Gothic Investments: Social Overhead Capital in the High Middle Ages
Anne McCants*, MIT
Paul Hohenberg, RPI (emeritus)
March 2016
Abstract:
Economists concentrate attention on market processes and account for most behavior and
outcomes via these mechanisms. The existence of public goods compels us to pay attention also
to public production, and therefore to coercive financing and to the political economy of transfer
payments. In all this a major part of the real economy, the social sector, gets relatively less
attention. Yet the social sector is large and plays a major role in providing desirable objects of
consumption beyond those commodities provided by the market. This paper calls attention to
social enterprise, and the problems associated with investment in it, in an age when neither state
nor market-based enterprise were nearly as well established as they are today, namely the
European Middle Ages. It investigates the capacity of medieval society (between the 12th and
14th centuries and especially in the newly dynamic urban context) to make what appear in
retrospect to have been sizable and very long-term investments in one form of social overhead
capital: building in stone. Our particular focus is the financing and construction of cathedrals,
basilicas, and even parish churches in the then-new Gothic style with a comparative reference to
contemporary investments in stone bridge construction. We conclude that the religiously
motivated medieval building boom represented a significant investment in social overhead
capital.
DRAFT: Please do not cite without authors’ permission.
* This work draws from materials collected as part of Anne’s larger research project on the
construction and financing of Gothic cathedrals in the greater Paris Basin and Anglo-Norman
England in the period from the 12th to the 14th centuries.
1 A salient feature of the High Middle Ages, certainly in the West, was a remarkable building
boom. Less obvious, but at least as significant, was the economic transformation that facilitated
it. Alongside castles, palaces, and to a lesser extent after the 11th century, monasteries -- all built
by and for their inhabitants -- a large number of more publically accessible structures were also
constructed, many of them quite impressive even to us. City walls have been much studied in
this regard as they explicitly mark the rebirth and expansion of urban places; indeed, many cities
and towns had to rebuild their enclosures more than once to cope with sustained growth. Our
attention in this paper is particularly drawn to churches and secondarily to bridges, a comparison
that may seem most productive for its contrasts, but which in fact is more illuminating in respect
of its similarities. Of course, many important structures predated our period of focus between
the 12th-14th centuries, but were nonetheless rebuilt more grandly (and typically more durably)
during that time. In the case of bridges this principally meant replacing wood with stone, while
for churches the aim was sometimes to enlarge or altogether replace an earlier structure, and
always to achieve both lightness of form and the capture of interior light in the new style we call
Gothic. Thus one especially noteworthy characteristic of the medieval building boom was the
creative use of stone.
From an economic point of view, the building boom represents a major effort of investment and
therefore raises the question of how the funds were mobilized, particularly for those projects that
were not intended for private use. Medieval Europe was, after all, a relatively poor and deeply
fragmented society, one in which neither markets nor states were well developed. The strongest
2 institution was no doubt the Church, but its resources, besides being spread over many member
components, had to cover a multitude of needs: sustaining a large clergy, succoring the poor and
sick, preserving learning and the arts, and providing pastoral care and oversight to the entire
population. The vast extent of piously motivated building in this time -- a category that includes
many bridges, a fact that is often surprising to the modern reader -- and the scale and
magnificence of churches, most especially in northern France and in England, is thus all the
more striking. There is no doubt that the cathedrals in particular were meant to impress and awe
the faithful, but the question of how it was managed remains unresolved. Our aim is to answer
this question by reviewing the material aspects of the building boom freed from the simple piety
of the folklore long associated with medieval cathedrals and other religious structures; and
further, to use the Gothic moment as an especially rich example of the capacity of the muchneglected (by economists certainly) social sector to provide economic goods in a context where
markets were comparatively thin and the public sector limited in its capacity to mobilize
resources.
We begin with a basic fact well established by architectural historians: once it was demonstrated
that churches could be made light and open, and moreover large, such churches were desired in
many places, giving birth to one of the more spectacular episodes of fervent emulation in history.
Furthermore, the technical advances in stone construction associated with the Gothic style also
gave rise to significant improvements in the stability and durability of other kinds of built
structures. The most important of these for our purposes was the stone bridge, a form that
benefited greatly from new vaulting techniques. The impetus for bridge building often
originated in a similar source, the Church. All of this construction had economic consequences,
but also economic requirements, most importantly the refinement of a material process, the
3 mobilization of new resources, and the development of new forms of managerial organization. It
is these latter considerations that will occupy our interest in this paper.
Although many of the cathedrals and other churches dating from the High Middle Ages remain
standing, most prominently in the greater Paris basin, they give only a partial sense of the
dimensions of the overall building boom. Jean Gimpel has estimated, for example, that by the
High Middle Ages, in a then almost fully converted Christian Europe, there was a church or
chapel for every 200 inhabitants. Norwich, Lincoln, and York, all cities of less than 10,000
inhabitants, boasted 50, 49 and 41 churches and chapels respectively.1 Similarly, John James
estimates that within the 28,000 sq. km. region of the Paris Basin (bounded by Laon and Reims
to the northeast and Chartres to the southwest) 669 major churches built or rebuilt in the Gothic
style between 1120 and 1250 are still extant in whole or in part.2 As astounding as that number
is, James has found further evidence of a roughly equal number of lesser church buildings dating
from the same period, many of which now lie partially in ruin. Many structures, of course, have
not survived at all, while the hundreds of smaller churches and chapels that remain attract little
attention from the modern visitor who dashes, guidebook in hand, from cathedral to cathedral.
Only one type of endeavor in this period rivals (or rather eclipses) the building boom in cost, and
that is the waging of war, whether against infidels and heretics as in the crusades to the Holy
Land or against the Cathars, or in dynastic wars of king against king, or duke against count.
While it is a commonplace to decry the cost of war, the more so as economists understand that it
costs society more than a penny to levy a penny of usable revenue, the economic impact of
construction is less clear, if only because there is a product at the end, certainly one with clear
1
2
Gimpel, Cathedral (1983), 7. James, ‘Funding’ (1997), 41-­‐2. 4 economic value in the case of a bridge, but also, even if not so obviously, in the case of a church
building.
In this paper we focus on the remarkably dynamic urban economic context for the construction
of the Gothic cathedrals of the first wave in France and England. While it would be desirable to
measure the total investment involved, in money or as a share of gross output, such an ambition
is fated to be thwarted. One may venture guesses as to the cost of a single cathedral, and we will
try, as have others before us, but the estimates can only be rough. Our concern is with the
mechanisms of financial mobilization, both specific methods and in a larger political economy
perspective. We begin with this aspect.
1.
Market, Public and Social Sectors: a Broader View of Political Economy
Economics, while nominally concerned with the allocation of resources by any means, tends to
focus strongly on market mechanisms (supply, demand, and credit), and secondarily on public
finance (most importantly taxation, with or without government borrowing). In political
economy terms these imply, respectively, voluntary exchange and coercion or command. What
this dichotomy most clearly fails to account for is what we might call the social sector, where
resources are mainly supplied by voluntary donation either to benefit some (presumably needy
and deserving) group or to provide collective benefits that cannot easily be paid for (public
goods) or that are felt useful to supply free (merit goods).
For example, in many societies such
as ours, public libraries do not charge for their services, although it would not be difficult to do
so. The argument for gratuity is twofold: first, that there are positive spillovers in having a more
literate community and second, that having access to books is a good thing for people and should
not be rationed.
5 It is in a sense surprising and perhaps revealing that the social sector gets relatively little
attention from economists. Certainly its size is no excuse for neglect, since much of education,
the arts, religion, and social welfare is provided in this way. The fact is that economics tends to
gravitate to problems that are amenable to its tool kit, and this tool kit is based on a somewhat
rough and ready behavioral model of hyper-rational and self-focused utility maximization.
Recent work by Daniel Kahneman, building on the work of Richard Thaler and others,
distinguishes Econs from Humans in terms of how they choose.3 It is safe to say that were we all
Econs, the social sector would not have the size and scope it does. When it comes to analyzing
the medieval economy, the social sector must have played an even larger role proportionately,
considering how weak and under-developed both states and markets were.
Despite the clear logic of this observation, those economists who have taken an interest in the
functioning of the social sector (or as it more commonly appears in the literature, the non-profit
sector) tend to assume that it is only relatively recently that it has come into its own. In a work
of synthesis about this sector as it stood at the close of the 20th century, Lester Salamon and
Helmut Anheier emphasize in their title that it is as yet still ‘emerging’. Moreover they report
that the nonprofit sector ‘has increasingly come into view as a crucial actor in modern social and
economic life.’4 It is in part to this alleged newness that they attribute the ‘conceptual confusion’
and the ‘great lack of information’ for those who study the nonprofit sector;5 and we might add
to that list an absence of historical perspective as well. For indeed, institutions that meet
economic and social needs via the social sector are not only of quite long standing, but have in
3
Kahneman, Thinking (2011), Part 4, 269-­‐374. Salamon and Anheier, Emerging (1996), 2-­‐3. 5
Ibid, 4. 4
6 some historical contexts been the most important institutions of society both in terms of scale
and social value. The Church in the High Middle Ages is certainly one such example.
What then have economists had to say about how the social sector actually functions? What
rules of behavior does it follow, and by what criteria does it make decisions? We turn largely to
the work of Kenneth Boulding, who in the 1960s and 70s led a movement to study what he
called the ‘grants economy’ which focused on voluntary transfers. Although his project was
largely swallowed up in the Public Choice movement (which in turn fell prey to those who
argued that non-market, i.e., government, failure often outweighed market failure), we continue
to see theoretical value in the logic of his model for parsing motivations for action. We do take
from the public choice literature the insight that large institutions, such as the Catholic Church,
however hierarchic their nominal structure, are not typically a single entity for decision making
purposes. Rather, they are likely to show internal divisions and divergences that impact resource
allocation. In other words, problems of self-interest and coordination failure work not only at the
level where entities interact but also within them. Nonetheless we also take from the recent
survey literature on nonprofit activities the insight of Peter Frumkin that ‘nonprofit and voluntary
action can be a powerful force for good in society.’6
Burton Weisbrod is perhaps the leading post-Boulding analyst of the social or nonprofit
sector. His brief treatment of the impetus behind the financing of non-profit production, which
he calls “complicated,” falls back largely on presumed intangible benefits to the donors, thus
preserving the mainstream assumption of rationally self-interested decisions about the allocation
of income.7 We prefer instead the more transparent and richer framework of Boulding that
6
7
Frumkin, On Being (2002), 28. Weisbrod, Voluntary (1977), 13. 7 recognizes three rather than two principles as governing decision making in a political economy
model. To the standard forces of exchange and coercion he adds ‘integration,’ or love, thus
offering an allocation space in the form of a triangle with the principles as the apexes. In Figure
1, we represent his so-called ‘social triangle’ anchored by the three systems that he claims
motivate the functioning of all institutions, regimes and organizations: exchange, coercion, and
charity8. That is, Boulding views disinterested altruism, maximizing exchange, and coercion by
authority as ideal types. Motives on the other hand are seldom purely all of one sort or another.
We might thus expect different kinds of economic activity to be situated within the resulting
three-dimensional space rather than just at its apexes. In Figure 1, for example, we can represent
gift giving by point A: although the act is voluntary, presumably based on love, reciprocity is
both expected and rewarded. Indeed, failure to give appropriate gifts can lead to social
exclusion, a form of coercion. Point B can represent social transfers, driven by integration (we
are unwilling to let fellow beings suffer all the consequences of imprudence or bad luck) but
financed by compulsory taxes and legitimated to the selfish actor as exchange in the form of
insurance, (‘there but by the grace of God…’).
In the medieval context, exchange itself, (i.e., commerce for profit, to say nothing of credit) was
easily viewed as a threat to the eternal soul that was best redeemed by substantial acts of charity.
Of course, the very vehemence of strictures against profit-seeking and interest-charging testify to
their prevalence even then. Nevertheless, for nobles and especially rulers, taking and giving
were considered the most socially appropriate ways of interacting with those below them.9 Yet,
to offset threat with integration, for instance by requiring a donation to the church as the price of
absolution, seems to us (as it did to some at the time) reminiscent of exchange. Also, to threaten
8
For a good summary, see Caruso, ‘Economics’ (2005). The reference is to Boulding, The Economy (1973), 107-­‐
109. 9
Scott, Gothic (2003), 50-­‐52. 8 someone with exclusion and eternal damnation (if not immediate physical punishment) for
diverging in thought and action from the official embodiment of divine love showed a certain
lack of confidence in the power of the integrative principle, even though charity and forgiveness
were the stated foundations of Christian religious practice. The preachers themselves often fell
short of the ideal.
Our aim then is to examine the financing of stone construction and tease out of the limited
available data the relative roles played by Boulding’s three principles. We shall also note that
resource allocation and distribution were not guided only by decisions drawing upon these three
principles. An important additional element was custom, which was held to legitimate all kinds
of long-standing practices and distinctions regardless of function or fairness, while a closely
related element of inertia (or stability) was established, namely privilege or the right to economic
rents. For example, the manorial relation of master and serf, though nominally an exchange of
service for protection was not a contract requiring compliance by both parties, but a property
right vested in a name or its corresponding estate with coercion on one side and only free
exercise of judgment or respect for custom on the other. Such a society needed a strong moral
compass, or for the (sometimes justly) skeptical at least the appearance of one, to avoid being
riven by unbridled oppression and violent outbursts of resistance. That restraint was presumably
provided by a church that enjoyed a monopoly on moral influence, concomitant with its
considerable material and legal power. Surely the Peace of God movement, coming as it did
from the offices of Bishops eager to secure their church and community from the ravages of
private violence, offered one such moral compass in the waning years of Carolingian
government.
9 What can surprise us, immersed as we are in a market dominated social system that values
voluntary exchange so highly, is that medieval society viewed market behavior with deep
suspicion, whereas coercion – at least when nominally checked by integration and custom – was
seen as quite acceptable and normal. One example can be found in the medieval reluctance to
rely on tolls for financing the building and (especially) the maintenance and repair of bridges.
The imposition of tolls was denounced as pure rent-seeking, mimicking the practices of the
original robber barons; and therefore it was a practice hedged around with all sorts of exemptions
for local people, pilgrims, and others. Strange as it will seem to the modern perspective, when
tolls were levied, they typically applied both to those crossing the bridge and to vessels passing
under it, suggesting that the charge resulted from the opportunity presented by a bottleneck
rather than from the need to pay for the infrastructure inherent in the bridge itself. As we have
noted already, that aspect was seen as a pious work, protective of life by making a river crossing
less dangerous, and protective of the soul by the establishment of chapels, shrines and hospices
on the newly stronger stone bridges10. But it was not an investment per se in the transport sector
as we so commonly assume today. That the building of more durable bridges yielded in fact
powerful economic spillover effects for improved transport does not alter the fact that the
motivation to build found a different origin than the one we are likely to ascribe when looking
backwards. Medieval bridges then, like churches, were located squarely in the social sector.
Our object in the present paper is to call attention to this social enterprise, and the problems
associated with investment in it, in an age when neither state nor market-based enterprise were
nearly as well established as they are today. Medieval Europe had no great firms or large state
administrations. Even the centerpiece of social enterprise, the Church, was comparatively
10
For a full discussion of the religious building sited on bridges, see in particular Boyer, Medieval (1976). 10 fragmented. As an ideological entity it was monolithic enough, but all of its practical operations
were carried out by a strongly decentralized network of unequal, if not in fact competitive, parts.
We are especially intrigued by the capacity of such a society to make what appear in retrospect
to have been significant and very long-term investments in one form of social overhead capital,
religious building. We will focus on the financing and construction of cathedrals (and other
major churches) in the then-new Gothic style, chiefly from the 12th to the 14th century in and
around the Paris Basin and in Angevin England. There were of course important precursors to
this movement, and many, indeed most, Gothic cathedrals were not ‘completed’ until well after
1400. However, this place and moment in time captures one of the most intensive religious
building episodes in western history, the fruits of which are still in wide evidence today. For
these reasons a careful study of what we might call ‘the Gothic moment’ seems to offer a
compelling entrée into a better understanding of the social enterprise function at work. (Note,
however, that our purpose here is not to assess the economic impact of church construction, a
topic that has spawned a literature of its own, most notably along crude Keynesian lines11.)
Many stone bridges, sharing materials and techniques (most importantly the so-called ‘broken’
arch) with church design and construction also date from this period.
2.
The Medieval Building Milieu
The fluid, indeed contentious and contested, interplay between threat, exchange, and integration
is well illustrated in a remarkable (for scale, magnificence, and durability) episode of investment
in social capital, namely the building boom of Gothic church construction in North-western
Europe peaking in the 12th and 13th centuries. As already noted, these buildings represented a
11
Owen, ‘Economic’ (1989) recapitulates and extends an exchange in Explorations in Entrepreneurial History involving H. Thomas Johnson and B. W. E. Alford & M. Q. Smith in 1967 and 1969. 11 sizable footprint on the built landscape, and by extension, a formidable claimant on available
resources. How those resources were amassed, by whom and from what sources, and to what
end, are all questions that bear directly on our quest to better understand social spending.12
In the Middle Ages the social sector was more or less coterminous with the Church. Although
historians have demonstrated that commerce and towns never disappeared entirely in Europe
after the fall of Rome, it is nonetheless the case that on the civil side the dominant social
formation in the later first millennium was the manor: ideally autarkic, and nearly so in many
places, agriculture-based, and with limited production of processed and manufactures goods,
such as bread, cheese, and beer or wine, as well as cloth and implements. A loose hierarchy of
kings and counts linked local lords to a larger realm by ties of feudal allegiance, but the manorial
lords exercised near-absolute rule over their fief, in exchange, presumably, for protecting the
peasants, free or unfree, thereabouts. The Church was also structured as a hierarchy, with the
bishops answerable to Rome in point of rule, but in practice more often to near-by kings or to no
one. Hence the real strength and staying power of the early medieval church resided in
monasteries, many of which were sited outside the urban space (such as it was) and thus formed
a counterpoint to the bishop’s premises within.
12
This is not, of course, an isolated example of such a building boom. A similar episode of active social enterprise and investment, namely the building of large (mostly Roman Catholic) parish churches took place in industrial areas of the United States, notably during the period of rapid immigration and industrial growth, 1875-­‐1920. If one considers the number, size, and quality of these churches, and the economic situation of their parishioners, almost uniformly low-­‐income ethnic workers with large families, one cannot help but wonder how this work was financed. Unfortunately the answers are not easy to find. Available sources, including parish histories, seldom go beyond the kind of pious generalities that are also common in accounts of medieval building: it was all accomplished through fervor and sacrifice by the faithful. Even back-­‐of-­‐the-­‐envelope calculations cast doubt on this story, the more so as these parishes and dioceses concurrently invested in schools, hospitals, orphanages, and th
other institutions. The present paper does not tackle this 19 c. episode, even though the current spate of church closings makes this a propitious time to recall the remarkable feat of collective investment they embodied. 12 Monasteries were also the primary locus of social spending at the close of the first millennium,
offering hospitality, poor relief, medical care, and education to the extent these services were
available at all outside of the much diminished urban nodes of the late antique world. Monastic
scriptoria served as a semi-secure repository for the learning of the past, and in the course of time
would be the source of its renewed dissemination. The growth of monastic foundations
following the establishment of the Rule of St. Benedict in the middle of the 6th century had been
phenomenal in the centuries leading up to 1100. By that year England and France together could
boast of 5,577 monasteries, having increased their number by 121% just over the preceding
century. In the 12th century this rate of growth had tapered off to a more modest 69% and after
1200 the establishment of new foundations had more or less stopped, to be followed by the small
absolute losses of the 14th century. There can be little doubt that the urban building boom of the
High Middle Ages (of which cathedrals and bridges were both part) mirrored the gradual
diminishment of monastic influence.13
More generally, beginning sometime around 1000 CE, but more strongly in the 12th century, with
invasions from outside pretty much in the past, the revival of commerce and towns began to
change the relative importance of the rural (manor and monastery) versus the urban (commerce
and parish/episcopacy) spheres in western Europe.14 Kings very gradually gained more
meaningful authority over their nominally vassal nobles, while bishops exercised religious and
sometimes temporal authority more intensively.15 The relative peace and security engendered by
these socio-political changes promoted (or at least coincided with) a nexus of favorable
13
Buringh and van Zanden, ‘Charting’ (2009), 427. Scott, Gothic (2003), Chapter 4, reprising arguments made by Georges Duby. 15
th
Scott ascribes the pioneering role of the Paris Basin in the Gothic enterprise (12 century) to the strengthening of the Capetian monarchy, (2003), 13. However, this should not be taken to suggest that the monarchy directly financed much of the construction, as they did not. 14
13 economic phenomena. Most noticeably there was an increasingly dense urbanization,
particularly in the favored areas of northwestern France and the Southern Low Countries
(reaching the unprecedented peak of 35% urban dwellers in Flanders by around 1300). This
density of settlement was sustainable on account of, and simultaneously contributed to, a great
expansion in the capacity of regional agriculture via the intensification of mostly traditionally
available farming practices.16 The new towns in turn became centers of highly specialized
industrial production, most especially of textiles. Bruges had its lace, Arras its tapestries, and
Gent its fine woolens, to name just the most famous. The Fairs of Champagne (in their prime
from the 1120s until the 1280s) facilitated the export of those textiles southwards in exchange for
the myriad goods of the east that were transshipped via Italy as well as those goods produced in
Europe south of the Alps. The Fairs also promoted the development of new business practices
and instruments of credit, most critically the Bill of Exchange. Finally, the interplay between all
of these factors gave rise to a number of impressive technological innovations, most importantly
wind-mills for land drainage, water-mills for grinding grain and fulling cloth, the spinning wheel
to outpace the spindle by an estimated factor of at least seven, and the bundle of new
construction techniques we have come to call Gothic.
It was in this fecund context that the cathedral, or bishop’s church, acquired both greater
importance and access to substantially greater resources. During this time, many sees witnessed
the building of two (or more) cathedrals successively, first in the Roman (Romanesque) and then
in the new or Gothic style. It was the rare bishopric that still had a Carolingian (8th or 9th c.)
basilica to tear down to make way directly for the Gothic, although Laon and Cologne offer two
16
Campbell, “Economic Rent” (1997). Historians have noted further that despite the rapid rise in the urban population of Flanders in the High Middle Ages, it suffered only one significant famine in the whole period. That was the disastrous period from 1315-­‐17 when all of Western Europe was engulfed in a weather-­‐induced agricultural crisis of millennial proportions. 14 prominent examples.17 In any event, it is important to remember that the Gothic cathedrals were
for the most part reconstructions of existing structures, sometimes already fairly large
themselves. To be sure, reconstruction was often mandated by damage from fires (or collapse)
in this pre-Franklin age.18 Fires and collapse were also among a number of factors, including
often enough social conflict and resentment of the Bishop’s growing authority, responsible for
slow progress or even extended cessations in construction.
Nor were cathedrals the only component of the High Medieval building boom, or the only
structures whose construction generated conflict between various interested parties. The
building and repair of bridges also represented a major investment in infrastructure over the
whole of our period. Although in England the road network and its bridges were in place by the
Norman Conquest, investment continued at a remarkably high level thereafter. This was due
both to the upgrading of bridges from wood to stone from the 11th century onward and to
ongoing maintenance, repair and rebuilding. Traffic on the surface and water against the piers
(most especially flood waters) presumably were responsible for the frequent need to repair or
rebuild. Compared to churches, the initial cost may have been modest but ongoing costs were
proportionately higher.
The technology, skills, and materials used to build and repair stone bridges were quite similar to
those used for churches, from wooden scaffolds to the use of ‘free’ stone (high quality for
cutting) and design. Moreover, the people involved were often the same, with both kinds of
17
Wilson, Gothic (1990), 54. A list of even just the most prominent cathedral projects precipitated by fire (or multiple fires) is already quite long: Amiens – 1188 and 1218; Auxerre – 1188 and 1210; Beauvais – 1188 and 1225; Canterbury – 1067 and 1174; Chartres – 1031, 1134, 1188 and 1194; Chichster – 1114; Evreux – 1119; Glouchester – 1102; Laon – 1112; Le Mans – 1134; Lincoln – 1141; Lisieux – 1136; Paris – 1235-­‐40; Provins – 1188; Regensburg – 1273; Reims – 1210; Rochester – 1138 and 1177; Rouen – 1200; Strasbourg – 1176; Tours – 1188; and Troyes – 1188. The astute reader will notice that in the drought afflicted year of 1188 there were fires in multiple cities, a fact which Murray also attributes to suspicion of opportunistic arson, Murray, Beauvais (1989), 33. 18
15 projects sharing master masons and managerial organizers. It is claimed for example, that a
single individual remodeled the nave of Canterbury Cathedral and designed the bridge at
neighboring Rochester in the 14th century.19 Bishops also sponsored both types of construction
as at Durham and Salisbury, as well as famously Bishop Maurice de Sully of Paris who is
credited not only with beginning the great Gothic remodeling of Notre-Dame in 1175, but with
the simultaneous construction of two bridges over the Marne and the Seine respectively.20
3.
The Characteristics of Church Building
What then is already known about the parameters under which the Gothic building boom took
shape? What might we learn from this particular episode about the more general capacity of a
society to elicit support for significant and far-reaching investment outlays via the social sector?
Our study of the literature on the construction and financing of cathedrals in the medieval West
leads us to several conclusions, though they must sometimes remain speculative (as well as
occasionally counter-intuitive, not to say iconoclastic).
To begin with, it must be emphasized that the cathedral was planned and built as a fitting frame
for the ritual and display that formed the core of religious practice, including as sites of
pilgrimage where appropriate relics were to be found. The building was not itself of first
importance; that is, it was not the ‘work of art’ we understand it to be today. The ritual of the
cathedral belonged primarily to the bishop in conjunction with the canons. The people, nobles
and commoners alike, also participated in ritual display, but theirs was more likely to be centered
around a parish church or a monastic endowment, and eventually in chapels located around the
19
Harrison, Bridges (2004), 130. Boyer, Medieval (1976), 62. 20
16 periphery of the bishop’s cathedral. This separation was explicitly marked in the cathedral itself
by the placement of near-solid choir screens separating the congregation in the nave from the
clergy at the altar. These choir screens were elaborately decorated, and often the more so on the
side that would never be visible to the lay public.
The structure of the cathedral, though highly variable in its details, was based on a number of
functional principles. The cathedral was really two churches: one for the people in the nave, the
side aisles, and sometimes the transept and the ambulatory around the choir; and one for the
clergy centering on the choir and the altar, and demarcated by screens and/or steps. In this way
the cathedral joined the holy and the secular city, but without mingling them. The main
functional advantage of the Gothic style over the Romanesque, aside from the ability to add
height and volume, was to allow more light on the splendor of the ritual and decoration that
marked the clergy and their church.
The actual construction of cathedrals was overwhelmingly carried out by people paid to do so,
notably by itinerant skilled craftsmen working in groups under the direction of a master mason.
A few of these masons are known by name, and many were likely associated with particular
stone quarries. The elite component of this workforce was definitely comprised of the men who
actually worked the stone. Carpenters and blacksmiths, not to mention haulers, carters, and
numerous low skilled or even unskilled laborers could be drawn from the local area.21 A number
of critical points follow from these observations. First, successive building sites could learn
from the experience (and most especially the difficulties and failures) of other sites, since what
we might call the engineering decisions were made by men who traveled from one project to the
next. Competition between projects along the lines of scale and scope was easily facilitated by
21
Prak,‘Mega-­‐structures’ (2011), 387. 17 this mobility as well. Third, any technological spillovers from large-scale masonry construction
into other knowledge domains could be widely diffused with relative ease, again because of the
geographic reach of the knowledge embodied in the masons themselves as human capital.
Finally, agricultural labor rhythms did not have to be overly disrupted by even major building
campaigns with high demand for labor because local men could easily shift back and forth
between a building site and their fields. For example, at Westminster Abbey in 1253, a year for
which we have unusually detailed records for the fabric, the payroll was halved during the month
of September as compared to the summer months that preceded it. Labor had to be released for
the taking in of the harvest.22
Just as labor could move between occupations and projects, building a cathedral, even in those
periods when there was real impetus behind the work, was never the sole or even the primary
concern of the bishops or other clerical promoters. Cathedral construction competed with
building other parts of the ‘holy city’ next to it (the Bishop’s palace, cloister, chapter house,
etc.), with building churches and monasteries elsewhere in the diocese, with other municipal
projects (bridges, towers and walls), and with the worldly struggles of bishops, chapters, and
monasteries among themselves, or against kings, nobles, and communes, for power and
advantage. The capacity to build was also impacted by major outside distractions, such as wars,
crusades, and outbreaks of epidemic disease.
All of these enterprises required resources and funding was always problematic, often to the
point of bringing work to a halt for either shorter or longer periods. In the worst cases, such
cessations of building activity might extend even to centuries. Many resources that might have
gone toward the building were instead devoted to ornamentation and to ritual, such as elaborate
22
Prak, ‘Mega-­‐structures’ (2011), 386. 18 coronations, funerals and processions, or to the ongoing commemoration of the dead in chapels
within the structure. Work at Reims was slowed on more than one occasion by the great expense
of crowning a new king, and the cathedral at York was severely compromised by the payments
required by Rome on the accession of each new Archbishop, a burden magnified by the conflict
with the Archdiocese of Canterbury over primacy in England.23 On the other hand, the idea has
been put forward that lavish church ornamentation and the acquisition of particularly efficacious,
and therefore rare, saint’s relics tended to attract more donations.24
The secular power and property of churchmen, including bishops, the cathedral chapter, and
individual canons had a mixed impact on the process. On the one hand, lordship provided
revenue in the form of rents, feudal dues, tithes, etc. that could fund construction; on the other, it
often pitted the clerics against the local population and involved the various actors within the
church in potentially costly disputes and conflicts not least among themselves. Similarly, the rise
of towns greatly increased the available resources for building but led to endless conflicts over
lordship (with its attendant fiscal returns), involving both who would rule and whether towns and
townspeople might free themselves of the constraints imposed by feudal institutions. On this
showing, one reason for the chronic financial difficulties is that, though an urban institution,
cathedrals were funded within an agrarian system in which both wealth and social rank depended
on control over land and those who worked it. By the 13th century, this system, which did not
grant full legitimacy to commerce, mobile capital, or rank based on wealth (rather than the other
way around), was already moving toward obsolescence.
4.
Funding
23
Clark, Medieval (2006), 99; and Krauss, Gold (1979), 135. Lopez, ‘Economie’ (1952), 438, citing C. R. Cheney. 24
19 We come, then, to the issue of funding itself. Is it possible to give a meaningful sense of the
sums involved? It is difficult, at any rate, if only because of the infinite complexity of monetary
units. The basic money of account was straightforward enough: the old Roman system of £, s, d
or pounds (livres), shillings (sous) and pence or deniers that survived in Britain until 1971. But
various regions had their own version of the pound or livre, as well as florins, marks, and other
units. English money was strong, the livre tournois was worth less than the livre parisis, and so
forth. Furthermore, debasement meant that actual coins varied even more in value. Cutting
though all this, what can we say by way of orders of magnitude. The daily wages of workers on
cathedral sites have been recorded in at least some cases. They appear to have ranged from well
less than 1 sou for laborers and lowly assistants, to 2 sous for skilled craftsmen, it being
understood that workers were paid only for days actually worked. Since we have seen that a
work year was hardly more than 150-200 days, this means that a site could be kept active (with
100 workers) for about £ 1,000 per year for the cost of labor. To this, a lower bound, must be
added the cost of materials, so that one can estimate the amount required to make progress at
about £ 1,500 to 2,000 per year. For a finished cathedral, of course, large sums would also be
spent on decoration and ritual objects. If it required 40-50 years of actual work to build a
cathedral, one can very roughly estimate the total cost at something over £ 100,000 not including
more than minimal decoration25.
While this was in contemporary terms a very large amount of money, it may be compared to the
£ 500,000 – 1,000,000 that were gathered up by kings embarking on crusades in the heyday of
that effort, the latter being the amount spent by St. Louis (IX) on his first crusade in the middle
25
Few scholars are as foolhardy as we are in giving total figures, if only because most cathedrals were not actually th
finished. See Scott, Gothic (2003), 35-­‐36; and GImpel, Cathedral (1983), 37. For a slightly later period (14 and th
15 centuries) Wim Vroom has in fact found more detailed records that permit fuller quantification, Vroom, Financing (2010). Also recall the point supra that magnificence tended to attract donations. 20 of the 13th c.26 It also compares favorably with the staggering sum of £ 250,000 promised (and
apparently mostly paid) to Edward III of England in the 1360s for the ransom of King John of
France and a few other notables. Likewise there were any number of other preposterous ransoms
resulting from the staged clashes of the nobility during the One Hundred Years War, in which
the object was more often to capture than to kill.27 (See Figure 2 for a representation of this
differential spending requirement.) In the medieval as in today’s world, public or social finance
shifts to a higher gear when war is involved. For example, in the 1290’s when Edward I of
England was faced with war on three fronts (France, Wales and Scotland), he resorted to
extraordinarily high levels of taxation on the clergy and laity alike. In 1294 he demanded a full
half of all clerical incomes, and a further tenth in the two subsequent years. Not surprisingly
perhaps, the Priory of Canterbury, despite being one of the richest in all England, built no new
barns, granges, mills or chapels during these lean years, among the many economies they were
forced to endure on account of Edward’s wars.28
Yet even if we do not take war as the relevant metric by which to judge the expense of building a
cathedral, we find that the cost of doing so was well within the realm of the possible as compared
to other large projects of the period, many of which we would see as substantially more wasteful
than building a monument still standing nearly a millennium later. For example, Clark cites the
expense shouldered by the commune of Reims for two royal coronations in rapid succession
(Louis VIII in 1223 and his twelve year old son Louis IX in 1226). Although the ceremony for
Louis IX was described by contemporaries as only a ‘modest’ one, the combined total still came
to 9,053 Parisian pounds, just shy of the 10,000 pound expenditure on the Gothic reconstruction
26
Krauss, Gold (1979), 7 and 287. Postan, ‘Costs’ (1964), 45-­‐47. 28
Mate, ‘Impact’ (1982), 762 and 764. 27
21 of the cathedral during the first decade of work following the fire of 1210.29 More modest
building projects could be even more easily (relatively speaking anyway) carved out of the
ordinary expenses of a religious establishment. When John of Cella became the new abbot of the
powerful monastery of St. Alban’s in Hertfordshire he began what was to be a nearly centurylong project of renovation and rebuilding of all the major buildings of the Abbey, including the
church. He began with a ground-up renovation to the monk’s dormitories and the refectory
somewhere around the year 1200, at which point Matthew of Paris’ Chronicle tells us that the
chapter gave up its daily wine ration for fifteen years to pay for it. The Abbot’s timing was poor
though as this period also witnessed the bitter conflict between King John and the church over
clerical elections (at its most intense between 1208 and 1213), followed immediately by his
conflict with the barons which resulted in the Magna Carta in 1215. Both of these conflicts cost
clerical entities dearly, in direct costs as well as in lost manorial revenue.30 Nevertheless, the
ambitious building campaign at St. Alban’s proceeded, even picking up steam with the election
of the new Abbot William of Trumpington in 1214.
All of this suggests that a more useful way of thinking about the cost of cathedral building is in
terms of forgone opportunities within the context of the contemporary economy. In this regard, a
most interesting study has been completed by Bernard Bachrach estimating the opportunity cost
of building a fortified masonry tower in the Angevin holdings of Count Fulk Nerra at the close of
the 10th century. Using a method similar to that employed by James for the cathedral at Chartres,
Bachrach estimates that building the tower required the labor efforts of approximately 140
construction workers for a period of two years at 300 days of work per year. To feed these
construction workers required the wheat surplus (that is above maintenance and reproduction
29
Clark, Medieval (2006), 99. Frisch, Gothic Art (1987), 39-­‐40. 30
22 requirements) ‘produced by slightly more than 460 agricultural workers from more than 2,700
hectares of average arable.’31 If we make allowance for the dependents of the construction
laborers as well, it is not unreasonable to estimate that between 4 and 5 agricultural workers were
needed to sustain each worker. This was indeed a formidable outlay for an agricultural economy
that in lean years might experience seed yield ratios of as low as 2:1. This exercise leaves no
doubt about the formidable expense of building in stone.
However, Bachrach goes on to point out that the requirement to sustain a mounted warrior and
his horse with wheat-equivalent calories amounted to the surplus of almost twelve agricultural
workers. Furthermore, this amount would be required every year and for every knight, not just
for the total workforce occupied for the few years that the fortified tower was under construction
(Ibid). The cost of building may have been formidable, but the cost of men and horses at arms
was nevertheless much higher. When we combine this finding with other research done by
architectural historians documenting the strong technical connections between military
architecture and cathedral building in the Middle Ages, it is reasonable to suggest that the effort
to sustain monumental ecclesiastical building is best understood within the larger context of even
more prohibitive military expenditures. In one rather explicit example, the very distinctive
parapet design on the west façade of the Abbey Church at St. Denis was included ‘both for the
beauty of the church and, should circumstances require it, for practical purposes.’32 But the more
typical experience would have been less obvious or direct. In a society deeply attuned to the
political, or even coercive, uses of pageantry, the urban structures of the Bishop could be as
important to the maintenance of civil integrity as expenditures of a more clearly secular nature.
31
Bachrach, ‘Cost’ (1984), 53. Abbot Suger as quoted in Gardner, ‘Influence’ (1984), 109 and 113. 32
23 Nonetheless, even if Gothic construction was not excessively expensive within the context of
other noble expenditures, all scholars agree that shortages of funds (as well as other priorities)
regularly plagued the building of cathedrals, often stopping work for extended periods. It
follows that fundraising was a constant preoccupation of those responsible, either bishop or
chapter. What we know of that process has a curiously modern ring, mutatis mutandis. Basic to
launching the effort were the contributions of the upper clergy, whose temporal wealth was not
infrequently considerable. Much of it came from feudal lordships and the right to levy a variety
of taxes, rents, and dues. Since these might be only loosely specified, with a mix of documents,
customs, re-interpretations, and farming (in the fiscal sense) arrangements, there was always
room to ramp up the pressure if funds were needed. Certainly the church had by far the greatest
capacity for record-keeping of all other entities whether individual or corporate, so they were
hugely advantaged in any legal dispute that might arise over land rights or fiscal obligations of
any kind. Jordan notes the particular advantage enjoyed by the Abbey of St. Denis, for example,
arising out of its capacity for archiving and subsequent retrieval of legal documents
substantiating land transfers and gifts, the proceeds from which could be dedicated to the great
building project they commenced in the 1130s.33
The extent of involvement by the population of the town or city is a much-disputed subject, and
there is no question but that the situation differed greatly from place to place. To speak of the
urban population in this context is to speak of the commoners, and, where self-government
developed, of the commune. (Since the Church and clergy owned or were lords of considerable
estates, the peasants also contributed a lot. However, their share was in the main coerced rather
than integrative.) Taxes, including the taille, which became notorious in ancien regime France,
33
Jordan, Tale (2009), 66-­‐67. 24 and allow us in retrospect to know something about what people earned, also affected urban
workers and artisans. As for merchants, we know that the Church was able to coax many
donations out of them by deprecating commerce as inherently suspect and denouncing interestbearing credit as usury. There was a strong element of threat in this, the more so as the Church
had an effective monopoly on access to salvation. Jews, whose faith did not preclude lending at
interest, were regularly tapped for loans, and at not infrequent intervals simply expropriated or
worse. For example, the very long reign of Henry III of England was distinguishable not only
for its phenomenal building program (£113,000 spent on castles and houses and an additional £50,000 on Westminster Abbey), but also for its repeated fiscal crises in the face of an ascendant
and often uncooperative barony, crises that led Henry to seek frequent recourse to Jewish
money.34 The combination of an ambitious architectural competition with Louis IX’s France and
an extravagant devotion to the cult of Edward the Confessor, at Westminster Abbey in particular,
likewise ensured that those Jewish lenders would be susceptible to arbitrary renegotiations.
This example notwithstanding however, the local nobility and the more distant kings and dukes
apparently participated more rarely than one might think in cathedral construction, lending some
force to the argument that building cathedrals forms part of the rise of towns and states, and lies
outside the overwhelmingly rural manorial/monastic system that had hitherto prevailed. We
have already discussed the role of the urban commoners, occasionally very invested in ‘their’
cathedral but more often at daggers drawn with an episcopate they saw as haughty and
grasping.35 What we know is that bishops were often forced to engage in regular fundraising
34
Jordan, Tale (2009), 98. The burghers of Lyon were particularly exorcised when the archbishop and the chapter, the latter having gone into debt to lobby the pope against the former, both claimed the right of justice over the city. The resulting th
th
upheavals in the late 13 and early 14 century led to churches being damaged rather than built. Krauss, Gold (1979), 93-­‐96. 35
25 campaigns that in fact resembled those undertaken today by nonprofit organizations, especially
to finance a major capital project. And like their modern counterparts, medieval bishops also
had ‘two principal instruments for encouraging consumers to reveal their demands,’ to borrow
the language employed by Weisbrod to explain the capacity of nonprofits to ‘obtain information
on individuals’ willingness to pay even when they cannot explicitly ‘compel payment.’36
Bishops could employ both the ‘stick’ of social pressure as well as the ‘carrot’ of subsidies. The
collection of contributions to a building campaign was almost always highly visible, making
even very small donations an object of public knowledge. Likewise, seed money from within the
Church hierarchy itself served to increase the amount of output that donors could enjoy above
and beyond the value of their own donations, helping to lessen the impact of free-rider problems.
Indeed, the initial impulse for a new church often came from donations by a few wealthy people,
whether clerics or lay people, whom Jean Gimpel compares to the ultra-rich philanthropists of
the American gilded Age, and one might add today’s billionaires from hi-tech and other fields37.
But in all cases, the generosity of the few could not finish the job, and more systematic efforts
aimed at a wider base were required. In the medieval case, clergy, and/or paid specialists were
sent around to solicit funds, often accompanied by holy relics to draw crowds and put them in a
giving mood. Local parish priests were instructed to exhort their flock to donate to the bishop’s
campaign, even though their own church might be badly in need of funds, and to push charitable
giving in the confessional. These efforts also drew on an analog of charitable tax deductions in
our time, the grant of papal indulgences. The subject of indulgences is fraught, Martin Luther
having been neither the first nor the last to rail against their ‘sale.’ Simply put, indulgences were
36
Weisbrod, Nonprofit (1988), 27-­‐28. In today’s capital campaigns, the initial or quiet phase consists of trying to raise up to one third of the target amount from a relatively small number of affluent supporters. Gimpel, Cathedral (1983), 27. 37
26 supposed to grant remission from the temporal penance (keeping ‘lean’ a whole year, for
example) imposed by a confessor when absolving a penitent from sin38. They could in particular
be awarded for ‘good works,’ in principle as recognition for demonstrating a contrite spirit and
therefore well within the ‘integrative principle’ in Boulding’s social triangle. But since
donations to the Church fell within the purview of good works, the exchange principle was
surely not far away. The Church obviously recognized the potential for abuse here and
designated trafficking in spiritual goods as simony, a grave sin and proof that it must have
happened.
More surprising from the modern point of view, the construction (and maintenance) of medieval
bridges also falls within the purview of the ‘integrative’ principle because they were understood
first and foremost by men of the High Middle Ages as ‘pious works,’ as surely as any church or
hospital. The collapse of central authority after the Carolingian era left bridge building as not
just a local responsibility (out of sheer necessity), but as an active component of caring for the
needy as well. Bridges were understood to save the poor from the deadly ravages of the
inevitable water crossing, more so than as a convenience for the movement of armies, merchants,
or their wares. In northern France, lords (lay and ecclesiastical) were the main promoters of
building projects, whereas in the South the ‘Peace of God’ movement and its assemblies were
key. Logically enough then, bridges were financed by a fabric, just as were their church
counterparts. Indeed, Boyer argues that the ‘same energy that built the cathedrals’ was at work
for bridge construction.39 Likewise when the flow of funds dried up, there was no hesitation to
resort to the sale of indulgences. By the 13th century, the competition from other pious
38
th
Rouen cathedral has a tower, dating from the 15 century, called the Butter Tower, as it was supposedly paid for with the proceeds of permission to skip the more severe restrictions for Lent, Krauss, Gold (1979), 214. 39
Boyer, Medieval (1976), 35-­‐36. 27 institutions (including hospitals) had become strong. Only gradually after the 12th century did
towns begin to displace lay and clerical lords as bridge builders, relying increasingly on tolls to
support their projects, and ultimately on taxes in the public goods model that we find so familiar
today.
5.
Social Overhead Capital
To return to our starting point, what was the role of the cathedral and should it qualify as social
overhead capital as bridges undoubtedly do in the modern understanding? There is no question
that cathedrals proclaimed the power and glory of a particular city and diocese, of its bishop, its
resident saints, and of the Church and its God. Given the role of the Church, this can be seen as
proclaiming the civilization of Christian Europe, or as defending the primacy of the Church
against competing forces such as kings and nations, or even vis-a-vis urban commerce and
manufactures. On a more day-to-day level, the cathedral enabled and symbolized the dual role
of the clergy, to be in the world and yet apart from it too. It served as a gathering place,
especially on feast days and other great occasions. The largest cathedrals could hold most of the
population of a moderate size town (up to 10 000)40. As Ball reminds us, ‘when a service was
not in progress, [the people] would meet their friends here, bring in their dogs and their hawks,
arrange trysts, eat snacks, etc. The poor might even bed down for the night in the gloomy
recesses. Stalls clung like limpets to the walls of the building. At Strasbourg, the mayor held
office in his pew in the cathedral, meeting burghers there to conduct business. Wine merchants,
perhaps employed by the chapter itself, even sold their wares from the nave of Chartres – selling
inside the church, they were exempt from the taxes imposed by the count of Blois and
40
Gimpel, Cathedral (1979), 7. One of us (PMH) has been in Chartres cathedral with 6 000 others during the annual student pilgrimage, pretty well filling the place with all chairs removed. 28 Chartres.’41 Cathedrals also drew visitors, in some cases large numbers of pilgrims (Santiago de
Compostela, Chartres, and Canterbury to name only the most famous). They might also be seats
of learning, but no more so than monasteries. This is perhaps not a lot of immediate return for
the enormous effort of building them. However, if one uses a zero rate of discount, appropriate
to unworldly matters, and reckons as a return their drawing power for tourists in the last two
centuries, the cost-benefit calculation changes.42
If the cathedrals only partly qualify as social overhead capital from an economic point of view,
what of the possibility that their construction was a drain on more productive uses of capital and
labor? Robert Lopez raised the point in a short and superficially modest article many years
ago.43 He pointed to towns that appear to have exhausted their substance in a disproportionately
magnificent cathedral, while other communities grew and prospered with less extravagant
churches. Among the former one may cite Beauvais, Salisbury, Bourges, and many more, while
the latter include most Italian city-states (but not Pisa) and Bruges. Of course, from Roman
times to ours, other forms of conspicuous investment (baths then and stadiums then and now)
have proved be to white elephants. Lopez is careful to point out that the major cities, from Paris
to Venice, could absorb the cost of a major cathedral with no loss of momentum. In the case of
both these cities, moreover, cathedral building benefited from plunder. Venice profited from the
crusades and Paris from the annexation of Normandy by the French Crown. We would add to
these another possibility, namely that the long duration of construction may simply have
41
Ball, Universe (2008), 66. A recent article in the New Yorker profiles an Italian producer of luxury goods who donates to, among other causes, restoring a monastery in a small Umbrian town. The abbot of the monastery is quoted as saying that ‘…monks take a long view of things, so if it takes fifty years to do it we’ll manage,’ Mead, ‘Prince’ (2010), 79. 43
Lopez, ‘Economie’ (1952). 42
29 outlasted a phase of prosperity of the city.44 Merchant towns tended typically to experience
temporary booms, perhaps again a working of Cardwell’s Law, or in keeping with the Network
System of competitive and fluid trade flows and shifting economic leadership among cities.45
Indeed, Herman van der Wee has suggested a very different way of thinking about the resource
demands of Gothic construction itself. Rather than viewing it as does Lopez as investment
forgone for more productive uses, he concentrates instead on the contribution made by Gothic to
a general increase in technical knowledge, understood as either practical or abstract or a
combination of both. He argues that ‘cathedral building concentrated resources in a sector where
the few potentialities of technological progress could be actualized in the most promising way.’46
He seems almost to suggest that even if the buildings were used for no good social purpose, the
very act of building them contributed in ways not available elsewhere in the economy of the
High Middle Ages to the development of human capital. A similar argument has been made by
the historian of science, David Turnbull, who argues that Gothic cathedrals were akin to
laboratories with geometry as the common language employed to transfer knowledge from one
place to another. Thus, they contributed to both ‘science and technology,’ and it is this
combination that ‘allows ad hoc progress to constitute real progress in collective practice.’47 Or
in Maarten Prak’s formulation, cathedral building allowed for something akin to ‘full-scale’
experimentation.48
44
A similar point is made by M. M. Postan in his assessment of the costs (or benefits as some have argued) to the English economy of the One Hundred Year’s War. He reminds us that we ‘must not ascribe to the war what was due to the hundred years,’ Postan, ‘Costs’ (1964), 53. 45
Amiens, for instance, enjoyed a lively trade in woad until their English customers declared a boycott and seized the stocks in 1295, Krauss, Gold (1979), 41.; and Hohenberg and Lees, Making (1995), 63-­‐64. 46
van der Wee, ‘Review’ (1984), 268. 47
Turnbull, ‘Ad Hoc’ (1993), 321 and 332. 48
Prak, ‘Mega-­‐structures’ (2011), 395. 30 And what of the donations that built the cathedrals? Where do they fit into Boulding’s social
triangle? On the face of it, the integrative principle should dominate. There is no doubt that
without faith (to say nothing of hope and charity) these impressive structures would not have
been built. But faith was reinforced with strong elements of threat or coercion as well, both from
the temporal power of the Church and its prelates and from their ability to punish on earth as
well as banish and damn. To be excommunicated, for example, was no laughing matter, though
bishops often overreached and tried to put whole communities outside the pale. Moreover, from
the 13th century on the Inquisition pursued those who were deemed not to hew to the official line.
Nowhere was this more true than in the Holy Office’s birthplace in Southwestern France during
the suppression of the Cathar heresy (the so-called Albigensian crusade of the 13th c.). As we
have seen, there was also a strong element of exchange involved, not only in the matter of
indulgences, but also in the purchase of chaplaincies and other ways of honoring the dead
(funeral processions, burial in a sanctuary, masses in memoriam, commemorative windows, etc.).
Yet the cathedrals themselves remain, and the most skeptical among us can hardly fail to be
moved in their presence. Perhaps, like sausages, legislation, and statistics, it is tempting to enjoy
cathedrals without too close concern for just how the material means to erect them were
gathered. Yet asking the question is not only illuminating historically, but also sheds light on
larger questions about resource allocation and the forces that govern social spending. At any
rate, compared to medieval people’s alternative means of celebrating and propagating the true
faith, such as crusades and campaigns against deviant thought, or in contrast to the multitude of
destructive behaviors pursued by the nobility to concentrate and display their power, cathedrals
regain, and retain, their luster.
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34 Figure 1
Threat B A Exchange Integration The Social Triangle (after Boulding, 1973)
35