152 FROM THE ART OF BUILDING TO THE ART OF THINKING
The masons were dependents of an officer of the royal house, the
master of the works of masonry. In 1268, during the time Etienne
Boileau lived, this individual was Master Guillaume of Saint Paul. He
had under his jurisdiction masons, stonecutters, mortar makers, and
plasterers. We do not know to what exactly the trade of mortellier cor-
responded. This word has long since vanished from speech, but it most
likely concerns what are today called dressers—workers who, after the
architect and master mason have finished, oversee the cutting and lay-
ing of stone, preparation of mortar, and so forth.^10
This illustrates how far things were then from the specialization of
today. For a long time, even extending into modern times, architecture
consisted only of this division mentioned by the Canon Hugues de Saint
Victor in the eleventh century: masonry (cementaria), which included
stonecutters (latomos) and masons (cementarios), and carpentry, which
included carpenters (carpentarios) and joiners (tignarios). One fact
should not be overlooked: Until the seventeenth century, private archi-
tecture was made of wood—long beams, then short beams after the fif-
teenth century. Only sacred or public buildings were constructed of
stone. Rare indeed were the houses built of stone.^11
Architects were merely workers of a higher degree, master builders
who worked personally either as sculptors or as simple stonecutters.
Until the Renaissance, they were designated by the term master mason
or that of master of the work, magister aedificans, or magister aedifi-
ciorum, when they were the head supervisors of worksites. The word
architect received scant use during the Middle Ages. Pierre de
Montreuil gave himself the distinction of the title doctor lathomorum.
Like their fellow workers, architects were paid by the day, but benefit-
ing from a well deserved consideration, their salary was higher and
included tips as well as gifts (robes, hoods, gloves, pipes of wine, and
so forth). These masters of the work were generally men of higher
learning. They were in no way technical specialists; rather they worked
simultaneously on architectural constructions, war machines, furnish-
ings, and sculpture. Like Villard de Honnecourt, who was quite fluent
in Latin and highly knowledgeable about different sciences, and like
Tetillon, a monk of Saint Gall Abbey, who was known throughout
Germany in the eleventh century as a preacher, professor, Latinist,