Church building and the economy during Europe’s ‘Age of the Cathedrals’, 700-1500

"This paper presents new data on the construction history of about 1,100 major churches in Western Europe between 700 and 1500 CE. The idea is that church building can be seen as an index of economic activity, reflecting confidence in the future, command of substantial ecclesiastical revenues, mobilisation of large teams of construction workers, and an ability to assemble impressive quantities of building materials at a single site, with the wider economic multiplier effects that this entailed. In a pious age, Church reform, monastic foundation and advancing architectural technology helped kick-start and then lend momentum to the process. Whether so much conspicuous construction activity was beneficial to or a burden upon Christendom’s relatively poor and under-developed economy can be debated. What is clear is that churches, like the books and manuscripts produced in the same period, are artefacts that can be quantified. Whereas hard data are lacking for many other aspects of economic activity, at least before 1250, research by generations of architectural historians means that much is known about the construction history of individual churches, commencing with their original foundation. Putting this information together provides estimates of the ecclesiastical building industry for a number of European countries, currently Switzerland, Germany, France, the Low Countries and England but potentially extending to the whole of Latin Christendom. The results shed fresh light on the onset, scale, spatial dimensions and duration of the great economic boom that got under way sometime after 1000 and corresponding features of the long contraction then set in train during the fourteenth century."