The Collected Prose, page 14
Work was regulated by the sundial. It started at dawn and stopped at dusk. English builders, we read in documents of the second half of the sixteenth century, in winter had one hour for lunch, with a fifteen-minute break in the afternoon. In summer: one hour for lunch and two thirty-minute breaks. In winter they worked eight to ten hours, in summer twelve hours. There were fifty holidays which, taken together with the Sundays, gave about two hundred and fifty days of effective labor.
In order to attract skilled workers, they were promised lodging at the inns. The first hotel for workers near Eton, hospicium lathomorum, with its own kitchen, appeared quite late, not until the seventeenth century.
The payroll was diverse. Knoop and Jones listed no less than seventeen different fees for builders in Caernavon in the years 1278 to 1280. Unskilled workers were paid day wages every evening. The craftsmen received their wages on Saturdays.
How much did they earn? A difficult question. We know how easy it is to prepare misleading tables, which will plainly demonstrate that we are doing all right, or have been better off, or that things are much better somewhere else. The matter is even more complicated when a remote epoch is involved. The minimum for human existence is so relative. Citing the work of a seemingly impartial French scholar, Pierre du Colombier, we shall only say that the material situation of workers in the Middle Ages was far better than at the end of the nineteenth century. One must add that this is probably true only for skilled laborers, not for those who drilled tunnels in the quarries. After meticulous research, Baissel proved that in order to buy three hundred and sixty kilograms of wheat, a worker had to work twelve days in the fourteenth century, twenty days in 1500, and twenty-two in 1882.
There is an even more convincing indicator: a comparison of the salary of a London builder who ate his meals at work, with that of a worker who dined at his own expense. The former received a third less than the latter. In the sixteenth century, one half less. Contemporary research on the working man’s family budget demonstrates that considerably more than a third is spent on food.
Only a few records allow us to probe the relation between employer and employee. In the twelfth century a strike took place during the construction of an abbey in Obazin. The workers, unable to stand a prolonged fast, bought a hog and ate a portion, hiding the rest. Abbot Stedan discovered the meat and ordered that it be thrown away. Next day the workers refused to work, and even insulted the Abbot. In return, he warned them that he would find other laborers, better equipped to check their bodily desires and build God’s house. It ended with the rebellious staff humbling themselves in front of the Abbot. In Siena there was a thirty-year lawsuit over wine from the vineyards belonging to the construction board, which the builders wanted to receive during their work. They substantiated their claim quite logically, saying that they did not want to interrupt their work in order to wet their lips. In the end the board acquiesced to these legitimate human demands.
ACCORDING TO MEDIEVAL TRADITION the cathedral builders descended from the builders of King Solomon’s temple. An ancestry as noble as it is mystical. In contemporary novels about medieval architects, they are surrounded with an aura of mystery; half magicians, half alchemists, astronomers of cross-vaults, mysterious men, who came from far away carrying esoteric knowledge of perfect proportions and well-guarded secrets of construction. In reality the beginnings of this profession were extremely modest. An architect was lost amidst a crowd of anonymous craftsmen. In medieval texts the very term “architect” is somewhat vague and equivocal, reflecting his ambiguous position and role. Most frequently he was a builder and mason, who did manual work just like the others. On occasion the role of architect was assumed by the patron himself, a bishop or an abbot, a learned man who had traveled widely, which was particularly important, as cathedrals were often copies of famous existing temples.
The role of an architect became more defined and his importance grew along with the Gothic cathedrals. His position was well-established by the middle of the thirteenth century. But just at this time we come across a text which makes our eyebrows rise in amazement. Nicolas de Biard, a moralist and preacher, speaks with indignation: “It has become a habit that one of the masters directs the works by word only, but scarcely ever lends a hand; despite this his pay is higher than that of the others.” And further on, he exclaims with contempt that an architect, wearing gloves and equipped with a rod, commands: “You should cut stone in such and such a manner,” yet he himself does not work. “Just like some prelates of today,” adds Nicolas de Biard, to make his condemnation complete.
The above text proves that the emancipation of the new profession was by no means easy. Architecture was not a university subject. Among the experienced masters there were amateurs who joined the trade, like the famous Perrault, who “from a bad doctor became a good architect,” or Wren10, a mathematician and astronomer, or the playwright Vanbrugh11. But they were at least, as we would say today, intellectuals. According to Peach there were also simple men, like the illiterate village bricklayer who erected a large church with a dome on Malta. Monasteries, too, specialized in the trade. In the Middle Ages the Cistercians had a reputation as builders, which gave occasion to a quarrel between the Pope and Frederick II, who forced Cistercians to build his castles.
Architecture was denied a place among the liberal arts. No doubt this fact hurt the architects, who tried to compensate for the injustice by usurping academic titles, such as magister cementariorum or magister lapidorum. We know that the practice provoked protests from the Paris palestra, who refused to lower themselves to the level of bricklayers. (Poor lawyers, what has remained of their causistry but a rich subject of comedy.)
But the supreme accolade was the inscription on the tomb of Pierre de Montreuil12, architect of Saint-Louis, the creator of Sainte-Chapelle. He is called not only the flower of good conduct, but also docteur ès pierres—a title never used before or after. This is, however, the apogee of an individual career, which should not overshadow its modest beginnings.
What is an architect for us? One who makes plans. Were the plans of medieval cathedrals preserved? Only from the middle of the thirteenth century. The invaluable album of Villard de Honnecourt13 dates from this time. I shall talk about it in a moment. Although a plan of the Abbey of Saint-Gall is preserved from the eleventh century and a plan of the water system for the Abbey of Canterbury from the twelfth century, these sketches can hardly be called plans due to their naive perspective, resembling children’s drawings. The lack of primary sources for historians of architecture can easily be explained by the high cost of parchment. Perhaps plans were made on other, less durable materials? Or perhaps—the second blasphemy against the cathedral builders, after the lack of an estimated budget mentioned above—the outline of the construction was born rather vaguely in the minds of the initiators.
The firms dealing with the construction of cathedrals in Strasbourg, Cologne, Orvieto, Vienna, Florence, and Siena jealously guarded the blueprints which appeared in large numbers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This is the time of “tracing houses,” chambres aux traits, small drafting workshops supervised by architects. Parchment became cheaper and tracing techniques improved substantially; but despite these documents, it is still difficult to reconstruct the building process based solely on their details. The general practice was to draw plans of elevations and facades, never a complete structure. Lacking accuracy and uniformity of scale, they were more like summaries than technical prints for builders. The same can be said of the models made of wax or wood covered with plaster, held by saints or donors, which we see in numerous paintings. They were a means of communication between architect and patron, not between architect and worker.
Luckily there exists a document which provides a greater insight into the architect’s workshop than all extant records and plans. It is the first and only known medieval textbook of architecture, a small encyclopedia of construction lore, a notebook of records and drawings, practical advice, and inventions.
We speak of the album of Villard de Honnecourt. Unfortunately, the thirty-three preserved sheets of parchment represent only half of the book. The entire section on wood construction and carpentry, which was of crucial importance to the cathedral builders is missing. Nevertheless the material contained in this architect’s vade mecum overflows its pages.
Everything is there: mechanics, geometry and practical trigonometry, sketches of cathedrals, drawings of animals, people, ornaments and architectural details. Villard, who came from the small village of Honnecourt in Picardy, was a man of voracious curiosity. He traveled constantly and saw Gothic cathedrals in Meaux, Laon, Chartres, Reims; he ventured to Germany and Switzerland. He even reached Hungary and everywhere he drew and sketched things which attracted his attention: the outline of an organ loft, a grasshopper, a rosette, a lion, a human face emerging from the contour of a leaf, the descent from the Cross, nudes, figures in motion. Some drawings are schematic, written into an oblong or triangle as if Villard guided the heavy hand of a sculptor. Others, like a kneeling figure, surprise us with their decorative finesse and the perfection with which he renders drapery. He was also interested in recent inventions: a saw which could be used under water, a self-propelling wheel (the eternal dream of perpetuum mobile), and what Americans would call “gadgets”—how to construct an angel always pointing his finger towards the sun, how to make a statue of an eagle turn its head towards a priest reading the Gospel, or a clever mechanism for warming a bishop’s hands during a long mass.
Novelists present medieval architects as a sect jealously guarding its secrets. If these secrets were truly important, they must have concerned pure science. If we accept this premise, architects in the Middle Ages would be the sole guardians of the properties of geometrical figures, the principles of material resistance, as well as the basic laws of mechanics. Here Villard’s notebook is silent. It is a collection of practical recipes, the cookbook of a medieval architect.
The history of science maintains that the knowledge of mathematics in the Middle Ages was limited. We have the correspondence between two scholars from the middle of the eleventh century: Ragimbold of Cologne and Radolf of Liège. A stern contemporary scholar says that “analysis of these letters can be reduced to a revelation of ignorance.” The learned men are unable to conduct a simple geometrical proof or to calculate the external angle in a triangle. Who knows how long we would have had to wait for a new Euclid if it were not for the Arabs, who introduced Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, and Ptolemy to Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. No doubt this knowledge graced the hands of architects. Yet it is by no means certain what use was made of it.
Our nineteenth-century grandparents were incorrigible optimists when they spoke of the rationalism of Gothic architecture. One ought rather to believe those who claim that the knowledge of the cathedral builders was empirical, based on experiment and experience rather than calculation. Intuition invites error. Disasters during the construction of cathedrals were much more frequent than we might suppose, and did not stop at the famous accident in Beauvais or the ill-fated attempt to widen Siena’s Duomo. A thorough investigation of Chartres’ dome one hundred years after it was built presented a sobering state of affairs. The diagonal nave threatened to collapse, the portal had to be reinforced with iron bars. In the sixteenth century the condition of Notre-Dame de Paris was no less alarming. Why was this the case? Usually the foundations were not strong enough for the spiraling constructions. The vertical passion is well illustrated by the altitude of naves built in consecutive order: Sens—thirty meters; Paris—thirty-two and a half; Chartres—about thirty-five meters; Bourges—thirty-seven meters; Reims—thirty-eight meters; Amiens—forty-two meters; and finally Beauvais—forty-eight meters.
The story of the construction of Milan Cathedral, which we know quite well from the records of a commission of experts, demonstrates something that should outrage rationalists. Let’s imagine: the walls already constructed have reached a considerable height, yet the discussion is not about ornamental details but a quite fundamental matter—the layout of the cathedral. The French architect Jean Mignot14 vehemently criticizes his Italian colleagues, and utters the classical aphorism: “Ars sine scientia nihil est.” But this scientia belonged to the realm of empiricism, since none of the contending sides could produce a scholarly proof in defense of their own convictions.
We know that alchemy has more secrets than chemistry and that the branch of knowledge which to this day surpasses all others in its esoteric character is the culinary art. The essential secret of medieval architects was the skill of building according to plans, but their knowledge incorporated thousands of what we might call kitchen secrets: distinctions between various species of stone, production of various kinds of mortar. The obligation to guard these secrets bound not only architects, but also stonemasons, stone-layers, plasterers, and those who mixed limestone mortars and dwelt on the lowest levels of the hierarchy. Similar principles governed other professions that had nothing to do with architecture.
The real constitution of the cathedral builders consists of two manuscripts in English: one called “Regius,” written about 1390; and the other named “Cook,” written forty years later. Besides regulations governing religion, morals, and customs, they contain a separate point relating to discretion. They forbid the repetition of conversations held in lodges and other gatherings of stonemasons. For many years scholars thought that this interdiction concerned the repetition of esoteric formulae and secrets. It referred, however, as more recent research demonstrates, to specific technical and professional matters, like the manner of laying stones so that their position closely resembled their original place inside the rock from which they had been hewn.
For a long time it was believed that medieval builders communicated by means of mysterious, secret signs. Recent research proves that this habit existed only in Scotland, connected with work in a special kind of stone the Scots imported. It was therefore an ordinance protecting highly skilled craftsmen against the less knowledgeable, and was closely bound to certain locations.
The dispute whether cathedrals were built more geometrico or “intuitively” like honeycombs, cannot be solved in general terms since the matter largely depended on the period, place, and the current knowledge, as well as on the education of a particular architect. Alexander Neckam15, living at the end of the twelfth century, had the intuition of genius that the earth’s gravitation is directed towards the center of the globe. But his practical deduction from this principle was rather frightening, and it was fortunate that architects didn’t implement it. Neckam advised that walls should not be vertical, but should gradually fan outwards.
There is also the question of the module, an arbitrarily accepted measure whose product is repeated in different elements of the construction, like the length of the nave, the height of the columns, the proportion of the width of the transept to the main nave. There is no doubt that medieval architects used the module. An American archaeologist, Sumner Crosby, discovered that the module, quite consistently employed, for the Saint-Denis cathedral was 0.325 meters, which is approximately the length of the “Paris foot.” Yet it was not a principle of construction but of aesthetics. It was widely understood that the use of simple rules of geometry gave the harmony of proportions.
At first an architect was one of the artisans. He was paid daily and worked as a mason, and up to the sixteenth century, quite surprisingly to us, received lower pay in Rouen than a stone-layer, although he was given an annual bonus. In time the material rewards of the profession became clearer, as the daily wage was paid whether or not the architect was present at the site. To that we should add compensations in kind—clothes. In the beginning they were a sort of livery and stressed a relationship of servitude. But when we hear that in 1255 John Gloucester received a fur-lined coat, similar to those worn by the gentry, it is a clear sign of the ennoblement of the profession. The construction management, in order to bind the architect to his work, presented him with a horse, a house, and the high honor of dining at the abbot’s table. In Italy, and even more in England, the material situation of an architect was much better than in France. In the fourteenth century his annual income in the British Isles amounted to eighteen pounds—when twenty pounds of income from property could buy a nobleman’s title. In the thirteenth century the court architect of Charles d’Anjou enjoyed the title of proto-magister, a mounted retinue, and was counted amongst the knights.
The majority of Gothic cathedrals were the work of many architects. Nevertheless, attempts were made to entrust the supervision to one man for as long as possible. Life contracts were not unusual. They often included a clause which provided that in case of incurable illness, or the loss of sight, the architect would receive an agreed pension until the end of his days. In the late medieval period an architect often worked simultaneously on a number of constructions; but we also find a draconian contract between the management of the Bordeaux Cathedral and Jean Lebas, who held the title of “maçon, maitre après Dieu des ouvrages des pierre.” He was allowed to leave the construction site just once a year in order to visit his family. The possibility of travel was greatly desired by architects, as consultations were not only a supplementary and quite lucrative source of income, but also added to the craftsmen’s prominence.
WE SHOULD FINALLY DISPOSE of the myth of the cathedral builders’ anonymity. Scores of their names have been preserved, not only in chronicles and financial registers. The medieval constructors signed, if this is an appropriate term, their work with joy and pride.
