These were not as a rule vaulted, but the granaries, or greniers d'abondance, were often built with three stories, that of the ground-floor, and even the one above it, being vaulted. The granary of the Abbey of Vauclair, in the department of Aisne, built towards the close of the twelfth century, is a very interesting example of such structures.
202. TITHE-BARN AT PROVINS
203. GRANARY OF THE ABBEY OF VAUCLAIR
Some idea of the importance of religious establishments at this period may be gathered from the foregoing details. The great abbeys were miniature towns, and their dependencies, the priories, consisted of vast farms, round which large villages soon grew up. The cultivators of these great holdings combined agricultural labours with their religious exercises, and the priors in especial were not only priests, but perhaps even in a greater degree stewards or bailiffs, whose duty it was to collect payments in kind, such as tithes or other revenues, to store these, together with the crops of their own raising, and finally to administer the wealth of every description—lands, woods, rivers, and ponds—belonging to the abbey.
Hospitals.—A large number of charitable institutions, called in the Middle Ages maisons dieu, hôtels dieu, hospices, hospitals, and lazar-houses, were founded in the eleventh century, and greatly developed in the twelfth and thirteenth.
A hospital was attached to most of the large abbeys or their dependencies. The cities also owned hospitals founded or served by monks.
Lazar-houses had multiplied throughout Western Europe by the end of the twelfth century, from Denmark to Spain, from England to Bohemia and Hungary; but these buildings gave little scope to the architect. They consisted merely of an enclosure surrounding a few isolated cells, and a chapel, attached to which were the lodgings of the monks who tended the lepers.