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This is the Second Page of This Feature. For the First page Click Here
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Impressment
If you thought that the Royal Navy invented the notion of "pressing" men for service during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then think again. Throughout mediaeval times monarchs could and did impress stonemasons into work on the royal projects. Knoop and Jones - in a separate paper - found a remarkably close correlation between the amount of royal building projects and the numbers of orders for the impressment of masons. As you might expect, the peak of impressment was during the Plague-blighted second half of the fourteenth century. In 1361 alone Knoop and Jones found evidence of no fewer than thirty four such orders. There were one hundred and thirteen in the four years 1360-3. Yet in the first decade of the fifteenth there were only two in total.
Certainly in the churches of my own part of the East Midlands this is very revealing data. The work described in my book "Demon Carvers and Mooing Men" seemed to have been carried out in the last part of the fourteenth and early years of the fifteenth centuries. Even outside this corpus of churches one sees again and again churches that acquired widened aisles and clerestories during these decades. There are several circumstances likely to have contributed to this; but it is impossible not to believe that there were decades of demand suppressed by the lack of availability of masons due to Plague and impressment.
The majority of royal work was in London which explains why masons were far more likely to be impressed in counties close to the city. Their wages and expenses were met during travel to the project. County Sheriffs were often given quotas to meet from their counties. And in case you were wondering, impressment meant just that: there was no escape! However, at Oxford the colleges seemed able at least occasionally to buy off impressment. Th Warden of Merton College obtained a licence to excuse Robert Jaynes , “master mason”, of impressment in the middle of the fifteenth century. Merton was at it again with Thomas Wykes - designated only as “mason” during the same period. We don’t know how prevalent this practice was and whether it involved payment. This all shows how irksome impressment was fro patrons.
Impressment was almost invariably for royal projects. Only the Crown could create an order for impressment. Occasionally, it seems, the Crown might do so for the benefit of a non-royal project seen as particularly desirable but this was very rare.
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Who Paid?
It is an enduring myth that churches were and are built by “The Church”! As any modern vicar or member of the Parish Church Council will tell you, The Church gives little and takes a very great deal.
Most churches you visit today will be the legacy of patrons and the parish itself. In Anglo-Saxon times a ceorl (or “churl” which had none of today’s pejorative connotations) who wished to become a thegn might enhance his chances by building a church. Effectively it remained the property of the patron who would allow the locals to worship there. In Norman times, again, the builders or expanders of churches would be the Norman aristocracy.
That pattern changed little until the feudal system gradually broke down after the Plague of 1348. Former serfs were able to become prosperous either on the land or as tradesmen. Ordinary people of the parish could now individually or collectively bankroll improvements to their local churches and it seems that they were remarkably generous. Many joined guilds (not trade guilds bit something more akin to a modern “friendly society”). They valued their “immortal souls” as highly as did the aristocrats and hoped to collectively gain the same afterlife advantages as their betters. If the local worthy financed a chantry chapel for his family in the south aisle, so might the parishioners fund a Lady Chapel in the north aisle. Increasingly the local worthy might now be a rich wool merchant rather a knight or an earl. Indeed, the word “wool church” is used today to denote a church - often of improbable scale and lavishness - that was enriched by those engaged in the sheep trade.
Freedom from serfdom and an increase in prosperity unsurprisingly led to the development of administrative and leadership institutions within towns, villages and parishes as forms of local government. That is not to say, however, that these were consistent and universal, nor that they were dictated by a centralised government. There is a great deal of documentary evidence that shows the ways in which parish church building was funded through a mix of gifts, promises and levies on the population. Churchwardens were important as the commissioners of church fabric repairs – as onerous a task then as it is now and which tends to be overlooked when discussing the mediaeval period – and building. To be clear, almost all of the surviving contracts for parish churches were commissioned by local laymen, not by aristocrats (with the famous exception of Fotheringhay) and most certainly not by that nebulous construct “The Church”. Parish churches were a parish matter.
This was a considerable burden, as modern churchwardens would ruefully acknowledge. In most cases there would not be sufficient money in hand to pay for the entire program of work so the wardens would be in the business of what today we would call cashflow forecasts, with chasing up pledges and levies and trying desperately to balance income with outgoings. Many parishes took upon themselves the provision of materials, especially stone, doubtless with the ambition of minimising costs. This added to the burden of the local wardens.
This pattern has continued over the ages and is still with us – except that the landed gentry are no longer, perhaps, willing to support their local church financially. The Reformation put paid to any notion of seeing a return on their investment in terms of the health of their immortal souls. Now it is the parish that finds the wherewithal to keep the rain out and the walls standing.
The exception to this pattern was the monasteries. They, in particular, owed their foundation to endowments of the uber-rich. As time went on they were able to acquire even greater wealth from the scandalous (to our modern eyes) practice of extorting money from pilgrims to shrines housing holy relics of provenance that varied on a continuum from the extremely dubious to the downright dishonest!
In a practice that – again – we would find dubious today, monasteries were gifted parish churches either by their founders or, latterly, by the Pope! Parish churches came with entitlements to tithes and so the monastery would acquire these with the church. Sometimes in the early days the monastery might set out about improving the church. The pattern that emerged was that the Church (the Monastery) would pay for the upkeep of the chancel and the parish would pay for the upkeep of the nave.
This whole system fell into disrepute in the century before the Reformation. Monasteries found that funds from rich patrons dried up, not least because the monastic establishments became bloated and declined morally. Moreover, funds were just as well invested in chantry chapels that gave more direct benefit. Their remedy to an imbalance between income and expenditure was all too often to seek to acquire churches and their tithes. They would often keep most of the income and replace the resident priest with a monastic “rector” who may or may or not give a fig for the welfare of the parish. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was primarily a money-raising scheme of Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell as popular fiction and TV is only too glad to inform us. Sadly, however, many of the monasteries got their just desserts. Even amongst the pious population, the Monasteries had fallen into disrepute. The supposedly cosseted monks were compared unfavourably with the orders of mendicant friars whose members had assumed the old monastic mantle of simple piety in the service of the community.
Finally, the post-Reformation period was a disaster for the fabric of the English parish church. Henry VIII, although a Catholic until the day he died, was forever in his role of Head of the Church in England messing about with the new-fangled state religion. The distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy became increasingly arcane and the common man or woman hardly knew what it was safe to believe from one day to the next. Henry’s son Edward VI turned the country into a Protestant one and, as most of you will know, England was in a state of religious turmoil for another two centuries or so with kings and queens (and Oliver Cromwell) shifting religion first one way then the other. Kings fell for the merest suspicion of Catholic sympathies. Men were prepared to blow up King and Parliament to restore “The One True Church”. Statues, rood screens and chantry chapels were amongst the visible casualties of these religious quicksands.
In this febrile atmosphere, is it surprising that both aristocracy and parish were reluctant to invest in their churches? What was orthodox today could be heresy tomorrow. Being a benefactor to a church made your allegiance all too obvious. Better to lie low. If yours was a Roman Catholic family you would hardly want to support the newly-Protestantised parish church and just receiving the sacraments in private might condemn you. If you were a Protestant family Mary I would have terrified you, James I would have worried you, Charles I would have made you distinctly nervous, the Commonwealth period would have unsettled you and James II would have had you sharpening your sword!
It was not until the days of Queen Victoria that the country felt secure enough in its beliefs to put significant money into the parish church again. By then it was often a case of saving a church from a state of rack and ruin. The man (it was almost always a man – don’t blame me!) who funded things would now be one of the industrial nouveau riche who fancied a bit of posterity for himself and his family. Many of the old families had quietly remained Roman Catholics. They retreated to their estate chapels and left the parish churches to the plebs and the new money.
The era also marked a change in the whole model of church building. If you were to peruse the pages of Pevsner you will often see the name of the “builder” or rebuilder of a Victorian church. The “master” mason was no longer the designer. We now had “architects” who would hand the plans over to a construction company who would do the work. Ironically we still don’t know the names of Victorian master masons any more than we do those of their mediaeval counterparts. The names of men like Gilbert Scott however, will be preserved for posterity – whether the work was sublime or, as was too often the case, an abomination!
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The Contract System
One of the insights from the Oxford colleges is that masons were engaged in a number of ways: ad taschem, by hourly payment and by contract. The master masons were even sometimes paid annual retainers. This is surely true of the masonry trade in mediaeval England as a whole reflecting, in fact, the way we do things in the modern world. There must have been countless small jobs needed at parish churches making good crumbling masonry, adding buttresses, fixing the roof, putting in an piscina, all of which surely have called for short-term work on an ad taschem or time-related basis. Of such arrangements, as far as I know, there are no records but they must have been predominant. When we look at building churches, or at major extension work, commonsense tells you that the work would usually be sub-contracted on some level. Parishes would need to be able to match the cost to the depth of their pockets and even rich patrons would surely not have wished to enter open-ended arrangements.
LF Salzman’s “Building in England Down to 1540” contains an appendix containing all the mediaeval building contracts he had managed to track down. The earliest is 1176, the latest 1538 - bear in mind his book covers only the period up to 1540. 364 years yield only 123 contracts. His book covers all aspects of building so many have no relevance to the mason’s craft but it is still interesting to note that other building trades also worked under contract and, of course, for generally much smaller projects. This implies that contracts were not confined to the very largest building jobs so it is a not unreasonable inference that almost all parish churches were constructed or changed under such arrangements.
Gabriel Byng, however, notes that all of these contracts post-date the 1348 Plague. This invites the inference that contracts were a purely post-Plague phenomenon designed to alleviate the shortages and price volatility of labour (despite the wage control statutes) and materials. He believes that the most able and ambitious masons were opening urban workshops during the mediaeval period even before the Plague and carrying out a certain amount of prefabrication but the evidence is, to say the least, thin. He suggests that such masons, if they did exist, would have been better able to become contractors. More convincingly he suggests that a contracting mason would not need the entire cost of a contract up-front. Many contracts (as we shall see) featured stage payments from the client and the contracting mason would be able to secure credit for some materials and tools. Nevertheless, I think we can assume that this was still the preserve of the well-established, reputable mason with a certain amount of capital behind him.
Only eighteen surviving contracts are concerned with parish churches. It is a desperately small body of knowledge. But the insights are quite remarkable. For the record the churches are :
1348 Sandon (Herts) L 1372 Arlingham (Glos) L 1409/10 Hornby (Yorks) E 1412 Catterick (Yorks) E
1413 Halstead (Essex) L 1419 Wyburton (Lincs) F 1420 Surfleet (Lincs) L 1425 Walberswick (Suffolk) E
1433 Chester St Mary on the Hill E 1434 Fotheringhay (Northants) E 1442 Dunster (Somerset) E 1452 Cambridge St Benet’s E
1476 Broxbourne (Herts) E 1487/8 Helmingham (Suffolk) E 1508/9 Wycombe (Bucks) E 1512 Tempsford (Beds) E
1522 Biddenham (Beds) 1529 Orby (Lincs) E
The letters E, L, F denote that the contract is in English, Latin or French.
You can see English gradually supplanting Latin as the lingua franca of contracts. This is not the whole story, however. Just looking casually, I spotted nine consecutive contracts concerning castles written in French in the late fourteenth century. Contracts involving abbeys and cathedral (including commissioning changes to churches within their ownership) liked to use Latin. I think we are seeing a remarkable linguistic division between the Ecclesiastical world (Latin), the aristocracy (French) and the commons (English of the most vulgar kind). We must presume that many masons had to rely on the client to spell out to him the terms of the contract in - literally - “a language he would understand”. This seems to me to be a great idea for a research project for somebody out there.
Let’s look at some of the salient points.
1. It was normally the parish commissioning the works. The conspicuous exception was Fotheringhay which was commissioned by the Duke of York. Another is Biddenham commissioned by Sir William Butler. I shall write about both of these contracts separately.
2. There were no cases of building a new church. The closest is Catterick which was a total rebuild. What we can learn here is almost priceless. The choir was to be completed within one year; the whole church within three years. Another year was to be allowed for the parapets. That seems a long time. The mason was to reuse the stone of the old church and to procure any extra stone required. The parish, however, would supply carriage of any materials. Unlike most contracts it is explicit that the mason is to find all the labour. The mason was to be paid 60 Marks. According to Wikipedia a Mark - which was not actually a coin but used only for accounting - was worth 160d or 13s 4d
3. Arlingham, Walberswick, Dunster and Helmingham were all concerned with building or raising the height of towers. That’s a high proportion of an admittedly small sample but perhaps what we should expect at a time when “improvement” rather than “building” was the name of the game. Comparing payments is fascinating but we need to understand not all towers are the same.
Arlingham: To complete a bell tower. 12 feet to be built per year. Three years in total (so 36 feet). Payment of 17s and a bushel of wheat per foot! Mason to pay the wages. Parish to provide all materials except tools. Board and lodging provided.
Walberswick: Payment is 40s per yard (13s 4d per foot) - somewhat less than at Arlingham. He was also to get a barrel of herring and a gown each year. Parish provides materials and a house to work and live in (for the master mason only, one presumes). Work only to be carried out between Lady Day and Michaelmas (ie 25 March and 29 September). This must have been a nightmare for the mason. What were he and his men to do at other times? Similarly, at Helmingham work could only be carried out between Whitsun and 8 September. Remarkably, this project was to last ten years! One wonders if the parish needed to stage the work in this way so that they could raise sufficient funds.
Dunster: A one hundred foot tower. Parish to provide materials. Payment of 13s 4d per foot. This is precisely the same as at Walberswick. A further payment of 20s for building decorative pinnacles. To be completed in 3 years. Note that this means 33 feet per year. At Arlingham the contract specified only 12 feet per year! That’s some discrepancy!
4. Those commissioning the projects would sometimes specify another church as a model. Helmingham for example, referenced the churches at Framsden and Brandeston. Orby wanted battlements like those at Weston Admeals.
5. Almost all parishes provided the materials. Of those contracts requiring stone (as opposed to wood) nine parishes supplied all materials as opposed to the single case of Surfleet where the mason was responsible. This is a remarkable statistic and surely of great significance despite the small size of the sample.
6. Most contracts demanded sureties from both parties. £40 - about £25,000 today - at Hornby and Catterick. At Wycombe in 1508 three masons gave a bond of a colossal £100.
7. Other examples of costings: At Broxbourne to lengthen the south aisle eastwards and to provide decorative tombs (!) £24 paid in three instalments. Chester: to build a chapel south of the chancel: £20 and a gown. Fotheringhay: to build a nave on the site of the existing choir: £300 payable in instalments. The House of York being one side of the contract, if the mason did not complete in the specified time he would be committed to prison!
8. The level of specification varied widely. Dimensions of building were sometimes specified. A great deal must have been agreed during the execution of the work.
9. There are two examples of litigation (sadly without recorded outcomes). At Wyburton the client refused to pay. At Orby the mason, one William Jacson, was unable to complete the worked due to his having been impressed for a royal project. See above
10. The contracts never refer to a master mason, but usually to just a “mason”. It is perfectly possible that such a title was deemed to be superfluous. In the cases of Fotheringhay, Wyburton, Wycombe, Broxbourne, Biddenham and Orby, however, we see the title “Freemason” appear.
Gabriel Byng did a great deal of work on the contract system in his book “Church Building and Society in the later Middle Ages” (Cambridge, 2017) and notes that only one contract exists for a parish church for the period before the Plague of 1348. There are five for the rest of that century and there are nine in the fifteenth century. Byng accepts that the sample size is very small but suggests that those numbers are still significant. He points to the much greater volatility in the prices of materials and labour and that contracting was the rational way for a parish to insure against future financial difficulties. Effectively they transferred risk from themselves to the contractor. Poor workmanship, labour difficulties, problems with materials were all the responsibility of the contractor.
Byng’s analysis bears out my own – that the parishes were not contracting out the whole project but only the construction itself. He coined the phrase “part contract system” to describe it. There is ample evidence that the parishes did not just leave the masons to get in with it but oversaw the work and carried out a lot of the project management.
There were other advantages in contracting the work. Firstly, all surviving contracts show a fixed price so that contractor mason had no incentive to delay the work. The quicker the project progressed, the quicker he would realise his profit. What is more, working quickly would insulate him against the very volatility that worried the parishes.
However, we have to assume that the avoidance of risk came at a price, a subject upon which Byng is more reticent. A mason would have his own pay rates set by the various wage control statutes after the Plague. Even as a master that would be only around 6d per day. When a mason became a contractor his own remuneration – his profit – would not be transparent and we have to assume that he would build in a notional personal profit that was well in excess of what he could earn on a per day basis whilst the amount paid to his workforce would be conveniently pegged - at least in theory – to statutory levels.
In modern business and investment you always have to understand that risk and reward go hand in hand. Tracking the FTSE100 or the Dow Jones is relatively low risk but the rewards will, by definition, be average. If you invest in a start-up tech company you might lose all of your money – or you might get very rich. If you see a promised return well in excess of the norm you will understand – unless you are one of the legion of mugs out there – that it carries probably unsustainable risk. Our contracting masons will not have talked in such terms but it is surely inevitable that the contract prices they negotiated will have a leeway built in as a safety margin and to reflect the economic volatility of the time.
Inflation was not the only risk, however. I have commented before on the quasi-mystical status afforded to master masons by some gushing modern writers. Mathew Paris (12001259) was a Benedictine monk at St Albans and was perhaps the most important historical chronicler of his generation. Speaking first hand, Paris had this to of Master Hugh de Goldclif at St Albans : ”A deceitful and unreliable man, but a craftsman of great reputation whose influence caused to be built carved work, unnecessary, trifling and beyond measure costly”. The result was that the money ran out, the walls were left uncovered so that the columns and capitals “fell to ruin”. In 1200 the canons at Beverley Minster hired masons that were “not as prudent as they were cunning” and who were more concerned with aesthetics than with structural safety with the result that the crossing tower collapsed, destroying much of the nave with it.. In his admirable paper on the carved capitals at Wells cathedral, Mathew M Reeve argued cogently that the decoration that today is one of the joys of the Cathedral (for those who notice it!) was at the instigation of Master Adam Lock rather than of the patrons. Reeve concluded “contemporary documentation on masons and mason-craft bears the refrain that masons are temperamental, untrustworthy, duplicitous and frequently working to their own creative agendas rather than the visions of their patrons”. He continues “...a mason’s lodge was a place of training, leading eventually to showmanship, competition and ‘inflation’ of the atelier’s ornamental repertoire”.
We are talking here of masons undertaking the most prestigious projects at abbeys and cathedrals. Not only do these anecdotes confirm the masons’ dominance in the area of church decoration, but also that they were sometimes prepared to pursue an artistic agenda to the detriment of their patron’s pockets and even of structural safety. These accounts speak of a craft that was sometimes out of control. If the comparatively deep pockets of the great churches were compromised by masonic overreach it is hardly surprising that parishes that had to scrimp and scrape to pay for their building work chose to use legal contracts that made any overspends or delays the liability of the contractors.
You might be struck if you were to read mediaeval building contracts that they are brief and (with the conspicuous exception of Fotheringhay about which I have much to say anon) conspicuously lacking in detail about what is to be built. Gabriel Byng argues very convincingly in a paper for the Society of Architectural Historians in 2016 that the written contract was only intended as the bare-bones statement that allowed either party to enter into litigation if necessary. He quotes from mediaeval wills - a priceless source of information to which I am not privy - and found that mediaeval people often made bequests for the benefit of a church but that those bequests often specified a local church that the new work was to emulate. Byng concludes that behind the legalistic text of the contracts were negotiations and that agreements about the detail of what was to be built and that what he calls “source buildings” were used to guide the masons. We already have seen some of this in the contracts themselves. Emulation was not seen as plagiarism..
Byng’s conclusions - that, as I say convinced me - explains to me (Byng has not said this, as far as I know) the way that architectural development worked in a world that pre-dated the printed book. For example if St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol was the first Perpendicular style church in England it is wholly understandable if a church a few miles specified that new work on their church should be in the same fashionable style. The mason would have to study the work at Bristol and emulate it. This would create a chain reaction leading to the adoption of the new style throughout the country. Of course, this would be accelerated if masons moved from one area to the other, taking their new expertise with them. This concept - beautiful in the simplicity of its logic - also helps to explain regional styles and fancies. Where one innovated others were compelled to follow. There will have been those who would not or could, of course, and all of this helps to explain why there were always “transition” period where styles were a mixture of the new and the not-so-new.
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Left: Sandon Church, Hertfordshire. A contract of 1348 - the year of the Great Plague - made in Latin by two canons of St Paul’s London with Thomas Rikelyng of Barkway (five miles away) to demolish the chancel and build the replacement seen here. Right: Orby Church, Lincolnshire. The battlements were built under a contract in English between two parishioners and a freemason, William Jacson of Bratoft (four miles away) for the sum of £12 13s 4d. Jacson never completed the job, having been impressed into the king’s work.
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Left: Surfleet Church, Lincolnshire. In 1420 the rector and another parishioner contracted with Robert Dynyce (mason) to rebuild the chancel “on the old foundations”, a “winding stair” and “parapet walks”. The contractees were to provide all materials. Litigation ensued when the parish alleged that the work was not completed in the time specified. Right; Catterick Church. Yorkshire. It is the result of a contract in English of 1420 to demolish the old church and rebuild it completely. Richard of Crakehall (six miles away) was the contractor. The choir was to built within a year, the rest of the church within three years. The price was 160 marks (just over £100) with a bonus of 10 marks plus a gown for completion on time A further one year was allowed for parapets. Looking at the church now with only parapets on its tower this is somewhat baffling! The client supplied materials and scaffolding.
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The Oxford Mediaeval Masons
Fortunately, an unusually comprehensive account of the masons employed in the mediaeval period was published in 1952 as “Oxford Masons, 1370-1530” by Eric Gee who died in 1989. He documents the names of the masons, their titular statuses, the colleges at which they were employed, and the nature of their work, covering the whole waterfront from labourer to master mason. The Oxford colleges, of course, had the literacy and the administration to record everything as well as the continuity to preserve what they had recorded. There are no less than 450 names made available to us in the appendices as well pocket biographies of thirty six of them. This treasure trove is perhaps the most comprehensive digest of actual payments to masons available to us in England.
The breakdown of the masons as designated in these records is :
Master Mason : 25 Freemason: 24 Mason: 244
Rough Mason : 33 Labourers: 91 Paviors: 17
Marbler : 1 Wardens: 2 Servants: 7
Carvers: 3 Apprentice: 1
As well as these, fourteen other names are recorded as “mason” in connection with having worked on the chancel at Adderbury Church in Oxfordshire between 1408-18. New College were the rectors of the church.
There is so much to be gleaned from here, although we must be mindful that the University was not a typical employer. Nevertheless, we must draw some conclusions:
1. There was no Stonemasons Guild in Oxford. There is not a single mention of it. Only two masons are shown (in one hundred and sixty years!) as having at any point been “promoted”: one from labourer to roughmason, the other from roughmason to freemason. The master masons were not from Oxford. Eric Gee himself states very clearly that no Guild existed during this period.
2. The Statute of Labourers was enforced, at least to a limited extent. Four men are listed as having been fined. In one case it was the master of the guilty mason that was fined. All incidences were between 1390 and 1392. Whether there was a particular focus on the Statutes at this time or whether they were no longer recorded by the colleges we cannot know. Despite all of this, the instances of over-payment by the Colleges – who were not themselves fined – seem to be innumerable.
3. Some huge gaps occur between the regimes of master masons. All Souls had no master after 1482. Lincoln had one only from 1509-10. Magdalen – a college that employed a great many masons – had a master for most of the period but not from 1505-30,. Merton had none from 1378-1448. New College consistently employed a master until 1418 but then none until 1500. Oriel employed masters only between 1411-15 and 1513-21. Queens had none between 1402 and 1516 and then for only three years. We can say then with some authority that none of the colleges employed masters as a matter of course.
4. Masons of the ordinary kind were occasionally given inducements to move to Oxford. This suggests occasional labour or skill shortages and, again, reinforces the lack of Guild control.
5. The designation “mason” – the great majority of those listed - makes no distinction between hewers and layers. The hewers were generally paid more. This possibly reflects official discouragement of this distinction that was enshrined in their absence from the Statutes of Labourers.
6. The roughmasons (usually regarded as synonymous with “layers”) number only thirty three. The freemasons (usually regarded as synonymous with hewers) number only twenty three. Yet there were 244 designations of “mason”. The accounts of what the ordinary masons did show a very wide range of work that we would not see in, for example, the parish church context – such a building garden walls and repairing chimneys. A mason might be a freemason, excellent at working in freestone, but much of his work might not requite this skill at all. Working at the colleges produced a much wider range of work than at churches, hence the proliferation of the generic “mason”.#
7. Only one apprentice is mentioned. – one “Plumar” who worked at Magdalen for fifteen weeks in 1520-21 for the derisory sum of 3d per day. To put this into perspective, in the same year Magdalen was paying labourers at 4d and sometimes 5d per day. The whole thing is curious. An apprentice would normally be paid by his master, not be a client. Was this “Plumar” in fact a plumber? The account also mentions the payment of an apprentice at Adderbury. Here we know that his master was Richard Winchcombe and that he was paid 2/4 per week in 1412 (about 4 ½ d per day) and 2/9 (5 ½ d per day) in 1412, presumably reflecting his increasing skills. This is in line with the wages of ordinary masons and suggests that the man was not already a fully-trained mason.
I have remarked elsewhere that the daily premium – typically 1d per day - paid to masters hardly encourages us to think of them as having skills so very in advance of their more junior brethren. Form this it is reasonable to conclude that the near-legendary status of master masons was not shared at the time. However, the Oxford rolls show us that all was not quite as it might seem.
William Humberville was master mason at Merton between 1369-78 and is thought to have been the designer of its library. He is shown as working at Taynton Quarry for four weeks, earning 4s per week or 8d per day, double the statutory pay for a master. At other times he was working for around 6d per day, Although still well in excess of the statutory rates we find many instances of ordinary masons being paid 5d per day, so the premium is still slim. For a man who designed the library one this hardly seems a generous emolument, but he seems to have done that under contract, receiving over £36. One must surmise that after his disbursements to other masons he allowed himself a generous profit. That, I believe, was the secret of prosperity for a master mason: not to work on a per day basis but to contract for work. As in so many things concerned with the stonemasons craft, this would not surprise modern observers.
William Wynford was master mason at New College from 1386-1405. He had worked upon Windsor castle as deputy to the Kings’s Mason, John Sponle. He was appointed Chief Mason (an interesting designation) at Wells Cathedral in 1364 probably recommended by the famous William of Wykeham. Despite this exalted position, Wynford, like Humberville, was paid only 6d per day, nevertheless in excess of the statutory level, However, Wynford also received a house at a nominal rent and a retainer of 40s per year. Here we begin to see that all was not as it might seem in the employments of Master Masons of the more exalted sort. He went on to work at Abingdon Abbey, Corfe Castle and then Winchester Cathedral, again sponsored by the Bishop William of Wykeham. By the time he arrived at Oxford, in short, he was famous. We know little of his remuneration at the college.
Richard Chevynton, on the other hand, was master at All Souls in 1437-43. He may have been chief mason at Abingdon Abbey but he was not famous like Wynford. Chevynton was paid 40d per week, just over 6d per day, little more than Humberville considerably earlier. But he also received an annual feel of 26s 8d worth about an extra 1d per day.
The daily rates for individual classes of mason are fairly consistent over time and between colleges. Masters were not paid much in excess of the statutory rates even the famous Wynford at Wells Cathedral. Just from the three examples above, however, we can see how the daily rate was not the whole story for masters. Retainers were sometimes paid, board sometimes found and accommodation sometimes provided. Some masters dealt in quarry stone, no doubt very profitably, and contracts would have given the opportunity for much bigger rewards. What we see here, and again hardly surprising to our modern eyes, is a widespread conspiracy between masters and employers to pay above the statutory rates by other means. The market, in short, found a way. And, not to labour the point, no Guild was involved.
Much of the work, however, was carried out under contracts so rates of pay are not always visible to us. Nevertheless, we see here further evidence that mastership was not necessarily the gateway to a fortune. We should be clear, however, that masoncraft was inherently well-paid. A labourer would have been earning more like 2d per day.
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The Fotheringhay Contract
There is no better-known contract for church building than that between Richard Duke of York and William Horwood for the construction of the nave of Fotheringhay Church, Northants in 1438. Its fame rests on two things: the extraordinary detail of the building work to be carried out and the fact that Horwood agreed to surrender himself for imprisonment should he not complete the work in reasonable time. This unique clause gives rise to much amusement today, as well as emphasising the power of the aristocracy, but it begs the serious question of why Horwood would agree to it in the first place. That, though, is only one of several questions surrounding this remarkable document.
Horwood is described as “free mason” within the contract and as dwelling in Fotheringhay. The copy (not a facsimile) of the contract within the church has Horwood signing himself “Master of Stamford Guild”. What records there are of such a guild are alleged to have been lost in the Wars of the Roses, although how anybody would know that is a bit beyond me. There is a lot of doubt as to the existence of provincial stonemasons guilds but if they did exist then Stamford (ten miles from Fotheringhay) would surely have been the home to one. In the fifteenth century it had fourteen parish churches, a castle, a stone bridge and a town wall.
What are we to make of this? In the first place, it should be stated hardly any contracts for any of the building trades refer to the contractor as “master”. Our knowledge that other trades had active guilds suggests that the title of master was either regarded as contractually superfluous or did not have the import that we assume for it today.
Horwood was clearly proud of his status and whatever the title implied there was surely some prestige attached to it. Yet when we examine the detail of the contract we see a whole raft of clauses that show little or no respect for Horwood’s supposed status.
1. The contract is very prescriptive as to what is to be built. It could well be, of course, that Horwood himself had been instrumental in creating this design in conjunction with the patron but other clauses strongly suggest that the design was drawn up by other masons.
2. The patron’s overseer was to appoint two “setters” something seen in no other English contract. We must presume that these were not common layers of stone but, perhaps, men skilled in such complexities as putting together window tracery. The contract goes on to say “And during all the said work the setters shall be chosen and taken by such as shall have the governance and oversight of the said work by my said Lord…” This is the clearest indication that Horwood was not in charge of the site. And why on earth is the “Master of Stamford Guild” who might have been expected to have several such men on call having two setters foisted upon him?
3. Worse still, Horwood was able to dismiss these two setters only “by the oversight of master masons of the country”!
4. And again, Horwood “shall neither set more nor fewer free masons, rough setters nor layers thereupon, but as such as shall be ordained…” (by the patron’s overseer). So the size of Horwood’s workforce was to be laid down by another – in a contract that threatened Horwood with imprisonment! The contract goes on to say that if Horwood fails to pay one of his men then the “clerke of the werke” will pay him and recover the money from Horwood.
5. The sufficiency of the groundworks was to be attested to by “maisters of the same craft”.
Horwood’s role at this site, in short, seems to be of the local freemason appointed only to execute the construction. Given the reference to “masters” that are clearly seen as much more exalted than himself it seems unlikely that the design was his. The workforce was not all of his own choosing and its size certainly was not. We might smile at the thought of his being imprisoned for late completion but on a more serious note it shows little respect for Horwood’s professional abilities. Indeed, it is important to note that the contract talks of “masters of the craft” not “other masters of the craft. There is no suggestion that they regarded Horwood as a master at all.
One imagines that the Yorks had several stone structures within the village – not least the Castle where the unfortunate Mary of Queen of Scots was to be executed in the next century. A plausible scenario is that Horwood – a resident of Fotheringhay let us remember - regularly carried out small jobs for them. Then when the church nave was to be built Horwood got his big break, entrusted with a much bigger project and a hefty contract from which, one would assume, he would be left with a worthwhile profit. I rather doubt, in short, that he was the grand man that his signature implies.
Assuming that Horwood’s title as “Master of Stamford Guild” was real and not invented by himself we have to seriously question the nature of that guild, its significance, and the real nature of Horwood’s role within it. Everything we see in this contract contradicts the notion of the guild as a respected and well-organised operational institution, the Master of which would be a revered figure. One would expect that no self-respecting master of his craft would have signed such a contract.
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Left: Fotheringhay Church from the south. Being a a collegiate church, its chancel was demolished after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Centre and Right: Supposed representations of William Horwood and his dog, “Blaster”.
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The Biddenham Contract
This contract of 1522 was unearthed from he National Archives by Gabriel Byng. It is between Sir William Butler and a freemason contractor John Laverock of St Albans. It concerns the building of a north aisle to house a chantry chapel for the Butler family. What makes it remarkable is that it has a great deal of amendments and crossings-out that give an insight into the development of the document. It is a curious mixture of the very specific and curiously omitted. For example, Byng notes that finials, plinths, gargoyles and so on are visible at the church but not mentioned in the contract. He is of the view that the mason would not provide such things gratis and that there must have been other oral or written agreements in place.
Perhaps the most interesting insight, however, is that the contract makes clear involvement by the parish with what might otherwise have been thought of as what Byng calls a “gentry” contract. Although the parish are not signatories to the contract they are to provide stone, lime, sand and timber and in the case of the stone pay for its carriage to the site. They might have been providing money too, of course, but that would not be visible if Butler was making himself liable to the contractor for the whole amount.
The contract is unique in revealing collaboration in both finance and planning between the gentry and the parishioners. We should not be surprised when you consider that the aisle was to be an integral part of the church that would bring benefits to parish as well as patron. There is no doubt, however, that most people, including many writers, seemingly subscribe to the view that such alterations were “done to” the church and its parish by gentry who were then seen to “own” it. Byng points out that the display of aristocratic coats of arms on aisles, rood screens and so on does not imply that the families were sole financial contributors or “owners” as is commonly supposed.
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Left: North Aisle, Biddenham Church, Bedfordshire. Right: Masons Marks at Blythburgh Church, Suffolk
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Masons’ Marks
Previously I have talked of my belief that the stonemasonry industry was much less structured than many believe. I have also discussed the many doubts about the nature of the mediaeval stonemasons guild. In doing so I have questioned what seems to me to be the romantic notion of a craft where the imparting of passwords and “secrets” were part of the progression of a mason through the ranks of his craft. A more substantive topic we need to address is that of “masons marks”. Masons marks can often be seen in churches. Their existence is a fact but like the notions of passwords and secrets they are imbued with a certain feeling of awe – unsurprisingly since even the uninitiated church visitor is excited at the thought of being somehow able to identify with an individual artisan from centuries before.
Masons marks can create quite a lot of excitement in Church Guides. I suppose this is inevitable since they are taken to be the “signatures” of the masons within a church. Some point to the same mark being seen in a church nearby and get very excited because they see it as evidence that a single mason served at both. That might seem to be an unassailable assumption but sadly it is not. We know very little about mason’s marks and much of what we do know is contradictory. Here is the first big problem with the concept of a mason’s mark being a personal signature. How many thousands of masons must have worked in English parish churches over the centuries? How could all of these men have chosen individual personalised marks safe in the knowledge that a mason just down the road was not using the same one? The modern signature that uses combinations of names (or initials), sizes of script, flourishes and a thousand other distinguishing factors could not be condensed down into a few hurried strokes of a hammer and chisel!
Jennifer Alexander of the University of Warwick and a leading art historian wrote an invaluable paper on masons marks for the Society of Mediaeval Archaeology in 2007. I quote her: “Bronze age Knossos (Greece), 13th century Southwell Minster and 16th century Hardwick Hall (Derbys) share a common vocabulary of saltire crosses triangular shapes and intersecting-line marks. It is safer to treat these marks, for which the term ‘banker mark’ is preferred, as site-specific and to use the information that they embody to demonstrate phases of construction, to estimate the size of the workforce, or to comment on the significance of building breaks”. She uses the word “banker mark” to distinguish from marks made to help in the work of construction.
Why might there be marks at all? I think we can suggest three possibilities: to check the output of an individual mason, to check the quality of work of an individual, or to do both. Let’s look at each.
Firstly let’s look at the notion of measuring output. How many masons' marks do you see in an individual church? If the marks were to measure an individual’s output then you would expect to see them on every stone. Yet visible marks are few and far between and at most churches there are none whatsoever. It could, of course, be the case that marks were customarily buried on an invisible inside face and that the visible ones are aberrations. That’s a bit thin to say the least. The unassailable problem, though, is that masonry seems to have been the first wage-based industry in England. There is a mountain of evidence that masons were paid by the day, not by the piece.
So were they a check on quality? If so then they could only feasibly be used in this way before the stones were laid. Quality control would be of little use once the stones were in place. Imagine a building site. One can only surmise that the layers of the stone were not there waiting around for each stone to be cut. It is far more likely that they were drawing on a supply of stone already squared and ready for use. Masons marks would allow any rejected stone to be traced back to the culprit hewer before it was laid. Again, however, we might expect to see such a mark on every stone and again we do not.
So whatever theories we advance for masons marks - for which, by the way, there is no contemporary account whatsoever - we have to deal with the issue of their infrequency and, in the case of most churches, their absence altogether. These factors are attested to by Jennifer Alexander as being characteristic across Europe and right through from the Romanesque period. My own logic process suggests that if the stones are only seen occasionally then they must reflect some kind of occasional use. Obvious, you might say, but the “quantity” and “quality” theories do not fit that criterion.
So my inference is that the marks were used when a mason was employed on a casual basis or when his capabilities were not well-known to the master mason. In fact that is precisely in line with the notion discussed elsewhere in this account that the stonemasons craft was characterised not by “time-served” trainees advancing up the masonic hierarchy through examination by a Guild but by men steadily gaining competence and experience and advancing by their proven abilities. We can surmise that often a mason was more or less “attached” to a master or contractor who knew his capabilities or could be vouched for by trusted others. Where a mason was not known locally we might infer that his abilities would be tested during a very short probationary period (perhaps sometime measured in minutes!) ; and in the case of a hewer he might well be told to mark his prepared stone so that it might be judged before being used.
Our certainty that masons were almost invariably paid a daily wage derives from the comparatively large body of building accounts unearthed by the likes of Knoop and Jones. It is from these accounts that we know also of the occasional payment of masons “ad taschem” - that is for a specific piece of work and these are often for extraordinary items such as decorative work. In the Oxford records referenced elsewhere we see mainly daily rates and priced contracts. “Ad taschem” payments are also occasionally recorded, however.
Unfortunately none of these records are from parish churches. It seems that work on those was usually carried out under a fixed price contract between the patron and either a master mason or a freemason. We do not know from that how a contractor mason paid his underlings because their records – if there were any – have long been lost. We must assume that the industry practice of daily wages was observed in the main not least because that is the only method entertained by the various pay statutes. It is perfectly plausible, however, that masons on parish church and other sites were sometimes employed on a casual ad taschem basis to fill occasional labour shortfalls. In such circumstances it is possible that the stones were marked to record output and quality.
Another factor to throw into the mix is where the marks were made. The Oxford records show a close relationship between the college sites and the local quarry. Indeed, the master sometimes owned part of the quarry. We see masons – even on one occasion a master mason – working at the quarry but being paid for that work by the college. It is almost certain that the majority of stone was transported to site roughly shaped and sized in order to reduce expensive transport costs. It is a reasonable assumption that the closer a work site was to the source of its stone, the more a mason might be flitting between quarry and site according to the needs of the project. That leaves the possibility that masons marks were made not at the site but at the quarry. The sighting of a masons mark common to two churches might therefore not denote a mason who worked at both churches but a mason that cut stone for both churches at the quarry. It could even be that the same mark was allocated to two different masons at two different sites.
In short, it is likely that the masons marks (as opposed to functional construction marks) were used in a variety of ways but always, it seems, on an occasional basis. This is all very disappointing for those who see masons’ marks as personal signatures but I am afraid the notion does not stand up to scrutiny.
We have made mention of construction marks. These, of course, are functional and designed to allow the correct sequence and positioning and of individual stones within a larger whole. A good example might be of window tracery where individual pieces might differ only subtly with a danger of misplacement. Another example might be the voussoirs (individual stones) that made up an arched doorway
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Offsite Production
It is widely believed that the Plague induced an element of off-site pre-fabrication of components of church building at quarries. Gabriel Byng goes further and posits the possibility of town-based workshops delivering components to several churches simultaneously. These ideas rest on the need for more efficient use of the diminished army trained masons and recognition of the heavy cost of transport, especially transport by road. It also reflects the readily-observable fact that parish church – as opposed to great church - building in the Perpendicular style often has a distinct feeling of production line mediocrity.
The synergy of quarry and building site is quite well-established. There is no reason why a stone should not at last be squared off, if not finished, at the quarry. Just how much processing occurred at the quarry is impossible to ascertain. We have evidence of masons in Oxford doing stints at the quarry and we have to assume that this was part of their role as masons on building projects. Undoubtedly, however, masons would work full-time in quarries rather than be unemployed. In the absence of a provable system of training of masons it is generally accepted that some masons began their careers in the quarries.
Gabriel Byng’s speculation – not an assertion – that masonry workshops emerged in towns is not accepted by many other academics. I have my own doubts. The principal argument is that there is simply no evidence that they existed. My own doubt is based upon the economics of it. Why would someone transport stone to a workshop only to re-transport it to building sites? We know that the transport of stone cost more than the stone itself over distances as low as twelve miles. It just does not stack up. Also we know that a number of surviving contracts stipulate that the parish will procure the stone themselves.
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Hazards
The incidence of injury and death on building sites in mediaeval times would probably have been horrific by modern standards. Hard hats, goggles and reinforced toe caps were not part of the wardrobe of a mediaeval mason. Yet, nor were they when I was a child! And how many of us have those wonderful photographs of American building workers casually seated on girders eating their lunch with the streets of New York several hundred feet below? They were mainly "Native Americans", by the way. So the health and safety rules demanded by we softies of the twenty-first century are a very recent phenomenon. It is said that Ceaucescu's monumental folly the People's Palace in Bucharest cost three thousand lives or one a day. So we need, perhaps, to keep some sense of perspective.
We can't know how many were killed and maimed in the building of churches. We can assume, however, that these incidents were not taken lightly. Without making a political point, that sort of carelessness seems to have been the historic monopoly of royal and state projects where one dead man was easily replaced by another. Death and injury affected the master mason directly and we must suppose that a master mason who was careless of his men's safety would not have the pick of the masonic workforce. Nor could he advertise in the local newspaper for a replacement!
All that said, there were hazards that would have been peculiar to the masons. How many hewers and quarrymen, for example, were blinded by flying stone chips? How much microscopic stone dust was retained in the lungs? The preparation of lead for roofs is known to have produced toxic fumes that must have killed plumbers and caused collateral damage to others in the workforce.
Commonsense tells us that even on the best-regulated mediaeval sites the incidence of death and injury would be catastrophic by modern standards. Falling masonry, slipping off barrow runs, falling from towers; these things must have happened with only the most primitive and painful surgical remedies available.
Never forget, however, that the biggest perils had nothing to do with building safety: disease and starvation at a time when the average life expectancy was under forty years of age. These would have been the preoccupations of the masons. Few masons were likely to have lived long enough to die of lung disease or the long term effects of lead fumes. Of course they cared about safety but it would hardly be surprising if they were much more sanguine about the dangers than we would believe possible. That, gentle reader, is still the reality of much of the world we live in today.
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Freemasonry and Stonemasonry
This is dangerous ground and I will try to tread carefully, paraphrasing information passed to me by a practicing Freemason.
That the word “freemason” had currency within the hierarchy of mediaeval stonemasonry is beyond dispute. The first documented use of it was around 1376. The meaning of the word is discussed elsewhere but it is safe, I think, to say that a freemason was a relatively high-status member of the trade since many contracts from the fifteenth century onwards were entered into by men designated as “freemason”. I have discussed earlier how it seemed to have come about but in truth even that definition is not unchallenged. How did it become conflated with today’s movement that bears their names?
This is not the place to discuss the ethos and standing of modern Freemasonry within society. I am not a Freemason and have no wish to be but I have met several men who are and they seemed perfectly upstanding people to me! I don’t think, however, I can be accused of misrepresentation when I say that the movement has foundation stories that have a mystical element that some laymen (I am agnostic personally) find faintly ridiculous. Whether individual members subscribe to notions of the movement’s roots being traceable as far as the building of the Temple of Solomon or buy into the notion that masons had organised themselves in England under King Athelstan, or that the movement has links to the Knights Templar I do not know. I rather suspect that most don’t think about it too often and there is no reason why it should matter at all to anyone else. Except, that is, that those well-publicised stories inform many people’s beliefs about how the mediaeval stonemasonry industry was conducted, not least because of the sheer volume of documents and books that the movement spawns.
As we have already seen, the existence of mediaeval stonemason guilds is a bone of contention. Most scholars seem to conclude – in some cases to their own surprise, it seems – that there is virtually no evidence of their existence at all outside London until the sixteenth century. The importance of this is that if it is true then there is no apparent organisational infrastructure to support many of the assumptions about the stonemasons industry. If there were no guilds then there is no basis for the notion of a managed hierarchy of masons. Without that then it is difficult to know how and by whom “master-hood” could be conferred. How could standards be maintained if all and sundry were allowed to practice the masons craft, bearing in mind that even the ordinary mason would be earning probably double the wages of a labourer? How could apprenticeships work?
All of these issues undermine to a greater or lesser extent the basic tenets of Freemasonry. It is no secret that the organisation is hierarchical and features ceremonies, vows, secrets and passwords. Much of that has its foundations in the supposed operational environment of the stonemasons. That narrative says that masons received formal training via seven years apprenticeships; that masons were able to identify themselves to other masons via signs and passwords that were “secrets” known only to insiders; that the industry was controlled by the guilds not only in terms of employment and standards of work but also in terms of demanding both professional and moral integrity. These are values held dear by the Freemasonry movement today.
The reality seems very much more prosaic. We see an industry where training was almost certainly “on the job” rather than formal, where recruits were probably mainly sons and nephews of masons, and where advancement came not via examination by a supervisory organisation but from demonstrable skills that were recognised my masters and peers on the ground. We see masons taking on tasks that might have been considered “beneath them” and we might even assume that they sometimes took on jobs that were proved to be beyond them. In this world competence would be tested and not proven by passwords and handshakes. This is a world away from the model promoted by Freemasonry but I suspect that not readers will see in my description an industry not radically different from the one we see today. We should not really be surprised by that but such is the longevity of the theory of Guild governance theory that perhaps many will be.
I have already argued elsewhere that the nature of such stonemasons guilds that there were – and I stress again the special case that was London – were probably largely ceremonial after the Plague of 1348-50 and the start of royal sanctions against all craft guilds. What a Freemason friend describes as a “perfect Storm” of anti-guild sentiment continued via various wage-fixing statutes and then further anti-guild sentiment at the Reformation when the guilds’ own pride in its spiritual links were suddenly yet another stick with which to beat them.
The irony of this is that the birth of modern Freemasonry arguably supports the notion of post 1348 guilds that were largely ceremonial. Freemasonry designates such Guilds as “Operative”: that is, that they were concerned with the industry of freemasonry from whence their memberships were drawn. The forerunners of modern Freemasonry were “Speculative Freemasons”. The roots of this development were in Scotland where the Schaw Statute provided that a notary (lawyer) should be a clerk of the guild. Soon nobles who were enticed by the traditional “morality” of the craft were being admitted a “Speculative Masons”. Lodges became “mixed” and by 1705 there were half a dozen lodges that were Speculative only. That became an increasing thing and is the basis of modern Freemasonry. One might argue that if the post-1350 guilds had been what many modern Freemasons believed them to be – rather like modern trade unions – then Speculative masonry might never have had its opportunity.
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The Master Mason Conundrum
Running through this narrative has been a distinct lack of evidence for what I have termed the “Freemasonry” model of mediaeval stonemasonry that is built around the concept of guilds, masonic hierarchy, apprentices, journeymen, signs and passwords and perhaps above all the exalted position of “master mason”. This will not, I imagine, be the belief of every Freemason and nor, in any event, are their beliefs any concern of ours but it is and enduring popular belief.
That master masons existed is incontrovertible. Within a parish church context, however, they may as well as not have existed. Not one contracting mason is designated as “master”. William Horwood at Fotheringhay designated himself as “Master of Stamford Guild” but the contract only serves to make us question what sort of position within the building business he really occupied. It could be, of course, that his title implies that the title “master” was regarded a superfluous in contractual terms but this is not a convincing argument at all – especially when the term “Freemason” (as opposed to just “mason”) was clearly not regarded as superfluous.
Was “Freemason” then just a later synonym for master mason? It seems exceedingly unlikely. Some of the payroll documents for royal works show the employment of a master mason with several freemasons working under him. Also there are surviving contracts for St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle in 1506 and 1511 where two freemasons are cited. At Holywell in Oxfordshire in 1516 we have a contract to build a farmhouse also with two freemasons.
When we look at the Oxford contracts we see over twenty masters named. That, however, is over a period of nearly two hundred years at six different establishments and the periods for which they were actually employed there were generally short. Some of these masters were men of renown. Most work - sometimes for decades at a time - seems to have been carried out without any supervising master. A mason, it seems could make a living without having to be bothered by masters or guilds!
I have emphasised more than once that even when master masons are mentioned in records and contracts the pay they received was not much in excess of their less exalted peers; and the wage control statutes formalised this. This all casts a considerable shadow over the view of the master mason as some sort of masonic superhero. Given that some master masons throughout Europe indeed had such status we can only conclude that a master was very far from being a Master. It seems that it was a broad church!
Within the context of parish church work, one item I find very illuminating is that the contracting mason was often a local man. This includes Horwood who was a resident of the village itself. The entire rebuilding of Catterick Church was entrusted to a man who lived six miles away at the tiny village of Crakehall. There are examples of a mason being employed from a more distant town but about two thirds of contracts specified a mason living twenty or less miles away and generally living in a village. This implies that either master masons were a rare breed that were unaffordable as contractors to parishes or that they were remarkably numerous! I am sure that the former was in fact the case.
Knoop & Jones supported this notion. Citing contemporary literature (“The Regius Poem” and “The Cooke” MSS) they said: “The master would normally be the master mason of the works in charge of some big building operation for the King or for the Church or for some large landowner...The employer or owner behind the master is the “lord”, frequently referred to in the MSS. If the master was not the master mason or master of works of the Crown or of the Church or other body or person, he was probably a man of substance erecting a building by contract for some landowner or municipality. The latter type of master, whom we would call today the building contractor, is no doubt the man referred to in Article X of the Regius MS (Article IX of the Cooke MS), which provides that no master shall undertake work he cannot perform and complete...”
Elsewhere Knoop & Jones went on to say . “Practically all masons in those days (the late fourteenth century) were referred to as cementarii or masouns. Some cementarii were obviously much more skilled than others, and the best work was undoubtedly done in connection with ecclesiastical buildings which has led some writers to treat of “cathedral builders” forerunners of the later freemasons as forming a special category of masons in the Middle Ages, a body of superior craftsmen as compared with the general body of stoneworkers and possibly possessing special privileges. We have to confess to being unable to find any evidence which supports the view that ecclesiastical masons were a distinct and privileged body, either in the matter of conditions of employment or in the matter of immunity from impressment”
Knoop & Jones therefore concluded that even those designated “masters” were not necessarily the omniscient architectural geniuses we have popularly supposed - they were clearly seen to be fallible - and that not all masters were cut from the same cloth. The masters of popular imagination were employed by the Crown and the Church (not, let me emphasise, the parish church). Others were masters only through their ability to marshal the resources and capital necessary to successfully execute building contracts, albeit also surely with great competence and experience as masons and builders. We must assume that parishes would not hand over stewardship of work without assurance on all those issues.
Like it or not then, it is reasonable to suppose that one designated simply as “mason” in a contract was probably just that: neither a master recognised by his craft, nor even a freemason recognised for his great skill with hammer and chisel. We might speculate that careless draftsmanship caused lapses in professional courtesy but it is impossible to escape the conclusion that many of those contracting to work on parish churches - and employing others in the execution of those contracts - were competent rather than possessing great talent. Organisational talent might well have outweighed artistic talent.
We have to conclude that for work of the sort we see in these parish churches it was not necessary for the contractor to be “master” that had been raised to his status by a peer group as has been popularly supposed. In truth, why should we have supposed this anyway? The parish churches we see today other than those of the simplest kind evolved piecemeal over centuries not as the output of a single “genius” and his team. Nearly all of the surviving parish church contracts are for modification to or expansion of existing buildings not for greenfield building of grand new structures. This required a knowledge of building but not, I submit, genius. An ordinary mason from Crakehall, Yorkshire could apparently be trusted with the rebuilding of Catterick Church! The parish churches, in any event, could no more afford geniuses than a modern householder could afford a posh architect to plan the extension to a three-bed semi.
What credentials did a contracting mason need then? I rather suspect that he needed mainly a good track record, what we would call good references, some capital to get the project going before the first payments were received and well-off sponsors to put up those hefty sureties . The notion of masons turning up to potential employers with certificates of competence or with membership of a trade organisation or - worse still - “secret signs” is surely fanciful?
The existence of master masons in the most exalted sense of the term is well-documented by the cathedrals, abbeys and royal works but even then at those places, many important masons did not apparently qualify for the title of “master”. How then was such status acquired, Knoop & Jones having conclusively crushed the notion that masonic guilds in England existed outside London prior to the sixteenth century? The plain truth is that we have no documented knowledge at all. With no professional body or legal structure how would a peripatetic mason be registered as master? How could it be policed when a man could change his name simply by moving to a place where he was not known - which of course is precisely what a mason would be doing regularly?
Where is the evidence of prosecution or sanction against charlatans and impostors? It is perfectly possible that there were some long-forgotten and undocumented rites of initiation or examination that these men had to go through (but please spare yourself the idea of secret handshakes!). Equally possible is that the status was conferred by acclamation by their peers (in London) or simply by their fame amongst the great and good of the realm. Projecting any of this onto any masons who ever made a contract or oversaw masonic work, however, is another matter altogether. What is clear is that all master masons were not equal and those at the top of their profession did not, I fear, sully themselves with the work of altering mediaeval parish churches.
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Summary
Everything in this article (and heavily influenced by Knoop & Jones and Lon Shelby) points to the mediaeval stonemason working in a craft where the hierarchy was fluid, the training unsystematic, the availability of work uncertain. Added to the hazards of their workplace was the risk of impressment to some far-flung part of the country to work for the king. Their ability to leverage their scarcity is the post-Plague decades was limited by the self-interested statutes passed by successive kings. Yet, this was a trade that provided financial rewards considerably in excess of any species of labourer. Theirs was, one imagines, a reasonably ordered and comradely life - when they were working. We do not know how continuously a mason could find employment.
Historians like certainties and patterns but with the mason’s craft it seems that the more we find out the less we know. We once might have supposed that the masons’ craft was about guilds, master masons, journeymen and apprentices but twentieth century researchers - many of them shamefully forgotten - have comprehensively demolished most of these notions to leave frustrating space that has to be filled by deduction, inference and supposition.
I talked at the beginning of this account of the “Freemasonry School” model of the masonry industry as one end of a continuum. This was about guilds, masters, apprentices, ceremonies and “secrets”. The other end of the continuum I called the “Free Market Model”, that would be quite recognisable to us today and characterised by enterprise, on the job acquisition of skills, ambition, fighting for recognition and ultimately becoming a contractor and employer. I have no capital invested in either model but all the evidence I have seen points towards the reality being much closer to the Free Market Model.
It leaves a view of masonry that has stripped away much of the romance to leave an industry that was, to our modern eyes, ill-regulated, and relatively unstructured. Outside of the rarefied world of the great cathedrals it was prosaic. What is exciting, however, is that the craft was remarkably similar to the sort of free market, entrepreneurial business that we know in the West today. We see the Crown trying to hold back the tide of rising wages but being dished by labour shortages and the determination of workers to circumvent regulation. We see men who did not sit in their workshops waiting for work to come to them but who went out to look for it. We see clients offering perks and bonuses, often in kind. We see clients and masons entering into written contracts that were expected to be binding on both parties. It is a world of sureties and guarantees, of litigation and penalties. We see the aristocratic patrons being comprehensively replaced by the new money of trade and enterprise. The parish and its people become players in the development of their churches and not just spectators. It is a world that is vibrant and entrepreneurial and, I have to say, one that would be more likely to promote the sort of innovation and imagination that we see in our mediaeval churches. Some of the contracting masons and their teams would look like the local building contractors we are familiar with today - not Wimpey but Bloggs & Son..
On an artistic level this later democratisation - if I dare call it that - of the commissioning process led to competition between parishes and villages and between masons. This in turn led to a flowering of artisanal art in almost every village in England such as had never been seen before and has not been since the Reformation. Go to your local church. Look at the grotesque faces, at the gargoyles and the traces of wall painting. Look at the carved font, at the monuments, at the beautifully carved sedilia. Look at the window tracery that we take for granted because it is so commonplace, failing as we do so to appreciate the workmanship and the style. These men were copying, adapting, innovating. They were “pushing the boundaries”. They were not part of some stuffy establishment perpetuating the status quo.
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Sources
I have sourced much I have presented here from a number of the most important papers and publications on the subject. My conclusions are a synthesis of these works and perhaps present a view of the masonry industry with which all or any of those writers might take issue (were they all still alive!). My account differs in that it tries to project what is known about the industry onto the subject of parish church building for which source material - apart from the contracts - is sparse. In so many books about the stonemasons the reader is left to infer that what pertained at cathedrals must pertain to parish churches as well’ or that what pertained to smaller churches in France or Germany must hold true for the quirky, cussed corner of Europe that is England! This account is perhaps built on shaky foundations. But then so are all the others. The main sources I have used (in no particular order) are :
“Building in England down to 1540” by LF Salzman”. First published by OUP in 1952. A reprinted edition is available from Sandpiper Books - and worth every penny. The appendices have details of almost all extant mediaeval building contracts,
“Church Building and Society in the Later Middle Ages” by Gabriel Byng. Cambridge 2017. Paperback published in 2020. The first attempt I have seen to understand the social context of parish church building, especially post-1348. Also explores the roles of the parish, the churchwardens and how building parish churches was managed, Priceless for its unique focus on parish churches.
“The Mediaeval Mason” by Douglas Knoop and GJ Jones. Manchester University 1932?. Long out of print but available for free download if you search the internet hard enough. This was the book that made the scales fall from my eyes. An economist’s account of the industry packed with facts and figures. Simply indispensable. Interestingly, Knoop also wrote books on Freemasonry!
“Oxford Masons 1370-1530” by Eric Gee. 1953 Royal Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Long out of print. Downloadable from internet. The most comprehensive records of stonemasonry work available. Not related at all to parish churches but priceless - and free if you can find it on the web!
“Masons and Apprenticeship in Mediaeval England” by Knoop and Jones. Article in the “Economic History Review”, 1932. Available for download from Jstor.
“The Introduction and Use of Masons’ Marks in Romanesque Romanesque Buildings in England” by Jennifer S Alexander of Warwick University 2007 paper for “Mediaeval Archaeology”
“The Mediaeval Builder and His Methods” by Francis B Andrews. Published in 1925 and reprinted in 1974 by EP Publishing. Covers the whole building waterfront. Very dated in style and in conclusions and should be treated with care but still with some valuable insights.
“The Dynamics of Design: ‘Source’ Buildings and Contract Making in England in the later Middle Ages” by Gabriel Byng. 2016 Paper for the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain
“The Contract for the North Aisle at the Church of St James, Biddenham” by Gabriel Byng. 2015 Paper for the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain
Papers by Lon R Shelby of University of Southern Illinois:
“The Role of the Master Mason in Mediaeval English Building” for Speculum Journal of Mediaeval Studies. Paper available for download from JStor
“The Education of the English Master Mason”
“The Geometrical Knowledge of the Mediaeval Master Masons”
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If you are reading this as part of the “Bums, Fleas and Hitchhikers” narrative then the recommended next Section is: Friezes - A Local Phenomenon
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