GRANGIA. – It is a Benedictine, and especially Cistercian, organization of persons and economic assets, characterized by a large agricultural estate in the plains, in which all the economic roles of production—namely, those of the owner, the entrepreneur, and the worker—are united in the juridical person of the abbey (see).
The economic asset is represented by the landed capital, which comes to the abbey through donation or purchase. The persons involved are the monks and lay brothers, to whom wage laborers are added. The granges, sometimes consisting of several farmsteads, are independent of one another but together form a social unit under the authority of the abbot and an economic unit dependent on the cellarer or administrator of the abbey’s goods. The abbot is represented in the grange by a *prepositus prior* (rector of the grange chapel), and the cellarer by a monk known as the *grandiere* or factor. This individual directs the agricultural work and is entrusted with purchases and sales pertaining to the grange.
It is important to note that the Benedictine granges, safeguarded by numerous protections that were not always respected, constituted, along with the smaller monastic buildings, the only isolated rural structures of the medieval period located at the economic center of the estate.
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