medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
From: John Briggs <[log in to unmask]>
> Christopher Crockett wrote:
>> in the case of Bercheres stone, carting it the km or so to the river at
Morancez and loading it onto barges, floating it downstream to the City, and
offloading it for use at sites *down in the valley* was certainly a
possibility (at least so it appears, from my comfortable armchair view).
>> but hauling it up the hill, through the town, to the cathedral seems to be
enough of a task to obviate the laborsaving achieved by using the water
route.
> What is the distance?
here's the most decent map i could find on the web --which is not to say that
it's a Decent Map
http://www.quid.fr/maps/RfQj1vbISu5mKKMrBYrMuYa+wfXkq90Pqz22d+4e1/A=
the site i'm thinking of off-loading the stone from the barges would be
somewhere near St. Peter's, south of the cathedral, not far from the river.
the incline of the hill begins just north of St. P's and the rue de St. Pere
is the shallowest incline from the valley floor to the citadel,
skirting the scarp of the hill (St. Aignan is up on it, as is the Marché,
former site of the Counts' palace), taking a left at the fork,
then winding its way through the town, passing to the left of the Marché, a
total distance of maybe a km., as the crow flies.
but crows can't carry all that much weight in stone, and that treck up the
hill and through the town looks a hellofa lot easier on a map than it would be
in the actual doing of it, day in and day out, for decades, disrupting the
normal traffic of the town all the while.
>A shortish distance uphill is something that you can throw labour at
and we're dealing, at least in part, with labor supplied in the context of
something between Mass Hysteria and Julian Jaynes' "Bicameral Mind" hypothesis
(cf. Carl Barnes' nice summary, “Cult of Carts”, in The Grove Dictionary
of Art, available here: http://ariadne.org/cc/towers/cult-o-carts.html )
>- and still be cheaper than a longer distance overland.
yes, but there's more than just "distance" involved --there's the topography,
both natural and man-made.
>The final carving could have been done at the bottom of the hill and the
finished stone transported up the hill.
a matter of a few scores of pounds, max, out of hundreds; or thousands.
btw, the inset map in the upper right
http://www.quid.fr/maps/RfQj1vbISu5mKKMrBYrMuYa+wfXkq90Pqz22d+4e1/A=
gives an idea of the distance from centre ville to the quarry at Bercheres
(lower right).
from other maps (which i seem to have misread) the distance from Bercheres to
the river at Morancez is nearly 10km. (over flat land), while that from B. to
the cathedral site would have been about 20km., all but the last bit only very
slightly "uphill".
btw, here's a nice view of the region from a Cassini map of 1750:
http://www.davidrumsey.com/maps1050039-25650.html
click on the thumbnail of the map and you get an enlargable view which you can
navigate around in.
sort of.
beautiful things, those cartes de Cassini.
c
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