Life in a Medieval City (17 page)

—
FROM THE ACCOUNTS OF A
FOURTEENTH-CENTURY CATHEDRAL

T
he Cathedral of St.-Pierre and St.-Paul has experienced many vicissitudes through the centuries that it has been the church of the bishop of Troyes. From small beginnings as a chapel, occupying the site of the present choir, it grew slowly into a ninth-century basilica of sufficient size and dignity to serve as the scene for a council of Pope John VIII.

Fourteen years later the Vikings burned St.-Pierre to the ground; Bishop Milon restored it in the following century. In the new cathedral St.-Bernard preached to a capacity crowd in 1147 and cured many sick, including a servant of the bishop, an artisan, and an epileptic girl. Milon’s work was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1188, after which Bishop Hervée undertook to rebuild the church, using the new engineering technique which a later day will call Gothic. At the time of Hervée’s death, in 1223, the sanctuary and the seven chapels of the apse were nearly finished. His successor, Bishop Robert, continued the work; it is proceeding today under Bishop Nicholas de Brie and will go on for the next three centuries, stopping and starting as money comes in.

In Italy churches and cathedrals are often projects of communes; in northwest Europe the lead is more frequently taken by the bishop or abbot. Abbot Suger of St.-Denis led his carpenters into the forest to choose timber for his beams and personally ascertained “with geometric and arithmetical instruments” that the new choir aligned with the old nave. At Troyes the bishop is invariably the moving force in the endless task of construction and reconstruction.

Cathedrals are usually built on the crypts of their predecessors. The new cathedral of St.-Pierre is being constructed on the site of the old, but the larger apse, with its radiating chapels, requires more room, so Hervée negotiated a trade with a fisherman who owned the strip between the crumbling Roman wall and the branch of the Seine that marks the eastern limits of the old city. The wall was dismantled, and the chevet of the new cathedral now extends beyond it.

As work on a cathedral halts, resumes, progresses, halts again, several master builders may be in charge at different periods, which among other things leads to stylistic alterations and inconsistencies. Also, during these changes, the names of the masters
¹
tend to get lost. None of St.-Pierre’s early builders are known by name, though they were without doubt prominent men in their own lifetime. The cathedral builder, in fact, is one of the outstanding figures of the Middle Ages. If vanished records swallow the names of many, enough information survives to supply evidence of the kind of men they were. Many insured the durability of their fame by inscribing their signatures on their works. Carved into the soffit of the topmost window facing the New Tower of Chartres is the name “Harman” and the date “1164.” On the roof of St. Mary’s, Beverley, can be read the message: “Hal Carpenter made this rowfe.” Names are signed in the labyrinth on the floor of the nave at Amiens: Robert de Luzarches, Thomas de Cormont, and Renard de Cormont; and at Reims: Jean d’Orbais, Jean le Loup, Gaucher de Reims, and Bernard de Soissons. Tombs bear the names of many builders. One at Reims is dedicated to Master Hugues Libergier, “who began this church in the year of the Incarnation 12…”—the precise date obscured by the footsteps of seven hundred years. Documents record the names of many others, such as Pierre de Montreuil, one of the best-known men of his time, who in 1248 completed the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris in the amazing time of thirty-three months—showing what a Gothic engineer could do when the money did not run out. The brilliant Villard de Honnecourt perpetuated his name and fame by leaving a large parchment sketchbook filled with drawings, plans, and elevations which is one of the priceless documents of the thirteenth century.

Cathedral of St.-Pierre, Troyes
. Begun in the early thirteenth century, its construction, like that of most cathedrals, was interrupted for long periods by lack of funds, and was not finally completed until the sixteenth century. (Touring-Club de France)

The names of builders are well known to prospective employers. William of Sens was hired in 1174 to rebuild Canterbury Cathedral on the strength of his reputation as the builder of the Cathedral of Sens. Builders are well paid, with a liberal daily stipend supplemented by a clothing allowance, a food allowance, fodder for their horses, a fur-trimmed robe, and often special privileges, such as freedom from taxes for life. Typically rising from the ranks of the masons, they are remarkably versatile. Not only do they habitually combine the functions of engineer and architect, but some are adept sculptors and painters, or even poets. They are expert at every kind of construction—castles, walls, bridges, secular buildings. One architect, John of Gloucester, not only supervised the works at Westminster Abbey, but undertook at Westminster Palace to repair a chimney and a conduit supplying water to the king’s lavatory, and to build a drain to carry off refuse of the kitchen to the Thames, “which conduit the king ordered to be made on account of the stink of the dirty water which was carried through his halls which was wont to affect the health of the people frequenting them.”

The builders’ plans
²
are skilfully drafted on parchment, to explain their intentions to bishop and chapter: ground plans for each part of the nave, choir and transepts, sketches of portals with sculpture indicated, scale drawings of bays and ambulatories, variant possibilities for roofing and drainage. Accomplished mathematicians, especially strong in geometry, they determine proportions by supplementing measurements in feet and inches with modules, based on squares, equilateral triangles, and other regular polygons. This knowledge is so esoteric that it remains a professional secret.

The master builder is not only well paid but highly respected, as are the master masons. A preacher cannot restrain his indignation in describing the lordly status of these elite commoners: “In great buildings the master-in-chief orders his men about but rarely or never lends his own hand to the work; and yet he is paid much more than all the others…The master masons, with walking sticks and gloves, say, ‘Cut here,’ and ‘Cut there,’ but they do no work themselves.”

The
flying buttress
, a key element in the revolutionary Gothic system of construction, drawn by Villard de Honnecourt at Reims Cathedral.

The master builder is the general of a skilled, and consequently expensive, army of workers. Pilgrims and other faithful sometimes contribute voluntary labor, usually in the transport department. Occasionally a long line of penitents hitch themselves to a wagonload of stone, doing the work of oxen. On the whole, oxen do the work better. A more efficacious form of volunteer labor is the peasant with ox and wagon who receives an indulgence from the bishop in return for his help. Even so, moving a large quantity of stone a long distance overland is a serious problem. Troyes imports some of its stone from Tonnerre, only twenty-five miles south, but without a connection by water. The stone quintuples in cost on the journey. Water transport is much cheaper. The marble for the columns of the great abbey church at Cluny was moved ten times as far, down the Durance from the Alps and up the Rhône. When they can, bishops cannibalize pagan monuments, as at Reims, where an early archbishop obtained permission from Louis the Pious to dismantle the Roman ramparts so that he could build the old Romanesque cathedral.

But a convenient quarry is even better than an old Roman wall. Suger’s discovery of the quarry at Pontoise was regarded as miraculous. The bishops of Troyes have a quarry which is worked by masons from the cathedral work gang.

Never do volunteers figure as an important element of the labor force. They cannot dress stone, or set it in courses, or make mortar and tile, or lay lead roofs and gutters, or construct arch ribs, or sculpture stone, or carve wood, or fabricate stained glass, or assemble it into windows. Cathedral labor is necessarily professional.

In the terminology of construction workers of a later day, the masons are “boomers.” They go where the job is, living in barracks in the cathedral yard, collecting their pay, saving it if they are prudent, spending it on drink and girls if they are not. Many own their own valuable tools, which are passed from father to son. Others depend on tools supplied by the employer, who is normally responsible for repair and maintenance. Keeping soft iron points and edges sharp is a problem. Besides picks, hammers, wedges and points, basic to stone dressing, masons need hatchets, trowels, spades, hoes, buckets and sieves for mortar, and lines for laying out walls.

Masons are free men, skilled at their profession, capable of rising in the world. There are several categories with varying wage rates: plasterers and mortarers, stonecutters, master masons, and unskilled laborers. They usually spend their first years in the quarry, learning to cut stone. A mason in the quarry may be paid twenty-four deniers a week plus his meals and lodging, though in winter his wage is automatically cut to match the shorter working day. A summer wage may reach thirty deniers. There is plenty of work for an expert mason; from eight to ten churches a year are going up in France alone.

On a summer day, the workyard before a cathedral hums with activity. Masons are clustered in twos and threes. One man hammers while a comrade holds the point to the stone, cutting a voussoir, one of the wedge-shaped stones that form the ribs of an arch. Most difficult to fashion is the keystone, whose projections must fit into cuts made in the four rib stones that meet it, to pin the vault securely at the top. Some workers are dressing stone blocks for the exterior masonry. The Master of the Works, or one of his aides, may construct wooden “molds” against which the stone blocks are measured to insure uniformity and accuracy. A master mason marks each finished block with a number, to facilitate assembly of the great jigsaw puzzle. Some men are at work on more delicate pieces, sections of pier capitals or portal frieze borders. Some are busy making mortar with buckets, sieves, hoes, and trowels. They have the valuable assistance of a recent invention—the wheelbarrow. Two blacksmiths are sharpening tools, one turning the grindstone as the other hones the cutting edge of a hatchet. One shed shelters a forge where the iron clamps
³
and dowels are wrought. Another is the carpenters’ shack, near which is the pit where the heavy beams for the timbering are sawed by the big two-handed pit saw. The plumbers also have their shed, where they fashion lead fittings for eaves and gutters.

An exceptionally skilled craftsman at work in the yard may be the bell founder, really a brass founder, who makes brass pots, washbasins, and mortars when there are no bells to be cast. He has a large pit dug, and in it he constructs a mold with a clay core which supports a wax model of the bell, in turn encased in a clay “cope.” The mold will be dried by kindling a fire in the brickwork of the core, which will at the same time melt the wax, leaving a space to be filled in with bell metal. This is a mixture of copper and tin. Experience has shown that the best proportion is thirteen parts copper to four of tin; a higher percentage of tin improves the tone of the bell but makes the metal brittle. The bell is “long-waisted”
⁴
(longer in proportion to its diameter than bells in later centuries). It will be rung with a simple lever; later bells will be operated with a half wheel, three-quarter wheel, and finally a complete wheel. The founder casts his bells so that they will have a “virgin ring” and will need no further tuning. Tuning is a laborious and noisy process of chipping around the inside of a bell.

When the metal is poured and the bell mounted, the bishop baptizes it as if it were a child, with salt, water, and holy oil. He prays that when it is sounded faith and charity may abound among men, that all the devices of the devil—hail, lightning, winds—may be rendered vain by its ringing, and all unseasonable weather be softened.