The Restoration of Notre Dame

 In April of 2019, the roof beams of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire.  The flame roared through the 900 year old oak beams that supported the lead roof, sending particles of lead throughout the neighborhood and threatening to collapse the whole structure.  As Parisians watched in horror, the nineteenth-century spire that had risen above the crossing crashed down through the church's stone vaulting.

 

At the time there was fear that it might never be restored or might, like Reims cathedral (bombed in World War I) take decades to repair.  President Macron promised it would be rebuilt in time for the 2024 Olympic Games, to be held in Paris.  The restoration efforts didn't quite make the Games, but the cathedral has now reopened, just in time for Christmas 2024.

It helped that the church was not nearly as badly damaged as Reims had been.  Other than at the crossing, where the spire had come down, the stone vaulting (the ceiling you might call it, with all the oak beams and the roof above it) had mostly survived.  The church's interior was damaged by smoke and water but was mostly still there, unlike at Reims, which had been left as a shell after the bombing.

It also helped that a concerted search through Europe's forests (including eastern Europe) was able to find and obtain enough tall oaks to replace the twelfth-century beams.  (Many had been planted two centuries ago with the thought that they would become ships' masts, but steam replaced sail before they were used.)  In spite of some talk in 2019 of redoing the cathedral with an exciting new 21st-century "look," the decision was made to restore the church more or less to how it had been before the fire.  That meant not only using oak beams rather than steel but repairing the stonework (including the vaulting) using medieval techniques.

A major role here was played by craftsmen who had been working on Guédelon Castle.  As I've noted before, this is a project where modern people are attempting to build a medieval castle using medieval techniques and finding it more of a challenge than they anticipated.   But some medieval techniques they've worked out via trial and error, looking at how real medieval castles are put together, others they've found in late medieval handbooks.  At any rate, craftsmen who've developed a good feel for wood and stone played a major role in Notre Dame's reconstruction.

 

Notre Dame reopened in a grand ceremony attended by international dignitaries.  The interior especially looks strikingly different than it did six years ago, being limestone white rather than smoke-stained gray (from centuries both of candle smoke and more recently coal residue from the heating system).  One can see why thirteenth-century visitors to Paris were stunned by the cathedral.

But other aspects have been restored to the nineteenth-century standard,  including a new spire to replace the one erected by Viollet-le-Duc that crashed through the vaulting, and also including the gargoyles and the rather insipid heads of the queens and kings of the Old Testament, depicted on the front.  Some new things have been added, like the sprinkler system (good idea!).  But overall one can now enter the church and imagine oneself back in the thirteenth century.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on churches and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my book, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Available both as an ebook and in paperback.

Oak trees

 It's been two years today since Notre Dame burned.  How can a stone building burn? you ask.  Well, limestone (such as the church is made out of) will burn when hot enough (it's burned as one of the ingredients in cement), but the real problem at Notre Dame was the roof beams.  The roof itself was lead (and the fire spewed the whole area around with toxic lead dust), but the beams were 900 year old oaks.  After 900 years, as you can imagine, the wood had gotten very dry, and once it started burning it was very hard to put out.

After two years, the building itself is stabilized, the walls aren't going anywhere, and most of the interior decoration, which came through surprisingly well, was rescued.  The biggest damage, besides the roof itself, was to the stone vaulting (ceiling) at the point where the transept (the crossing) crossed the nave (the long central aisle of the church).  In the nineteenth century a spire was erected there, and when it crashed down it took out the vaulting.

Right now efforts are underway to repair the roof, which they are planning to put back more or less as it was.  They are even planning to replace the spire, but I could have told them that was a bad idea (they didn't ask me).  The challenge is getting enough oaks.  They actually have an excellent idea of how the beams worked, because modern timber framers have closely studied all old wood-framed structures, as they sought to revive what had almost become a lost art, and Notre Dame was one of the best examples.

Oak trees, as you doubtless know, are fairly slow growing but produce good, strong wood, and they were appreciated for beams throughout the Middle Ages.  The problem was giving the trees long enough to grow.  Burning wood was the principal way to keep warm, and oak makes a nice, hot fire.  Everyone building something, from a church to a castle to a little house, wanted nice oak beams.  It was considered miraculous in the early twelfth century, a generation before Notre Dame was built, that Abbot Suger was able to find enough oaks big enough for his new church's beams.  And then you have the problem that when people want to plant new fields, forests are the enemy, to be chopped down.

Sad but true: two centuries ago, when Ohio was being cleared for agriculture, they chopped down thousands of oaks and burned them in bonfires that could be seen for miles.

In England in the early modern period, some forward-looking people realized that some of their new halls and churches might need new beams at some points and created oak groves especially for the purpose.  When beetles got into the beams two or three centuries later, the oaks were ready.

Medieval people recognized the value of woodlands around the same time they were being cut down, just as happened in the US centuries later.  Oak woods had been important, even sacred, going back to the Gauls, before the Romans arrived.  It is even believed that the word druid is related to the Celtic word der, meaning an oak grove.

Medieval peasants wanted oak woods because pigs were fattened on the fallen acorns; indeed, woods might be described by how many pigs they would support.  Ships were built from oak planks; the Vikings had fairly untouched Scandinavian forests to draw on for their ships.  Oak galls provided one of the ingredients for medieval ink.  Oak bark was used in tanning leather.

Carpenters drew distinctions between different trees, depending on whether they grew on a hill or a flat area, among other trees or by themselves, on stony or sandy soil, even whether they were on a north or south facing slope.  These things influenced the grain and the strength of the wood.

Europe's modern woodlands are much more thoroughly managed than are American woods.  Those rebuilding Notre Dame are starting to assemble enough big oaks.  Some of the managed woods routinely cut down the oldest trees to allow younger trees to grow up.  Some of these culled oaks are destined for Notre Dame.  The challenge is going to be finding enough of them, especially since the French prefer French oaks, or at least European oaks, not Chinese or North American ones.

© C. Dale Brittain 2021

For more on architecture and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback!

Medieval architects

In an earlier post on medieval cathedrals, I noted that building a cathedral--or for that matter a castle--was not just a matter of getting a lot of strong backs together to heave stones around.  You needed people who know what they're doing, starting with the architect.

There is now a distinction between the architect, the person who draws up the plans, and the builder, the one who decides how to put the plans into effect, hires the workers, assembles the materials, and supervises the project.  In the Middle Ages the same people did both.

However, once a project was properly underway, the architect/master builder might hand it off to a second in command while he went off on a new project.  Although we almost never know their names now, the best seem certainly to have been well known in their own period and were highly sought after and highly paid.

One of the first steps was to decide how big a building was going to be.  One could make what was essentially the same church in different sizes, by having the basic unit of measure be different lengths.  That is, if it was decided that a church was going to be 10 "units" wide, then one could make it bigger or smaller by lengthening or shortening the basic unit.

For example, the abbey church of Cluny, which was the biggest church in Christendom from the early twelfth through fifteenth centuries, was reproduced in miniature a short time later by the abbey church of Paray-le-Monial, shown here.  (Miniature is probably a misnomer, as the church is still big, though not a contender for biggest church in Christendom.)

Paray is actually quite useful for knowing what Cluny looked like, because most of that church was dismantled by Napoleon to build his stud-stables.  All we have left of Cluny is a few walls, what archaeology reveals, and drawings made before its destruction.

For a long time historians of architecture tried to figure out how long was the "medieval meter,"in the assumption that the "basic unit" for all church building must have been some sensible multiple of the "medieval meter," like 1.5, or 3, or something.  All they had to do, they thought, was find some length (87 cm?) that, when multiplied by a series of sensible numbers, yielded the length of all churches' basic units.  But they never found it because, in fact, there was no medieval meter.  Medieval writers spoke of feet and inches and yards as we do, but there was no universal standard against which these were compared, and for most purposes it didn't matter.  For the architect, the "basic unit" was laid out on site at what looked like a good length.  Everything was measured against it.  It didn't have to be a sensible multiple of anything.

Medieval architects, without knowing calculus or having access to CAD (computer-assisted drawing), and working with Roman numerals, were amazingly good.  They built towers, walls, and arches that have stood up just fine for eight centuries or more.  They did sometimes experiment beyond the limits of what is actually possible, such as in the case of Notre Dame of Paris, the first really big Gothic church, where the walls showed signs of buckling from the strain after about fifty years, leading to the invention and addition of flying buttresses.  At Beauvais, the architects attempted to build the nave higher than any other church, some 130 feet high, but it kept falling down; no one has been able to equal that height without steel-frame architecture.  (At Beauvais, they eventually gave up.)

After the destruction of the French Revolution, nineteenth-century architects tried to reconstruct what medieval buildings "must" have looked like.  The leader here was Viollet le Duc, who made new, rather insipid heads for the kings and queens on the facade of Notre Dame and added the grotesque gargoyles (sorry, they're not medieval).


© C. Dale Brittain 2015
For more on medieval buildings, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.