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!

Notre Dame of Paris

This is heart-breaking.  Notre Dame is burning.

The cathedral is 850 years old, having been begun in the 1160s under the direction of the bishop of Paris.  The pope laid the cornerstone.  There had been older cathedrals there since the fourth or fifth century, changed or replaced every century or two, but this one was so large and so beautiful that it was never replaced.  It's built of local limestone.  The roof, now gone, was supported by wooden beams, giant oaks dating from the twelfth century, which would have been very dry and burned very readily.

It's one of the earliest and best-known churches in the Gothic style, a new twelfth-century way of building churches that emphasized height and light.  (The monastery of St.-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris, is now considered the first Gothic church, a generation earlier.)

The church was finished within a generation, but of course it had challenges and issues over the centuries—though nothing like what it is now facing.  The first problem was that the high walls, pierced by high windows, started bowing ever so slightly but very alarmingly.  The flying buttresses were then added to help keep the walls upright at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

During the early eighteenth century, the church lost much of its medieval stained glass, knocked out by the cathedral canons as too "old fashioned."  Then in the late eighteenth century, when France went officially atheistic during the Revolution, the facade was deliberately damaged, the heads knocked off the kings and queens of the Old Testament who were ranged across the front.

It was still however the biggest, most important building in Paris, and when Napoleon was crowned emperor (crowning himself), he held the ceremony in Notre Dame.

The novelist Victor Hugo deplored the dilapidated condition of the cathedral, and in his Notre Dame de Paris (1831), usually translated as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he inspired Parisians to look at their cathedral and save it.  Extensive renovations were carried out, headed by Viollet le Duc, who put new heads on the Old Testament kings and queens, added gargoyles, and had the whole thing topped off by a spire (flèche in French) at the crossing point of nave and the perpendicular aisles (transept), which spire collapsed today.

Recently the whole church was cleaned of the dirty patina from polluted air and was looking fresh and inviting, as seen in the picture below, taken the last time we were in Paris.  The limestone walls still stand, but it may be an awfully long time, if ever, before the church will be itself again.  (Limestone doesn't actually burn but it disintegrates in intense heat.  It is burned in kilns to form one of the components of cement.)

In the twelfth century, when Chartres cathedral caught fire, the local citizens pounded on the walls and cursed God.  One can see their point.

Added May 6:

Amazingly, much of the interior of the church survived.  There was stone arching (ceiling) below the actual roof, and it held up fairly well.  The biggest damage was at the crossing, where the nave met the transept.  The nineteenth-century spire crashed through there when it fell.

But obviously the church still needs a roof.  There are not 1300 oaks in Europe big enough to replace the 1300 wooden beams (made from oaks already several centuries old in the twelfth century).  And there is concern that, without a roof pressing down and out, the walls, which are pushed in by the flying buttresses, might start leaning toward the center.

Here's an article from the NY Times about how the fire spread--and how it could have been even worse than it is.

The French government has promised restoration within 5 years, in time for the next Olympics (to be held in Paris).  We'll see.  But cathedrals have been rebuilt before.  Reims, in northern Champagne, was blown up in WW I, leaving nothing but the walls, and was rebuilt back to its thirteenth-century glory over 20 years.

© C. Dale Brittain 2019