Medieval monastery

 

 

A life of rigorous schedules and self-sacrifice, the monastery was the intellectual and cultural powerhouse powerhouse of medieval Europe

       A monastery is a building inhabited by a community of men or women, devoted to the service of God and bound by a three-fold vow of poverty, chastity and obedience to a superior, and to a rule. The majority of medieval monks followed the Rule of St Benedict, written in the 6th Century. The standard features of the monastic plan were a smooth blend of spiritual necessity and common sense. The dominant building was the church, as it was where the monks spent the largest part of their waking hours in worship. Next to the church stood the cloister Garth (garden), lined by four walkways which provided

covered access to the surrounding buildings. These included the chapter house, dormitory, latrines, refectory and kitchen. Store rooms, an abbot’s house and guests’ quarters might also be attached. The infirmary, or monastic hospital, often stood to the east of the main buildings to provide peace and quiet to its patients. Many other buildings stood in the precinct, such as chapels, barns and stables, and most monasteries were surrounded by a high precinct wall, entered through an impressive gatehouse.

Built from stone and intended to both glorify God and remain serviceable for centuries, monasteries

were constructed using the prevailing style of the day, often pushing architecture to the limit. Walls and vaults were built from stone, roofs were covered in lead, windows were glazed, and the floors covered with encaustic tiles. Monasteries not only acted as houses of prayer and pilgrimage destinations, but also cultural centres, providing education and employment. Many towns, such as Abingdon, Oxford, St Albans, Reading, Westminster and Chester (the list goes on) only exist because they grew up around a monastery. In a very real sense, monasteries physically defined the urban geography of modem Britain.

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World's biggest dinosaurs

With fossil brush in hand, we unearth the massive behemoths that ruled over land, air and sea millions of years ago

Stegosaurus

Stegosaurus was 

Slightly larger than a shipping container, but its brain was only the size of a walnut.

Brachiosaurus

The brachiosaurus used its staggering 16m (52.5 feet)

Height to reach

Tall vegetation.

Pterosaur

The hollow bones of a pterosaur ensured it remained light

Enough to achieve flight,

Even when reaching the size of a small plane.

 

     

It’s somewhat frightening to

Imagine what it must have been like to wander around the plains

Of Africa and Argentina 100

million years ago. Whereas today you’d be hard-pressed to encounter a beast any bigger than yourself, back then you’d be running for your life as bus-sized creatures roamed free, some remaining largely peaceful and distant, others full of aggression.

The biggest land-based animal alive today is the African bush elephant, with the largest weighing a measly 13.5 tons and measuring io.6m (34.8ft) long and 4.2m (13.8ft) high. Argentinosaurus, the current of facial

Record-holder for largest dinosaur of them all, would have been at least four times the size. It was a sauropod, dinosaurs of the Jurassic and Cretaceous period that were mostly

Herbivores and known for being very large. Indeed, many other types of sauropod would have stood tau above the African bush

Elephant, as would carnivores, raptors and pterosaurs (‘flying dinosaurs’).

0f course, the dinosaurs inhabited the Earth for much longer than any modem

Animal, from 251 to 65 million years ago, allowing plenty of time for certain species to develop into the giant hulks of flesh we now so revere. The biggest dinosaurs discovered to date have largely been determined to live in the Late Cretaceous period, 99.6-65.5 million years ago, before they faced extinction.

For a long time, though, paleontologists have wondered why dinosaurs grew to be so large. While impressive, size can also be a hindrance. Not only does a large animal need 

   

     A much higher rate of metabolism, but it must also develop much stronger bones and

Skeletal structures to be able to hold itself upright. Many of these gigantic animals were also cumbersome and slow, leaving

themselves open to attack from large

Predators. Why did dinosaurs continue to grow for millions of years, then?

One train of thought is that there was a huge surplus of carbon dioxide in the

atmosphere during the age of the dinosaurs. This meant that vegetation flourished, and herbivores such as the sauropods simply had an over-abundance of nourishment available to eat. While somewhat of a burden in terms of manoeuvrability, their size would certainly have helped to some extent when fending off smaller carnivores. This leads to another proposal from palaeontologists, namely that some dinosaurs grew in size over millions of years as a form of self-defense.

However, others think that these giant dinosaurs were cold-blooded, which was directly responsible for their size. indeed, warm-blooded animals simply wouldn’t be able to sustain such mammoth sizes,

Somewhat backed up by the lack of

mammals larger than a few tons today.

Huge cold-blooded sauropods, weighing in at up to 100 tons, would have been almost self-sustainable, as they could store heat throughout the day for the colder nights, maintaining a fairly unchanged body

temperature and prolonging their survival.

Turn over for our look at the truly

humongous beasts that would wreak endless havoc if they roamed our planet today.

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