CELL. - I. It is a word that has the most varied applications. In a Christian inscription from Rome there is mention of a binara (= cinaria) c. belonging to Sextus Petronius Probus (consul in 371) and to Anicia Faltonia Proba. In general, however, it is synonymous with a sepulchral monument, as in the well-known testament of Basel (CIL, XIII, 5708).
Thus it is found used in the very well-known inscription from the Christian area of Caesarea in Mauretania: cellam struxit suis cunctis sumptibus (CIL, VIII, 9585, 20958); it is called a c. aeterna in a Christian inscription from Rome now in the Lapidary Gallery in the Vatican (E. Diehl Inscriptiones latin. Christ. veteres, II, Berlin 1931, no. 3697). Later, however, c. is found used in another sense, as, for example, c. Sanctae Mariae in the monastery of Cordoba, and in the sepulchral poem of the abbot Victorianus (d. in 560), also in Spain, there is mention of the c. of the monks: Iberiam Galliavæ replebit cellis (G. B. De Rossi, Inscriptiones christianae, II, 1, Rome 1888, p. 294).
Enrico Josi
II. A term which, besides the religious meaning of a small country church, kept open for worship by one or more monks detached from a priory or from an abbey, has also taken on by extension that of a small Benedictine agricultural estate on the plain, on a hill or on a mountain. It generally depends on a grange or directly on a monastery. It does not always have a prior for religious assistance, nor a resident steward or grangier. This depends on its importance and on its greater or lesser distance from the grange or from the monastery. The word c. has become part of many place names.