Cult of Carts
The Cult of Carts (a term coined by the architectural historian A. K. Porter) is various occasions in western Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries, when ordinary lay-people harnessed themselves to carts in the place of oxen in order to transport building materials to cathedral building sites.[1]
Precursors to the 'Cults of Carts'
Throughout European history there have been several documentary accounts of occasions when the public spontaneously came together to labour on some important building project (the earliest being
A similar story was also told of the building of another Benedictine monastery at St Trond (now Sint-Truiden in Belgium), c.1155, which was included in an early 12th-century account of the Abbey's history by its Abbot, Adelhard II.
Major 'Cult of Carts' episodes in medieval France
The first such account from the Gothic period was written by
In 1145, a few years after the incident described by Suger, one of the most famous 'Cult of Cart' miracles occurred at Chartres, where Bishop Fulbert's cathedral was nearing completion. The event was described in a letter claiming to be an eye-witness account, written by Abbot Haymo of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives to the monks of Tutbury Abbey in England.[3] Haymo described how the citizens of Chartres, of all social classes, harnessed themselves to carts like oxen and dragged materials to the building site as an act of mass piety which involved the singing of hymns and the acceptance of chastisement from members of the clergy.
In the following years a number of similar events supposedly occurred in other towns around France the last recorded at
Aftermath of the 'Cults of Carts'
An attempt was made to revive the practice in early 14th century Rome when material for the rebuilding of the
During the Gothic-revivals of the 19th and early 20th centuries, various writers used the supposedly spontaneous outbreaks of popular piety exemplified by the 'Cults of Carts' to evoke an over-romanticised view of medieval Europe as a religious golden-age.
References
- ^ Arthur Kingsley Porter: Medieval Architecture, Vol.2, New York, 1909, pp. 150–60
- ^ Erwin Panofsky (ed.) Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis and Its Treasures. Princeton University Press, 1946
- ^ Teresa Grace Frisch Gothic art 1140-c. 1450: sources and documents, University of Toronto Press, 1984. (includes translations of Haymo's letter and several other contemporary accounts)
- ^ Henry Adams, Mont-St-Michel and Chartres, 1904