What still seems incredible, and is nevertheless attested by every chronicle of the time, is that this horde of old folks and children, of women and men, were at once amenable to discipline; and yet they belonged to every class of society, for there were among them knights and ladies of high degree; but divine love was so powerful that it annihilated distinctions and abolished caste; the nobles harnessed themselves with the villeins to drag the trucks, piously fulfilling their task as beasts of burthen; patrician dames helped the peasant women to stir the mortar, and to cook the food; all lived together in an undreamed surrender of prejudice; all were alike ready to be mere labourers, machines, loins and arms, and to toil without a murmur under the orders of the architects who had come out of the cloister to direct the work.

Nothing was ever more simply or more efficiently organized; the convent cellarers, forming a sort of commissariat for this army, superintended the distribution of food, and saw to the sanitation of the huts and the health of the camp.  Men and women were no more than docile instruments in the hands of the chiefs they themselves had chosen, and who in their turn obeyed gangs of monks.  These again were under the orders of the wonderful man, the nameless genius, who, after conceiving the plan of this cathedral, directed the whole work.

To achieve such results the spirit of the multitude must really have been admirable, for the humble and laborious work of plasterers and barrow-men was accepted by all, noble or base-born, as an act of mortification and penance, and at the same time as an honour; and no man was so audacious as to lay hand on the materials belonging to the Virgin till he had made peace with his enemies and confessed his sins.  Those who were reluctant to repair the ill they had done, or to frequent the Sacraments, were dismissed from the traces, rejected as reprobates by their comrades, and even by their own families.

At daybreak every morning the work decided on by the foremen was begun.  Some dug the foundations, cleared away the ruins, carried off the rubbish; others, going in parties to the quarries of Berchere-l’Eveque, at about five miles from Chartres, cut out enormous blocks of stone, so heavy that in some cases a thousand workmen were not many enough to hoist them from their bed to the top of the hill where the church was presently to rise.

And when these silent toilers paused, exhausted and broken, the sound went up of prayers and psalms; some would groan over their sins, imploring Our Lady’s mercy, beating their breast and sobbing in the arms of priests who bade them be comforted.

On Sundays long processions formed with banners at their head, and the shout of canticles filled the streets that blazed from afar with tapers; the canonical services were attended by a whole people on their knees; relics were carried with much pomp to visit the sick.