The Cost of it All

All you village dwellers, I want you to use your imagination. Think about a fully developed English stereotypical church with a couple of aisles, nice tall west tower maybe with a spire, chancel, nave with clerestory. Not too big, not too small. Something like this one at Nassington..




		Nassington, Northants

Now I want you to imagine convening a meeting with your fellow villagers, showing them the design and asking them to fund it. I am going to assume for this purpose that every household is a good Christian one, by the way. You would need a good supply of smelling salts, wouldn’t you? Let’s have a little think. I live in a village with just over 1000 souls. How many households? Let’s say two hundred and fifty. I am going to assume the median England salary at the time of writing (2021) - about £30,000 per annum. Let’s assume a second income of around £10,000. So £40,000. That puts our annual village income at around £10 million. I know you can pick holes in that number - I suspect it is overstated - but just live with it as a ball park.

Now what do you think a church such as that pictured at Nassington would cost - building and materials but no land? No, I haven’t a clue either but let’s say £2 million. Not less, surely? One fifth of the annual income of the village. That’s £8,000 per household. Halve the cost if you like and call it £4000.

Now imagine what your chances would be of getting all of your two car-running, Ibiza-holidaying, takeaway-haunting, prosecco-addicted neighbours to shell out that kind of moolah? About 20% of their income, or even 10%. £4000, the cost of a good family holiday. No chance, right? Let’s be ridiculously optimistic. Let’s say that all of your

neighbours with much huffing and puffing and sucking of teeth agree to put their hands in their pockets to the tune of £500 each. I’m still in fantasy land, right? That’s £125,000. Where is the other million or two coming from? Well you might get a few thousand from the National Lottery although I doubt it. So my bet is you would turn to your local rich man to stump up.

Bear all this in mind when I tell you that there were probably 10,000 churches in England for two million souls in AD1400. That’s just over 200 people per church, a figure I find absolutely staggering. How many households? Say fifty. What was the cost of a parish church back then? The nearest estimate we can get is at Catterick in Yorkshire where, in 1412, a mason contracted to rebuild the church completely using all of the materials from the old church and was given three years to do it. He didn’t have to pay for carriage of materials or scaffolding. He was paid 160 Marks which was about £107 out of which of course, he would have paid other craftsmen and labourers. That, according to the national archives would be worth about £66,000 today which would probably not even cover the cost of the plans and legal claptrap. For that in 1412 you could buy 84 horses, 184 cows, about four tons of wool or 5350 days wages (!) for a skilled tradesman. To be paid for by a village that might have had fifty households. Over £1,320 per household. Or four cows. Or six months skilled labour. Madness, isn’t it? And compared with today’s villager, how much disposable income would one of Catterick’s denizens have had?

Of course, as you may have already guessed, the contract was entered into not by the parish but by the local magnates, the widowed Katherine de Burgh and her son, John. But the real figure to bear in mind is that sum of £107 for the cost of labour alone. The keen-witted amongst you will be thinking that a modern craftsman of any description of any description wouldn’t even get out of bed for sixty-six grand for three years, let alone pay another load of blokes from it. It gives you some idea of how much lower wages were in the fifteenth century in relative terms as well as absolute terms. 5350 days wages would have equated to about fifteen men employed for all of those three years. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Importantly, though, the work did not involve a tower. That was built subsequently.

This is not the place to discuss the ways in which parishes might raise funds. Gabriel Byng has written a hugely informative and very detailed book about that “Church Building and Society in the Late Middle Ages”. He quotes however, work by another author that suggests in 1300 (admittedly a century before the MMG) there were one thousand one hundred knights with incomes above £40 pa - one for every ten churches or chapels. There were 10,000 lower gentry with incomes of between £5 and £40 pa. There was on average one for every church and chapel. But their mean income was only about £15. This gives some indication of the importance of getting the backing of the gentry for parish church projects and, at the same time, an indication that many of the lower gentry were unable to provide anything like the full cost of major building projects. Byng’s book is hugely informative about how parishes made good these shortfalls via donations, collections, loans and bequests. Every way you look at it, however, the willingness of communities to find sums of money to build or enrich parish churches puts our modern notions of charity and community spirit to shame.

Towers

I mention towers because we have more than one contract that shed light upon their cost. I believe that the Mooning Men Group built the west tower at least at Cold Overton and probably at others.

At Dunster in Somerset in 1442 a mason contracted with the parish to build a one hundred foot tower at the price of 13/4 (one mark) per foot. That is a total cost of £66. The tower was to have battlements and pinnacles so there is an analogy with the MMG’s tower-building work. Materials and lifting equipment were provided by the parish. Three years was the time for completion. The cost was, then, about 60% of that for rebuilding of the whole church at Catterick, an interesting insight into the cost of towers as a proportion of a whole church. We are, however, talking here only of the cost of labour. What of the materials?

Stone, of course, would be the principal cost. For no better reason than that I was able to find its dimensions I am going to base a calculation of the cost for the tower at Whissendine. I acknowledge that the tower there is of very grand proportions but no more so than Oakham and Exton among the MMG churches. I am not either, attributing the whole tower to the MMG. I am just trying to show an idea of the cost of a tower.

Whissendine Tower is 18 feet square externally and it is 100 feet high. I am assuming a fairly conservative depth of stone of 2 feet 6 inches. The density of Ancaster limestone (still in production and with published specifications for the stone) is 2300 Kg per cubic metre. I calculate that Whissendine’s tower would have required something like 1,163 imperial tons of stone. Finding clear prices for stone in nediaeval times is difficult because it was measured in several different ways. L.F,Salzman found price of 18d and 20d per ton, admittedly in 1514. At a price of 20d per ton our Whissendine tower would have cost about £100 in stone, and that is saying nothing of sand and mortar.

That, however is far from the end of the story. Whissendine is within the limestone belt. Ketton, Clipsham, Ancaster and Holywell are all quarries in the vicinity of Whissendine. I am going to use the closest known quarry to Whissendine: Clipsham, a quarry still operative today. It is ten miles away. Salzman used an example of carriage costs that were 2d per ton per mile. If Whissendine’s stone came by “road” over a distance of ten miles. That means that means the cost of the stone (my coincidence) exactly doubled to £200. Wow. Dunster’s 100 foot tower was costing them £66. Put Whissendine’s material with Dunster’s labour costs - it is the kind of rough an ready calculation we have to do in this field - and you have £266! No wonder the proximity of quarries or access to much cheaper water transport - was important in those times.

To verify this estimate (and I found this post-hoc and therefore was not influenced by it), Gabriel Byng in examining the contract for the tower at Helmingham in Suffolk came to the conclusion that what on the face of it looked like an implausible contract to build a sixty foot tower for only £30 was more likely to have been for £30 in addition to £300 that the contractor had already been paid. If so then my estimate for Whissendine’s one hundred foot tower is on the low side.

I found this purely by chance on Pevsner talking of Old Leake Church in Lincolnshire. “The tower was begun in 1499 and not finished until 1547. It cost £359 14s 10. Putting aside the extraordinary time to build (presumably because of many interruptions, £300 plus still looks the right ball park for late mediaeval towers.

Note also, that this would be pro rata. At the time of the MMG the work was mostly in adding stages to towers, not building from scratch. Unless I am mistaken, however, that is what I think they were doing at least at Cold Overton..

Parapets

Roof parapets, one could argue, are a luxury. You could let your rainwater cascade from the roof to the floor and who would care? Indeed, this is precisely what they did at Cottesmore, to name but one MMG church. The problem of soaking passers-by is an obvious one but in a largely agricultural community well-used to the elements was that really a problem? Probably not. There are more serious issues, however. One is that if the water runs down your walls then it will damage your beautiful new window tracery and erode your stonework. Long eaves and good drip moulds will alleviate some but not all of that. England is not a place without wind!

I think perhaps the most pressing need for parapets to the mediaeval mind, however, was probably aesthetic. I have explained elsewhere how wider aisles, for example, inevitably led to shallower roof pitches and the need for the extra waterproof qualities of lead (of which more anon). The trouble with lead is that it is ugly. That’s just modern lead. Mediaeval lead was thicker and probably looked even worse. The money that parishes and patrons were prepared to spend on churches and the value that they placed upon aesthetics as revealed by surviving building contracts suggest that they would be loath to entertain “ugly”, especially if the parish church down the road was attractive. So parapets were not essential for practical purposes but they were probably seen as non-negotiable by most parishes. Cottesmore has an unfinished look about it.

If vanity were not the main consideration, why would most churches - at least in this area - opt for the battlemented parapets that surely cost more both in terms of labour and materials? Until the fourteenth century the installation of battlements on any building had yo be authorised by the King. Kings were not too keen, it seems, on the notion of fortified houses sprouting up across the land, making insurrection easier. Once this stricture was relaxed it was surely the association of battlements with power, dignity and affluence that drove their adoption by the parishes. There is no practical advantage to battlemented parapets over plain ones.

You might think that such adornments came cheap. Far from it. Returning to Catterick Church, the mason was given a whole year to install the parapets once the church was completed. We don’t know the implied monetary price because it all wrapped up in the overall contract price.

You might be able to procure cheaper and more local stone for your church building (I suspect this was the case for the Leicestershire ironstone churches such as Tilton-on-the-Hill and Lowesby) but your parapets had to be limestone. As a proportion of the total cost of your church, therefore, limestone battlements would come at a high price that most parishes and patrons were apparently prepared to pay. Their churches were their pride and joy.

At Wyburton (Lincolnshire) in 1419 a mason contracted to embattle the tower and to insert twelve corbels. For this he was to be paid 100 marks - about £67. Again, we don’t know whether this included materials. But that £67 is exactly the price paid by the Burgh family to rebuild the whole church! And remember, the embattlement of Wyburton was only on the tower. Then in 1529 at Orby (Lincolnshire) we see a contract that paid “only” £12 13s 4d (about) 20 marks. That, however, was for labour only. The parish was to pay for the procurement and transport of all materials. According to the National Archive, that amount of money in 1529 would have paid for 422 days of skilled labour.

So, incidental as they may appear to us, parapets - especially battlemented parapets - they did not come at an incidental price!

Lead Roofs

You can read a separate page about the leading of roofs here. I will quote from it here:

“Lead was both expensive and, of course, heavy. A “Super Foot” of lead (that is, one square foot of one inch thickness) weighed fourteen pounds. For a church roof a lot of it was needed. At Ryhall Church in Rutland the roofs cover approximately four thousand square feet. This would have required twenty five cartloads of lead, each load weighing about a ton. If the lead was bought already in sheet form it would have cost about 5s 3d per hundredweight or £5 5s per ton. That would mean that applying lead to the whole roof of Ryhall Church would have cost about £131 at a time when £1 would have bought about fifty days of skilled labour. Let’s get some perspective on that cost. A National Archives website suggests that this would have bought one of: 100 horses; 220 cows; 5 tons of wool; or 6,250 days of skilled labour! In today’s terms it amounts to about £76,000. That is just for the materials. Add in something for transport by river and by road and for labour an a today’s cost estimate of £100,000 does not look excessive. The cost of lead in pig form would, of course, been much cheaper.

5s 3d/cwt is the cost of lead in sheet form at Collyweston Church only four miles from Ryhall in 1504, perhaps a hundred years after the Mooning Men Group were at Ryhall Church. Salzman, however, also suggests £5 per ton at around the beginning of the fifteenth century so we can be sure we are in the right ball-park.”

Lead roofs went together with parapets and cornices like a horse and carriage. If you had wooden shingles or tiles for roofs you didn’t need parapets - but you probably needed steep roof pitches to make sure accumulated snow did not permeate your roof! Leading of roofs was at the very heart of the MMG work, and provided them with the opportunity for gargoyles and decorated cornices.

Of course, not all of the roofs of a church were necessarily leaded at the same time. But where the MMG were widening both aisles and building a clerestory that is going to account for most of the area of the church’s surface. As matters stand. the cost of leading all of the roofs at Ryhall Church would equate to about half the cost of building a one hundred foot tower!

Aisles and Clerestories

Aisle widening and clerestory raising was the opportunity for the MMG to leave us their sculpted friezes. How disappointing then that not one of the surviving mediaeval building contracts give us an insight into the cost of these activities.

Decoration

Again, we have no evidence of any costs for decorative sculpture - beyond, that is, the occasional one-off payment by a Cathedral for the sculpting of roofing bosses and the like. Within some of the contracts we see occasional demands for the provision of such things as pinnacles but the cost of such things is subsumed by the overall contract price.

The question of payment for carving is an interesting one. There is an argument - certainly within the over-crowded playpen of Romanesque art academics - that decorative sculpture would have been driven by aristocratic and monastic patrons who “were paying for it”. This is a particularly attractive argument for those who spend a great deal of time trying to find a meaning for it all. “People were paying, therefore those people would have wanted a say in what was sculpted, they were educated, so everything had a meaning even if it is impenetrable to us now” to paraphrase the argument. Nobody, this theory goes, would pay for meaningless imagery. This plays also to the idea that the motive was to allow better education of the benighted and uneducated peasant. I believe that is poppycock as I have explained elsewhere and I don’t need to revisit the arguments here.

When you are looking at the delicious corbels on the apse of Kilpeck Church - for my money the gem amongst gems of English parish churches - it is possible to discern the meaning of some without difficulty - the religious references direct and allegorical. That contrasts with the Norman corbels of, say, Romsey Abbey where for every one with an even remotely plausible explanation there are ten or more that are incomprehensible. At Kilpeck the corbels are highly symbolic and each stands alone as potentially capable of interpretation. At Romsey one would reasonably say that with a few exceptions, the corbel table is only capable of interpretation as a whole - and even then its function is controversial. When all is said and done, corbels are there to support the roof! Similarly if one looks at a course of beakhead decoration around a Norman doorway, one or two carvings can bear a “meaning” but the vast majority are seemingly random. Whatever beakhead means - if anything - that meaning is in the totality; and the occasional interpretable single carving is either a one-off or we are all reading into it something that was never intended!

When we look at the friezes sculpted by the MMG, they are of the same ilk as the run-of-the-mill Norman corbel table. We can see pigs, cows, men, bears and all manner of everyday creatures and objects but they convey no meaning of any kind. The long lengths of frieze are decoration to amuse the populace and if there is any meaning in any individual carving it was probably one that was born and died in the sculptor’s head. Professor Paul Binski of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University talks of “small group humour”: the notion that a closed group will develop its own quirky sense of humour and that surely is what we see with these courses of frieze carvings. They might be intelligible outsiders or they might not! The motifs were surely born out of the “closed” group po the masons lodge.

The contracts that we have for church building are remarkable for their brevity. Gabriel Byng advances a very strong and plausible theory that the contracts were intended for nothing more than to establish a framework that allowed for litigation in the event of total failure to perform on one side or the other. It is his contention that there were probably side documents that have been lost and understandings that were sometimes verbal. He also makes much of the practice of parishes calling on the mason - even within the contract document itself as we are able to see - to emulate or surpass comparable work at other local churches.

So my answer to the question “what did this decoration cost?” is, in my view, probably nothing at all. At least, nothing that was specified to the patrons. My strong suspicion is that the cornice decoration and even the functional gargoyles would have been part of that “we want what you did at you last church” ethos. The notion that parish and contractor-mason came together more or less by chance is surely fanciful. Here we have the Mooning Men Group toiling away at, for example, Tilton-on-the-Hill for a year or three. The good people of Lowesby, just a mile or so away, unsurprisingly don’t want to be left out of the fun. Or maybe they have been thinking along the same lines as Tilton already. Or maybe the bigwigs of both parishes have been comparing notes. Either way, the people of Lowesby would surely have gone to Tilton, talked to the mason and tried to engage his services next, wanting ot only they had at Tilton but wanting it better. The villages are so close together (although Lowesby Village is now completely lost) it is difficult to believe that this didn’t happen. Of course, Lowesby might have come first but that is beside the point.

At some point the two sides at Lowesby must have negotiated a price. We don’t know how those prices were agreed but we can be sure that the mason had done his own calculations and built in considerable leeway for cost overruns as well as probably a very hefty margin for himself. I think it is likely that the contractor simply built the cost of sculpture into the overall price. It is surely unlikely that the two sides sat there haggling about the cost of carvings. The mason would know he had to provide cornice-work, the parish almost certainly specified that they wanted it sculpted because the next church had it. The cost to the contractor-mason was probably quite marginal amongst the greater activities. It is even quite likely that the contractor-mason airily told his patrons that the carving was free. To which we citizens of the twenty-first century would mutter stuff about the elusiveness of free lunches, wouldn’t we? Because, folks, this kind of thing goes on today, doesn’t it? You don’t think it happened then? I know it is a mistake to assume mediaeval thinking reflects our own but in commercial matters I doubt that they were far adrift.

The Balance of Power

I am not talking about politics here. I am talking about the balance between clients and suppliers. If you have ever studied business as an academic subject you will know this is a classic strategic business question. Think supermarkets. We all know who holds the whip hand there, right?

So to our masons and their parish/gentlefolk clients. To a very great extent the balance would have been a question of availability of craftsmen - and contractors - with the skills to do the jobs that parishes wanted doing. By the turn of the fifteenth century, the amount of impressment into the King’s service in the post-Plague era had dropped drastically. This is known from royal records. That implies a supply of masons that had grown sufficiently to enable normal labour market forces to prevail. Economically, this is totally rational. In the post-Plague decades the supply of labour would ,of course, have been drastically reduced. Even if logic did not dictate this we know it was so by the steep rise in wages that was recorded, something that the King tried desperately to dampen through wage control legislation - the so-called Statutes of Labourers. This was not an unqualified success and it is almost certain that conspiracy between employer and employee would in many cases have concealed the scale of wage inflation from officialdom.

When wages increase in any given profession then the number of entrants will grow. Think of the modern legal profession. It seems certain that the diminution of serfdom would have attracted many of the young newly-liberated into the mason’s trade. With no formal training programs (my apologies to the “Stonemasons Guild” and “apprenticeship” school of thought) many of these were likely to be sons and nephews of masons; or boys who learned their trade the hard way as labourers on building sites or in the quarries. All of this points to a building labour market that had by the early fifteenth century reached a degree of equilibrium following the traumas of the previous decades.

Supply is one thing but what about demand? Well, this seems, as you might expect, to have slumped after the Plague. We can talk until the cows come home about the end of serfdom, wage inflation, social change, the move from arable into livestock. The fact remains that the Plague must have left the rural parishes in a state of shock and paralysis. Parishes will have lost many of their leaders and their functionaries. Indeed, parish priests themselves were no less alive to the economic possibilities of disaster and willingly left one parish to find greater rewards in another*. All of the evidence is that church-building, as evidenced at the better-documented great churches, slumped. The Plague did not leave in 1350. It recurred throughout the second half of the fourteenth century. Those recurrences were mild by the standard of the great pestilence but were still at levels that would destroy modern societies.

The activities of the MMG show the extent to which by 1400, England was back on its feet. The recovering parishes were ready now to invest in placating their angry God and the growing preoccupation with purgatory was concentrating the minds of less-than-virtuous bigwigs and the increasingly popular parish gilds or friendly societies on the preservation of their immortal souls. And that meant church expansion and chantry chapels.

Gabriel Byng has demonstrated in his book that it was not only labour costs that had increased drastically. So too had material costs. Whereas before the Plague inflation had been low and parishes could manage their building projects against a backdrop of relative stability they were now confronted with an unstable economic landscape. Many British readers of a certain age will recall the fevered atmosphere of high inflation in the nineteen sixties and seventies when everything had to be bought now rather than later, with credit cards and Hire Purchase deals helping out when funds were insufficient.

This must have been the golden age of the contractor-mason. What parishes will have needed was to insure against inflation. All of the contracts we see are for fixed prices: nobody, it seemed, built in escalation clauses. The risk then was thereby transferred from the client to the mason. The trouble with that is that it is an immutable law of business that low risk comes at a premium price. I would be very surprised indeed if the contractors did not load their contract prices accordingly. In fact, they would have been mad not to. Their ability to execute the contract at all would have depended on their retaining the team of hewers, layers and labourers who might have been readily enticed elsewhere.

In the building contracts, however, the parishes and patrons in almost every case supplied the stone and other materials themselves. They surely had more than a passing suspicion that the mason would add a fat margin if he was the Procurement Manager! I don’t wish to labour modern parallels too much but who of us has not allowed an electrician or a plumber to supply something and not then wondered if we could have procured it more cheaply ourselves? It is also quite likely that the parish would enlist the parishioners into using their own carts and oxen for at least some of the transport. Possibly the parishes had separate contracts with the quarries but, none have survived to my knowledge. Either way, it seems the parishes cannily kept to themselves those activities such as procurement where where they could control costs themselves, avoiding the middleman.

The key factor in the Balance of Power, in my view, had to be what we might today call information asymmetry. When the parish presented its requirements and the contractor - who surely rewarded them with much sucking of teeth and snorts of derision - and the contractor ventured a price, how was the parish to know whether it was reasonable? The parish officers could not pick up the phone and ask for more quotes! In fact, as mentioned elsewhere, priceless research by Gabriel Byng showed the contractor-masons rarely lived more than ten miles from the site so there is no sense that parishes felt able to play the field. There was no field to play. And even if there was, the most valuable thing for the client was likely to be experience and track record. It is eminently likely that the parishes would feel they were over a barrel. If you are commissioning work on your home today then multiple quotes plus, if you are very lucky, the experiences of your friends and neighbours who have commissioned similar work are your only real defences against being ripped off. If you wanted to engage a “firm” like the MMG in 1400 you might send an emissary to consult with a previous client. However no two jobs, as we can see all too readily, were the same and I am sure that the mediaeval builder (with apologies to any builders reading this who I am sure are deeply honourable) was as capable of blinding potential clients with science as his modern counterpart. That is even assuming the bloke in the next village told you what you wanted to know. He might not want to tell you. Or he might lie, the rotten toe rag! Who wants the next village to outshine your own pride and joy?

Then we need to look at the continuity here. I am honest in my admission that the mooning man as a trademark of a peripatetic group of masons is intelligent conjecture. And if you believe it’s rubbish why the hell have you read this far? <grin>. If I am right though - and I am sure I am - these guys were operating for years in the area. Although we don’t know what other groups of masons might have been also working in the area, perhaps with trademarks that we unable to spot, it suggests that the MMG were making a good living out of it and the contractor was setting prices the parishes felt able to pay, whether or not they found those prices steep. Certainly, it seems that the MMG had a compelling proposition - not least, their decorative skills - and it seems certain that a track record of delivery and longevity must have helped and that the parishes must have liked what they were seeing. I tend to think that supply was outstripped by demand. If the contractor-mason(s) had a robust and competent workforce they were probably in a strong bargaining position.

Every way I look at it, I feel that the balance of power lay with the masons, Some parishes might have rejected their blandishments but it does not seem to have mattered much to the masons. There was always work to be had, it seems.

* Within this context, it is interesting, as I write this in the Covid-19 year of 2021, to see employees becoming choosy about their jobs, enjoying wage inflation and in some cases demanding revised terms and conditions - especially the ability to work from home - from their employers.

Summarising the Costs

I have tried here to demonstrate how remarkable were the ambitions of the mediaeval parishes and the local gentry in revitalising their church buildings only fifty years after the greatest pandemic catastrophe in recorded history. The population had perhaps halved yet the average parish church wanted to increase its space at a time when it had half the parishioners to fund it. We have to remember, however, in mediaeval times capital was mainly land and even Plague could not destroy that. Marginal farmland was abandoned but the vast majority was not. Fewer owners with larger acreages drove economies of scale and I don’t think it is controversial to say that the free man was likely to be more innovative and more industrious than his bondsman predecessor. Where there was insufficient labour to work the land, or insufficient demand for its produce, then sheep could supplant arable to feed a continent-wide market. Wealth became more concentrated and survivors saw their disposable incomes - the amounts available, amongst other things, to fund communal projects - rise at the very time when preoccupation with the afterlife was at its strongest.

Yet, as you can see, the cost of altering churches was astronomical and no matter how prosperous parishioners might have been relatively, the commissioning of such work was - literally and figuratively - a huge act of faith.

The “typical” MMG work program seemed to involve :

Widening both aisles and re-fenestrating in the Perpendicular style
Raising a clerestory, usually involving the remodelling of the aisle arcades
Leading the roofs - probably of the whole church and installing rainwater goods and/or gargoyles
Applying either plain or battlemented parapets, usually to the whole church
Installing cornice and adorning it with sculpture.

What might this have cost? Presumably the raw construction cost would have been a lot less than the £107 paid for the rebuilding of Catterick Church. Let’s say £60. Add to that £20 for parapets. Let’s say the cost of the stone was half that of Whissendine’s tower : £100. For leading the roofs, let’s take my estimate of the cost of Ryhall’s roof (including material). That’s £131. That’s a total of £311, Since I don’t believe the sculpture was really “free” let’s round it up to £320, of which maybe £90 would have gone to the contractor.

This is an estimate, a ball park figure if you like. It could be say £50 out either way and it goes without saying that some churches are bigger than others. Let’s not forget also the very important point that information asymmetry (see above) would have made for wild variations in cost estimates. I feel this would have led to a great deal of very flabby contracts, usuallybut not invariably to the advantage of the contractor. It is the order of magnitude that I am trying to establish here. You can see readily see why a couple of churches (Cottesmore and Hungarton) did not want to pay for parapets. And we don’t know if some churches had already had leaded roofs. It seems unlikely when the original steeply-pitched roofs would not have required it.

Conclusion

So, if I am right or at least in the right area, our MMG churches were shelling out around £300 a throw. That is the equivalent of 236 horses, 517 cows or 15000 days of skilled labour. Which is nuts, frankly. If there were 50 households that’s ten cows each or 300 days of skilled labour. Impossible numbers even if payments were staged over three years. Double the number of households and halve the cost of you like: 75 days of skilled labour per household. A more interesting statistic perhaps would be that it would cost twenty years of the average annual income of the lower gentry.

Do read Gabriel Byng’s book if you are interested in knowing more about how parishes raised money. He is one of the few who will venture into the “how the hell did they afford it?” territory.

When you visit churches, these kinds of numbers when you are wondering about how some churches managed to expand in grandiose fashion where others are so modest. It is likely that those poorer churches just didn’t have the economies or the required quota of beneficent gentry to pay. The MMG churches were all in prosperous sheep-rearing areas. Oakham was a county town. Langham benefited from having an Archbishop of Canterbury amongst its alumni. Exton was richly endowed. But for all of these churches, the sheer ambition and energy was astonishing. Especially to our modern eyes where the concept of the “widow’s mite” is very much a thing of the past! Which is where this article came in,,,,,

Recommended Next Section: What can we Learn?

Preface

Introduction

Friezes - a Local Speciality

The Gargoyle Master

Bums and Fleas

The Square Headdress

Black Eyes and Lead Roofs

Styles of Sculpture

Church Building in the Post-Plague Era

Mapping the Sculptors

Scratching those Fleas