The Abbey of Cluny soon became too small for the increasing number of monks. St. Hugh undertook its reconstruction in the closing years of the eleventh century, and the monk Gauzon of Cluny began the works in 1089 on a much more extensive plan, indeed on a scale so magnificent that the church of the new abbey was esteemed the first in importance among Western buildings of the kind.
The plan ([Fig. 134]) shows the arrangement of the abbey at the close of the eleventh century, when the monastic buildings had been reconstructed some time previously. The ancient church was intact; the choir had been begun in the time of St. Hugh, but the building had not been consecrated till 1131. The chapel which precedes it on the west was completed so late as 1228 by Roland I., twentieth abbot of Cluny.
134. ABBEY OF CLUNY. PLAN
At A on the plan stood the entrance, the Gallo-Roman gateway which still exists. At B, in front of the church, a flight of steps led up to a square platform, from which rose a stone cross; a flight of broad steps gave access to the chapel entrance at C, an open space between two square towers. The northern tower was built to receive the archives; that on the south was known as the Tower of Justice. The ante-church or narthex at D seems to have been set apart for strangers and penitents, who were not allowed to enter the main building. Their place of worship was distinct from the abbey church, just as their lodging was separated from the buildings reserved for the brotherhood, who were permitted no intercourse with the outer world. At E was the door of the abbey church, which was only opened to admit some great personage whose exceptional privilege it was to enter the sanctuary.
At Cluny, as at Vézelay, one of the dependencies of Cluny, the Galilee, which is found in all Benedictine abbeys, was built with aisles and towers on the same scale as an ordinary church. It communicated with the buildings set apart for guests over the storehouses of the abbey to the west of the cloister at F on the plan. From the Galilee access to the abbey church was obtained at E, by means of a single doorway, which from descriptions seems to have resembled the great door of the monastery church at Moissac in arrangement and decoration.
135. ABBEY OF CLUNY. INTERIOR OF NARTHEX, WITH DOOR LEADING INTO ABBEY CHURCH
The special characteristic of the Abbey Church of Cluny is its double transept, an arrangement we shall find reproduced in the great abbey churches of England, notably at Lincoln. According to a description written in the last century, the Abbey Church of Cluny was 410 feet long. It was built in the form of an archiepiscopal cross, and had two transepts: the first nearly 200 feet long by 30 feet wide; the second, 110 feet long and wider than the first. The basilica, 110 feet in width, was divided into five aisles, with semi-circular vaults supported on sixty-eight piers. Over three hundred narrow round-headed windows, high up the wall, transmitted the dim light that favours meditation. The high altar was
placed immediately beyond the second transept at G, and the retro-choir and altar at H. The choir, which had two rood screens, occupied about a third of the nave. It contained two hundred and twenty-five stalls for the monks, and in the fifteenth century was hung with magnificent tapestries. A number of altars dedicated to various saints were placed against the screens and the piers of nave and side aisles. At a later period chapels were constructed along the aisles and on the eastern sides of the two transepts.
Above the principal transept rose three towers roofed with slate; the central, or lantern tower was known as the lamp tower, because from the vaults of the crossing below it were suspended lamps, or coronas of lights which were kept burning day and night over the high altar.