In the modern West, many of us are preoccupied with the inaccessibility of houses. Prices seem inaccessible, to own a building has become the preserve of the rich or older generations. Building itself is an ‘unsustainable’ activity, requiring vast amounts of energy and materials.
In the medieval period, the dynamic of building was far more extreme in its social effects and the resources needed. In this article we discuss the most economically demanding constructions of all: cathedrals. Alfie Robinson explains.
Basilica of Saint Denis, 1655.
The Hierarchy of Medieval Society
A cathedral gets its name from the Latin, cathedra, meaning ‘seat’, or perhaps more tellingly, ‘throne’. It refers to the throne-seat of the bishop that belongs to the cathedral. The connotations of a throne speak to two vitally important facts about the late-medieval church: its institutional wealth and its hierarchical nature. It is worth noting that these are factors that took a considerable amount of time to develop: early-medieval Europe had a much less consolidated and powerful church. Disagreements could still be made about the date of Easter; the Pope did not have a monopoly on the naming of saints.
In the course of the middle ages, this began to change. The twelfth century has been regarded as a ‘fulcrum’ century for some time now, and with good reason. With the help of some respected intellects, medieval life was shaped into that characteristic form which gives us the derogatory sense of ‘medieval’: a world both rigidly ordered and persecuting. Peter Comestor, the great mind who supposedly ‘ate’ knowledge (comedo, ‘I eat’, in Latin) was also a chief opponent of male homosexuality.[1] It is not widely known, but the idea that this sexuality was exceptionally sinful was not common currency in the medieval period. Not, at least, until the twelfth century. Likewise, the pursuance of heretics, Jews, sex-workers and lepers were present anxieties before the 1100s, but they were not as powerful as they were to become.
For the development of this controlling, monarchic society, one should turn to R I Moore’s Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250. That book tells this story with considerable eloquence. But what it does not tell is the cultural history of the same period. The main coincident event, or rather series of events, was the building campaigns of the twelfth century onwards.
A New Monumental Architecture
Gothic architecture, that quintessentially medieval mode, did not exist until about 1140. In this decade, a particularly ambitious abbot by the name of Suger constructed the west and eastern ends of Saint Denis, a cathedral north of Paris. Involved with these extensions were a number of technical feats, including an astonishingly complex ‘chevet’. This is the name given to the canopy of vaults at the eastern end of the church around the altar, three-dimensional stone structures that are both an engineering challenge to construct and a practical feat to carve. This structure is so complex that there is credible doubt as to whether the Abbot could have actually completed the amount of work he claimed, in a mere four years.[2]
What do vaults and persecution have to do with each other? The coincidence in time may be remarkable, but we cannot assume that one caused the other— the notion is absurd. Structures, however, and the societies that build them, are necessarily related. The payment, and who paid, for these structures is not just an economic question but also a cultural one.
In the early medieval period, there were few church buildings of a truly grand scale. Old Saint Peter’s, the now imaginary mother church of western Christianity is an exception that proves this rule. Were it not swept away by Michelangelo and others’ Renaissance work, viewers would probably be captivated by its great antiquity, but it was a fraction of the size of the present structure. Further away from the center of the faith, even the most important structures were rather small. Saint Denis’ nave, its central space, was rather old by the time of Abbot Suger, and if his accounts of pilgrimages are to be believed, woefully inadequate for congregations.[3] An even better example of the extraordinary difference between early and late medieval building, is the cathedral of Beauvais, also in France.
The nave and choir of this building are utterly mismatched. The nave, again supposedly the central space for congregations, is the size of a modest parish church. It dates to about 1000 AD and has a simple wooden roof. Attached to it is the stone colossus of Beauvais’ cathedral choir, its east end. The choir is multiple times bigger than the nave it is supposed to belong to.
Increasing prosperity and urbanization are the broader factors that enabled the medieval church to build bigger. But the path from the productivity of individuals in their day-to-day lives, to productivity in the masons’ yard and carpenters’ lodge is far from easy. Likewise, although certain cathedrals (Bourges, Chartres, Reims, Amiens) mostly in northern France were built in rapid campaigns, most building work in the medieval period was fitful.
Making Cathedrals Happen
To the present author’s knowledge, there is no such thing as a medieval building contract for a whole cathedral. Contracts that still survive in archives which stipulate costs, workmanship and materials belong exclusively to a class of more modest projects. Many of these are structures like water mills, or jettied wooden houses.[4] The very largest projects that medieval patrons contracted for were collegiate churches (for instance Fotheringhay collegiate church in the fifteenth century), or monastic dormitories (namely at Durham Cathedral, when the claustral buildings were reconstructed at the end of the fourteenth century).[5]
Instead of a contracted time period with an individual craftsperson, cathedrals had to be built by teams of workers. The ‘cash-flow’ for the projects was decided by benefactors’ generosity. Fabric rolls, the documents which compile a huge range of expenses for a given cathedral, also record names in the same way that public galleries often have rooms labeled in honor of a donor. Medieval donors usually hailed from the ranks of nobility, or from the clergy. High secular status was seen to enhance the status accrued by senior priests. As the Book of St Albans, a fifteenth century manual put it: “there is a gentleman [a noble], a churl’s [a non-noble] son made to be a priest, and that is a spiritual gentleman to God and not of blood. But if a gentleman’s son be made a priest he is a gentleman both spiritual and temporal.”[6] Besides, much of the time, the priesthood was simply drawn directly from the aristocracy anyway.
Sometimes these aristocratic clergy look as if they are radical defenders of faith at the expense of temporal, or secular power. Richard Scrope, archbishop of York in the early 15th century, was beheaded for his part in a rebellion over the crown’s taxes. Scrope, in fact, was no ‘proletarian’ bearing arms, but a member of a branch of the very wealthy Scrope family. He and his relatives donated vast sums of money to the construction of York Minster’s eastern end, and their stamp is made in the form of several coats of arms in painted stone which ‘hang’ in the very parts of the church they paid for.
More than voluntary gifts, though, historians must remember that the medieval church levied its own taxes, of many forms. Some of these were fairly explicit, like the ‘tithes’ (from ‘tenth’, Old English) which were taken, often in the form of grain. Monuments to these taxes survive in the form of tithe barns (originally filled with ‘tax’ in the form of grain) which can be found throughout northern Europe. Like the cathedrals, the earliest of these date to the twelfth century.
Grandeur and Poverty
Some taxes, however, were implicit. A major and extremely problematic form of tax-like burden was the economic impact of pilgrims upon locals who lived near pilgrimage shrines and sites. It was mandatory for such people to provide food and shelter for these visitors, who could number in their thousands. Despite its reputation as ‘the age of faith’, even medieval people had their limits on the amount of economic suffering they could undergo, whether it stemmed from the church or not.
The costs of pilgrimage sites could often cause conflict, not always even at the hands of ‘downtrodden’ peasants but also with the help of outraged nobility too. In 1119, Count William II and his retinue broke into the cloister of Vezelay Abbey (an important pilgrimage site), beat and stoned the monks, among other humiliating assaults. Barbara Abou-el-Haj, the chief scholar on medieval economy and its relationship with violence, puts the contrast between the expense of building and the tensions they caused: “Abbot and town haggle over everything: the quotas of vines, the dean’s servants picking his quota of grapes, fishing and forest rights, pasturage [...] the worst violence in 1152-1155, followed a famine just after the west portal [grand ceremonial entrance] was finished.”[7]
A highly important observation by that most perceptive polemicist, St Bernard of Clairvaux (also 12th century, around the same time as Abbot Suger’s building projects), was that the visible presence of wealth in and around the cathedral would serve only to enhance the desire to give yet more money. As it is in Hamlet, “appetite grew by what it fed on”— or, in St Bernard’s own words: “wealth is derived from wealth [...] wherever the more riches are seen, then the more willingly are offerings made. Eyes are fixed on relics covered with gold and purses are opened” [Conrad Rudolph trans.].[8] This was the case not just for the most wealthy but the least wealthy: hagiographies are replete with instances of the very poorest giving their tiny earnings away, often in the form of wax candles to light holy spaces.
For a deeper understanding of the impact of building on medieval society, one should turn to the remarkable article, also by Barbara Abou-el-Haj: The Urban Setting for Late-Medieval Church Building: Reims and its Cathedral Between 1210 and 1240. Reims cathedral, as she details, was constructed in a campaign which extracted so much wealth away from the city that it actually stunted the growth of the urban zone, well into the early modern period. The burghers who had to navigate hostile taxes eventually did the same as their predecessors in Vezelay: they broke into the Bishop’s prison fortress, beat and murdered his men.
The expense of medieval building was not just economic but social, even moral. Resources could be endlessly funneled towards projects dreamt up by the clerical elite. The only limit to the marshaling of these funds was the breaking point of the community. That limit, in the end, is rather similar to the more famous peasant revolts caused by taxation itself: indeed the same revolts which could engage noble priesthood to take up arms against the state too. The interesting similarity between these two cases is just another demonstration of the fact that, in the medieval period, there was no distinction between secular and religious.
What do you think of the cost of medieval cathedrals? Let us know below.
[1] Robert Moore, Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250, Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.
[2] John James, ‘Could Suger Have Built the Choir of Saint-Denis in Four Years?’, AVISTA Forum Journal, vol.1, no2, (1997), 23-25.
[3] See Erwin Panofsky, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of Saint Denis and its Art Treasures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946).
[4] Louis Salzman, A Documentary History of Building in England Down to 1540 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967)
[5] Ibid.
[6] Grammar and spelling modernized. The Boke of St Albyns, after 1486, Cambridge University Library Inc.3.J.4.1[3636], fol.51.r.
[7] Barbara Abou-el-Haj, ‘The Audiences of the Medieval Cult of Saints’, Gesta, vol.30, no.1, 8.
[8] Conrad Rudolph, The ‘Things of Greater Importance’: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990, 281.
