Grangia

GRANGIA. - It is a Benedictine and especially Cistercian organization of persons and of economic goods, exhibiting the characteristics of a large-scale agricultural estate, in which all the economic figures of production, that is, those of the owner, the entrepreneur and the worker, are united in the juridical person of the abbey (v.).

The economic good is represented by the landed capital that comes to the abbey through donation or purchase. The persons are the monks and the lay brothers, to whom are added the wage laborers. The grangiae, sometimes composed of various farmsteads, are independent of one another, but together they form a social unit dependent on the abbot and an economic unit dependent on the cellarer or administrator of the abbey's goods. The abbot is represented in the grangia by a « præpositus prior » (rector of the farm's chapel) and the cellarer by a monk granger or steward. The latter directs the agricultural works and is charged with the purchases and sales pertaining to his grangia.

It is important to note that the Benedictine grangiae, protected by numerous safeguards, in truth not always respected, constituted, together with the minor monastic buildings, the only isolated medieval rural buildings, situated at the economic center of the estate.

Giovanni Donna