Cloister

The English term enclosure is used in contemporary Catholic church law translations[2] to mean cloistered, and some form of the Latin parent word "claustrum" is frequently used as a metonymic name for monastery in languages such as German.

[5] Horn finds the earliest prototypical cloisters in some exceptional[6] late fifth-century monastic churches in southern Syria, such as the Convent of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, at Umm-is-Surab (AD 489), and the colonnaded forecourt of the convent of Id-Dêr,[7] but nothing similar appeared in the semi-eremitic Irish monasteries' clustered roundhouses nor in the earliest Benedictine collective communities of the West.

[8] Horn offers as early examples Abbot Gundeland's "Altenmünster" of Lorsch abbey (765–774), as revealed in the excavations by Frederich Behn.

[9] Lorsch was adapted without substantial alteration from a Frankish nobleman's villa rustica, in a tradition unbroken from late Roman times.

At Fulda, a new cloister (819) was sited to the liturgical west of the church "in the Roman manner"[12] familiar from the forecourt of Old St. Peter's Basilica because it would be closer to the relics.