Inden (816) and the
abbey of St. Wandrille at Fontenelle (823–833). At
Fulda, a new cloister (819) was sited to the
liturgical west of the church "in the Roman manner" familiar from the forecourt of
Old St. Peter's Basilica because it would be closer to the
relics. More recently,
John D. Rockefeller Jr. commissioned the construction of
The Cloisters museum and gardens in medieval style in
Manhattan in 1930–1938. ==Gallery==