Cathedrals

By Elise

A Cathedral is an enormous building that Christians built to worship in, and to glorify God. When they built them the cathedrals were the tallest structures at that time. The amazing thing is, they are still in use today.

When a Cathedral was going to be built, a site was picked with level ground and a quarry with good quality stone nearby. Without the stone nearby, it would be extremely hard to transport all the stone needed to build a cathedral overland. Also, an extremely talented architect was needed to design one of these massive buildings, and a lot of workers were needed too.

When a site had been picked and the architect and workers had been hired, the process was ready to begin. The architect would make designs and pick the one that he thought would work best. Once the design was picked the work began. If there had been a cathedral there before and it had been destroyed somehow, then it would be replaced, often with a larger one, by building over the original crypt. Otherwise work would be started with the crypt. Workers made sure the crypt was level, and then excavated around it, and stone was placed in to make the foundations.

As the cathedrals got taller and taller, a new style of building was needed to give them more support. This was where flying buttresses came in. They worked by pushing the walls toward each other, canceling the downward force, that was created by the roof as it got higher and higher. This meant that less stone was needed to support the walls.  

As the walls got higher the workers needed scaffolding made from long timbers to continue the work. Long enough pieces of wood were rare, so the scaffolding was raised up into notches left in the stone for this very purpose. When the workers needed to go higher, the scaffolding climbed too.

With more support holding the building, with the flying buttresses and all, there was more space for light and air to come through. The cathedral builders came up with a beautiful way to let light in while they kept out the cold. They used colorful pieces of glass that they made by melting sand, wood ash, and sometimes old pieces of colored glass together, until it was a liquid. Then a glass blower got some of it on a stick and blew it until it was a nice big sphere, like a balloon. It was then transferred to another rod, cut away from the first and spun to create glass sheets. These sheets of glass were then cut apart to fit in the correct place in the layout of the window. The pieces of colored glass were laid together and joined with lead. The windows told the story of the life of Jesus and the saints.

Along with stained glass windows, cathedrals often had statues of saints on the outside and inside. These statues reminded the people of the saints. On the inside of the cathedrals there were often paintings. These paintings like the stained glass told bible stories and stories about the life of important people.

The cathedrals were the grandest buildings of their time, and they still are very grand buildings today. These magnificent buildings show that the medieval Europeans were as inventive as we are, and every bit as ingenious.