Villard de Honnecourt

 Much of what we know about medieval building techniques is due to the so-called sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt.  We know very little about Villard himself, other than his name, and the fact that he lived in northern France in the thirteenth century.  But his sketchbook (perhaps better called a "portfolio"), is packed full of drawings of details of the buildings going up around him.  It also includes images of people, animals, siege engines (catapults and trebuchets) and an idea for a perpetual motion machine.

The image above shows a detailed rendering of a clock tower.

The portfolio is divided into several sections, sculpture, architectural features, masonry, and so on.  However, it is clear that some pages that were originally part of it are missing.  Architectural historians now think that the missing section was on carpentry.  Nonetheless, the parts that we do have include so much detail on how pieces of wood can be used and how they are attached together that it seems likely that Villard himself was primarily a carpenter.

The portfolio is a great boon to historians of medieval architecture, because we basically now have 800 year old buildings that have had 800 years of rebuilding and "improvement," so that it's almost an archeological exercise to figure out all the original details.  But Villard gave us, for example, the layout/floor plan of Cambrai cathedral while it was still being built, so we know exactly what the original architect intended.

Modern builders can also learn thirteenth-century techniques from the portfolio.  There are a number of sketches of Reims cathedral, which was brand new at the time.  The detailed drawings would have been a boon to the builders restoring the cathedral after it was gutted during World War I.

Other aspects of the portfolio pique our interest for different reasons.  He included a drawing of a lion (with a sketch of a porcupine off to the side).

In the caption Villard notes that he has drawn the lion "from life."  Okay, we ask, where did someone hanging out in northern France see a lion?  One has to assume it was in a cage, or Villard, standing right in front of it with his parchment and pen, wouldn't have been able to do a nice drawing.  Most likely this lion had been captured in Africa (maybe as a cub?) and sent along the trade routes until it ended up with some rich person, who kept it as a curiosity.  There were plenty of heraldic lions in the Middle Ages, used as signs of boldness and strength, but they didn't look as concerned as this lion seems to (and I'm not at all sure lions have eyebrows).

And let's not forget his perpetual motion machine, where a series of mallets would theoretically keep a wheel turning indefinitely once it was given a push.  (In fact it would not have worked in the thirteenth century any better than it would now.)

The portfolio is available in facsimile with commentary by Carl F. Barnes, The Portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt (Ashgate, 2009).

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval art and architecture, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Lost documents

 We have now only a tiny fraction of the documents that existed during the Middle Ages.  Many of those losses took place during the medieval centuries, due to fires, mice (that will chew parchment), the disintegration of papyrus, the fading of ink so that even though the parchment survives the document becomes illegible, raids from Vikings or Muslim pirates, a gap in record preservation if a monastery lost its regularity for a while, or downright carelessness.

Early in the Middle Ages, up until the early eighth century, some cities still had municipal archives, in which all sorts of documents would be stored.  But these archives disappeared with the disappearance of notaries and, in probably most cases, the disintegration of the fragile papyrus on which most records would have been written.  Papyrus stopped reaching the West after the rise of Islam in the seventh century cut Europe off from Egypt, and it took a while to decide that parchment would do (especially since making it from sheep skin was a prolonged and expensive process).

In the next few centuries documents were rare.  Monasteries that were refounded in the ninth century, after the raids and the indifference (or even hostility) of the early Carolingians toward monasteries, to say nothing of the many occasions where a powerful layman took over a monastery, found they had very few documents.  They would assemble the best records they had, ask people with long memories what they might have heard, and ask kings or bishops to issue charters confirming everything that the monasteries had earlier acquired.

Most of the time, as near as we can tell, these lists of "property we used to have though the documents are lost" was fairly accurate, but of course it also provided an opportunity for creative embellishment.  Many monasteries, for example, claimed Clovis as their founder (though he actually founded zero monasteries) and had long lists of the property he had donated.  Sometimes the creativity was more plausible, and the monks really had owned the property, though perhaps it was someone less elevated than a king who had given it to them.

Kings and bishops liked to confirm monks in their property.  It showed their authority, as chief giver and determiner of who owned what.  Modern editions of monastic records will often include mentions of "lost charters," a summary of a donation or confirmation made, say, by the Merovingian King Childeric, because an authentic document of Emperor Louis the Pious said he was confirming this earlier grant.  This drives documentary historians crazy, because we have no idea if the "King Childeric" document ever really existed, yet there it is, with page number in the modern edition, document number, a date, and a summary as a "lost charter."

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the numbers of documents greatly increased.  Cartularies, collections of documents copied into a single volume, began to be produced in large numbers.  (A thirteenth-century cartulary from Auxerre is shown below.)

 

Once a cartulary had been produced, the big, messy pile of documents in the archives was much less significant.  Archivists worried less about preserving individual charters when they'd been organized and copied into a cartulary.

The messiness really was a problem.  One sad cartulary entry refers to a lost document that had been seen within living memory.  The scribe said he'd looked for it for over a year and couldn't find it, so although he could summarize it in a sentence or two, he couldn't copy it.

Then there were wars.  The wars of religion on the Continent in the sixteenth century burned many documents. In England, the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII at the same time led to documents just being tossed, as were the relics of saints.  The French Revolution of 1789, when France went officially atheistic for a while, led to the wholesale destruction and loss of monasteries and their archives.

One noted nineteenth-century French medievalist got his start when his family acquired a former monastery, complete with a pile of old documents.  Mom cut up the parchment to use to seal her jam jars, but the future medievalist started saving out documents from the pile and studying them.

Today we still have a certain number of cartularies where the original documents once copied into them have long since disappeared.  Some cartularies long assumed lost, such as the episcopal cartulary from Auxerre pictured above, emerged in private hands in the 1980s.  Many other documents are still in private hands, such as the ones cut up to made decorative images to sell.

No wonder medievalists have to be intrepid in figuring out pre-modern history.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval documents, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.