How were cathedrals built in the Middle Ages? Without cranes, so tall, and who paid for it

Architecture · 4 September 2026

Medieval cathedrals were built by lay master masons working for a bishop and a cathedral chapter, with money from the diocese's lands, from the townspeople and from pilgrims, over a period that ranged from thirty years to several centuries. The stone was quarried nearby and lifted by human-powered cranes, treadwheels turned by men walking inside them, onto timber scaffolding that climbed the walls as they rose; the vaults were built on wooden centering and their outward thrust was caught by flying buttresses, which is how a Gothic nave could reach 140 feet (42 m) with walls of glass. Everything below is documented: in the surviving building accounts, in the sketchbook of the 13th-century master Villard de Honnecourt, in the fabric of the buildings themselves, and in modern reconstructions such as the Guédelon castle project in France, where a medieval building site has been running with medieval tools since 1997. The buildings named are in the Buildings by style collection.

Who designed them

Not priests, and not anonymous craftsmen either. A cathedral had a master mason, a professional who had risen through the trade, who drew the plan on parchment and full-size details on plaster tracing floors, one of which survives at York, and who ran the site; his name was often carved in the building. Robert de Luzarches began Amiens in 1220; Jean d'Orbais began Reims; Peter Parler built St Vitus in Prague and put his own portrait in the triforium; William of Sens crossed the Channel to rebuild Canterbury in 1174 and fell from the scaffolding. Under the master were a master carpenter, who built the scaffolds, centering, cranes and roof, and a clerk of works who kept the accounts. Design proceeded by geometry rather than calculation: proportions were set out with compass and square from the module of the bay, and the thickness of piers and buttresses came from rules of thumb and from what had stood elsewhere, which is why the boldest experiments sometimes failed. Villard de Honnecourt's sketchbook.

Who paid

The bishop and chapter, from the income of their estates; the town, whose guilds gave windows and chapels, which is why the trades of Chartres appear in its glass; pilgrims and relics, which is why cathedrals competed for them and why the Sainte-Chapelle was built to hold the Crown of Thorns; indulgences sold for building funds; and kings and nobles for the great ones. Money came and went with harvests and wars, which is the main reason building stopped and started: Cologne stood unfinished from 1473 to 1842 with a medieval crane on its stump of tower. A cathedral was the largest economic undertaking a medieval town ever made; Amiens is estimated to have cost the equivalent of the town's entire income for decades.

Quarrying and moving the stone

Cathedrals used the nearest good stone: Caen limestone for Canterbury, shipped across the Channel; the quarries of the Oise for Paris; Pentelic marble's medieval equivalent, the fine white stones of Tonnerre and Chauvigny, for the carving. Blocks were split with iron wedges along the bed, roughly squared at the quarry to save transport, marked with the mason's mark of the man who dressed them, and hauled on ox-carts or barges; water transport was so much cheaper that a quarry on a river was worth more than a better one inland. On site the banker masons finished each block to a template, so that hundreds of identical vault ribs or window mullions could be cut in the lodge over the winter and set in the summer.

Lifting without modern cranes

• The treadwheel crane. A wooden wheel 10 to 15 feet across with one or two men walking inside it, turning an axle that wound a rope; a man's weight on the rim lifted a load ten to fifteen times his own. Treadwheels were set on the wall tops or in the roof space and moved up as the building rose; several survive in cathedral roofs, at Salisbury, Beauvais, Canterbury and Peterborough. Lewis irons, wedge-shaped keys that lock into a dovetail slot cut in the top of a block, let one rope lift a block without tying it.
• Windlasses and pulleys. Smaller loads went up on hand windlasses and block-and-tackle; ramps and inclined planes carried stone to the first levels.
• Scaffolding. Timber poles lashed with rope, standing on the ground for the lower walls and then cantilevered from putlog holes in the masonry, the square holes still visible on many cathedral walls, as the building climbed; platforms of woven hurdles.
• Centering. Every arch and vault was built on a timber frame that held the stones until the mortar set and the keystone was in; the carpenters' frames for a nave vault were huge, and were reused bay by bay.

How they got so tall

A Romanesque church carried its stone roof on thick walls and could not rise much above 80 feet (25 m). Three Gothic devices changed that. The pointed arch directs load more steeply downward and can span any width at any height, so the vault ribs of a bay can all reach the same crown. The rib vault concentrates the vault's weight on ribs that run down to the corners of the bay and to the piers, leaving the panels between them thin. And the flying buttress, an arch leaning against the wall from a pier outside the aisle, catches the outward thrust of the vault high up and carries it to the ground, so the wall between the piers holds nothing and can be glass. With those three, the nave of Chartres reached 121 feet (37 m), Amiens 139 feet (42 m), and Cologne 142 feet (43 m); the towers went higher still, Strasbourg to 466 feet (142 m) in 1439, which made it the tallest building in the world for two centuries. Details of the style are in Gothic architecture.

Why some fell down

Beauvais Cathedral, begun in 1225 to be the tallest in France, raised its choir vault to 157 feet (48 m) in 1272; in 1284 part of it collapsed, probably because the flying buttresses were too slender and spaced too far apart for the wind loads, and it was rebuilt with extra piers. In 1573 its new crossing tower, at 502 feet (153 m) briefly the tallest structure in the world, fell because there was no nave to brace it. Ely's central tower collapsed in 1322 and was replaced by the timber octagon; Winchester's was rebuilt after 1107; Lincoln's spire, which may have been the world's tallest at 525 feet, fell in 1548 in a storm. Masons learned by failure, and the surviving buildings are the ones that got the ratios right; modern analysis shows that Gothic structures are often close to the minimum thickness that will stand, which is a compliment to their builders.

How long, and who did the work

Chartres was rebuilt after a fire in 1194 in about 26 years, the fastest of the great cathedrals, because the town was rich and the relic drew money; Amiens took about 50 years; Notre-Dame de Paris about 180; Cologne 632, with a 369-year pause; Milan nearly six centuries. A site at full pace employed several hundred people: masons and their apprentices in the lodge, carpenters, blacksmiths sharpening thousands of tools a week, glaziers, plumbers for the lead roofs, and unskilled labourers, many of them townspeople in the summer months. Wages are recorded: at Westminster in the 1250s a master mason earned about eight times a labourer; work stopped in winter, when the lime mortar would not set, and the masons carved indoors. The idea that cathedrals were built by volunteers out of faith is a Romantic one: the "cult of carts", in which townspeople dragged stone to Chartres, is recorded for a few years in the 1140s, but the buildings were raised by paid professionals.

Versions and myths

Everything below is a version, not a fact. These are the claims that appear in search next to "how were cathedrals built", each with what the evidence says.

Built without any plans

Version. That masons worked without drawings. Reply. Parchment plans survive from the 13th century at Reims, Strasbourg and Vienna, and full-size setting-out survives on tracing floors; what they lacked was structural calculation, not drawing.

Built by the Knights Templar or a secret guild with lost knowledge

Version. The Freemasonic and popular-history claim. Reply. The masons' lodges were ordinary trade organisations with rules, wages and apprenticeships, documented in accounts; their geometric methods are recorded in the books of Villard de Honnecourt, Roriczer and Lechler, and were used again at Guédelon.

Built by volunteers out of pure faith

Version. The Romantic image from the 19th century. Reply. The building accounts record wages, contracts, strikes and disputes; the cult of carts was brief and exceptional.

The stone was carried by giants or the buildings took a thousand years

Version. Local legends and vague guesses. Reply. The treadwheel crane and the ox-cart are documented and several survive; the typical great cathedral took between 25 and 200 years, with the extreme cases explained by money running out.

What is in the archive

The cathedrals named here, Chartres, Amiens, Reims, Notre-Dame de Paris, Cologne, Strasbourg, Canterbury and Salisbury, are in the Buildings by style collection under Gothic; their Romanesque predecessors are under Romanesque. For the other great building feat of the pre-modern world, see how the pyramids were built.

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