It was barbarian they argued because there wasn't enough ornament and because the architect-hero had not put his

It was barbarian, they argued , because there wasn't enough ornament, and because the architect-hero had not put his name and his ego in capital letters all over the building. As a parish priest from Andres in southern France wrote around 1200 of a local building site: "who but a man stupefied or deadened by age or cares, could have failed to rejoice in the sight of that master Simon the Dyker, so learned in geometrical work, pacing with rod in hand and with all a master's dignity, and setting out hither and thither, not so much with that actual rod as with the spiritual rod of his mind?"Renaissance commentators, a quarter of a millennium later, were to call the French Style Gothic - which was intended as a term of abuse (deriving from the word Goth or Barbarian). The fate of the vaults of the choir at Beauvais demonstrated that the masons knew much more about geometry and stone-cutting than they did about engineering. And as for deadlines, the construction could take anything from 25 years (if the foundations already existed) to several generations: some cathedrals are still unfinished.

What the builders did have, though, were amazing practical skills, with fairly rudimentary tools, the ability to put up a building which depended on stability rather than strength, and of course, the conviction that what they were doing was right. Close examination of cathedrals built in the French Style reveal that different work-teams had very different standards of workmanship and even different ideas about design within the same building. During building, there was disagreement about precise units of measurement. The floor of Chartres has a gentle slope to it, probably to make the place easier to sluice out after pilgrims had turned it into a mass bed and breakfast.There weren't any feasibility studies, or even detailed scale designs.

Shoemakers, of course, had a vested interest in the pilgrim business - it was a good way to wear out shoes - and they would also have gained redemption points for their generosity But the motivation wasn't just, or even mainly, air miles. The cathedral was an integral part of everyday life: inside its walls from the evidence of various edicts, people would gossip, exercise their dogs, parakeets and falcons, play ball games, go courting, shelter from the rain, and buy wine and food from vendors who had set up shop all along the nave. The bottom line - literally - of the famous ''Good Samaritan'' window in the south aisle contains a message from the sponsor - the shoemakers. Panels show shoemakers at work and in one they can be seen offering the window to the cathedral. Of the 176 stained glass windows in Chartres Cathedral, 43 were donated by the merchants and craftspeople of the town: their generosity was duly inscribed on the glass itself. And it worked.But cathedrals were also the engine of the local economy.

And so financial contributions from feudal counts and dukes, merchants, craft brotherhoods and tradespeople - plus gifts in kind, and free skilled labour - were also substantial Not exactly ''matching funding'', but something like it. Chartres possessed a particularly powerful relic - the Sancta Camisia, widely believed to have been the tunic worn by Mary when she gave birth to Jesus - which went on a benefit around northern France and southern England when building- work had to shut down through lack of funds. Emperor Baldwin II of Constantinople offered the Crown of Thorns as security for a substantial loan, while visitors to the shrine of St Thomas a Becket at Canterbury produced a quarter of the cathedral's entire annual revenues. When the money ran out, the sacred relic around which the church was to be built could be sent on a fund-raising tour around western Europe.