From the square below, the oxen on the towers of Laon Cathedral look like decoration. Stone animals on a stone church. Climb 210 steps up a narrow spiral staircase, step onto the open gallery with the wind in your face, and they become something else. Larger than any real ox. Sixteen of them, eight per tower, staring out over a landscape that once made this town one of the wealthiest in medieval France.
When I walk inside, my impression is that I feel very small.
Lucie Legroux knows why they are there. She is a historian and guide at the cathedral, the kind who says “I don’t know” when she doesn’t know and gives you three centuries of context when she does. We met her at the tourism office next to the cathedral, and she took us on a route that started at the western portals and ended, many steps later, face to face with these animals.
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A town built on wine
Laon today is a small town on a hill. Quiet streets, a handful of cafés, a cathedral that seems too large for its surroundings. In the Middle Ages, this was a different place entirely. Laon was a royal residence. Its bishop held the title of Duke and Peer of France, a position that put him in the inner circle of the king.
The money came from wine.
Laon: A Forgotten City of Wine, Power, and Gothic Splendor
Did you know wine once paid for Laon’s cathedral? In the 12th century, this northern French city boasted vineyards that helped build one of Europe’s earliest Gothic masterpieces. The French Revolution brought this prosperity to an end—yet traces remain, waiting to be rediscovered.
“The vineyards covered all the slopes of the hill,” Lucie explains. “Some of the best plots were highly coveted, especially the Goutte d’Or.” Laon wine was white, well-regarded, drunk as far as Flanders and possibly England, and served at the royal table during coronation ceremonies.
The vineyards are gone now. Forests cover the slopes. The railway brought red wines from Bordeaux in the nineteenth century, tastes changed, and phylloxera destroyed what economics had already weakened. But the old vineyard paths survive. The locals call them grimpettes. You can still walk them.
Early Gothic, still human
The cathedral was started around 1155 and completed by 1235 at the latest. That places it in the first generation of Gothic architecture, after Saint-Denis and roughly contemporary with Noyon and Senlis. What you notice when you step inside is the light. Then the length: 120 meters, which is considerable for a building of this period. And a symmetry that Lucie calls “pushed to the extreme.”
The vault rises to 24 meters. That sounds like a lot until you compare it to Beauvais, where the choir reaches 48 meters. Laon stays within what Lucie calls “relatively human dimensions.” You feel the height without being crushed by it.
The construction tells you where Gothic architecture stood at this point. The vaults are sexpartite: six ribs around each keystone, alternating strong and weak piers. A signature of early Gothic. The elevation has four levels (great arcades, tribune, triforium, and high windows) where later cathedrals would reduce to three. The tribune is still there because it was structurally necessary. Flying buttresses were not yet strong enough to carry the lateral load alone. At Chartres, Amiens, and Beauvais, that tribune would disappear. At Laon, it stays. That is what makes this building a textbook of the transition.
Eighty-five canons and a unique rose window
The east end of the cathedral is flat. No radiating chapels, no curved apse. That was not always the case. Originally, the cathedral had a rounded chevet with chapels, but it spanned only three bays. The college of canons numbered 85, and they did not fit.
The solution was practical: extend the cathedral by seven bays and flatten the east wall. That decision produced an unexpected result. A flat east wall allowed for something no other French cathedral has: a rose window on the eastern facade.
You see it from the gallery level, where original green floor tiles from the medieval period have survived. Standing there, the rose window ahead and the full length of the nave stretching behind you, it becomes clear why the canons pushed for more space. The light through that window alone would have justified it.
A cornerstone and a hanging bone
Every cathedral has stories that don’t quite fit the official record. Lucie has two.
In the center of the nave lies the pierre d’angle, the cornerstone. A square made of four rectangles (two large, two small), all cut from Tournai stone, the dark blue limestone from what is now Belgium. No one knows exactly why it is there. “It seems the height of the building was calculated in relation to this stone,” Lucie says. She does not overstate the claim. The evidence is uncertain. The stone is real.
The second story is stranger. For centuries, a whalebone hung in the central portal of the cathedral. Canons brought it from England around 1113, possibly as a stand-in for the sacred horn of the unicorn (a symbol of purity and virginity in medieval thinking). The bone disappeared sometime in the eighteenth century, then resurfaced. It now sits in the municipal museum. The people of Laon knew it by a plainer name: l’os qui pend. The hanging bone.
The legend of the white ox
Back to the towers. Why sixteen stone oxen on a cathedral?
Lucie is direct: nobody knows. No text from the construction period explains them. The only account is a legend, and she tells it as a legend, not as history. During construction, all stone had to come by road. No rivers run near Laon. Oxen hauled the loads up the steep slopes of the hill. One day, an ox in a team collapsed and died of exhaustion. The remaining animals could not move the load. Then, according to the story, a white ox appeared from nowhere, helped the team pull its cargo to the building site, and vanished.
The builders put oxen on the towers. Eight facing outward on each side, into the four directions of the wind. Whether as gratitude, as memory, or simply because the story was too good not to tell in stone, nobody wrote down. The oxen remain. The explanation does not.
Seven towers planned, five built
The original design called for seven towers. Only five were completed. One was later destroyed during the Revolution, another struck by lightning. Unlike the current reconstruction at the basilica of Saint-Denis near Paris, there are no plans to rebuild what Laon has lost.
What remains is still more than most French towns can show. According to Lucie, the city holds the highest density of listed historic monuments per square meter in France. The cathedral is why visitors come. The rest of the old town is why some of them stay longer than planned.
Parce que c'est beau
Lucie is not a believer. When I asked whether the cathedral still holds spiritual meaning for her, she did not hesitate. “I am profoundly agnostic.” But what followed was more revealing. For her, the building is a symbol of what people achieve when conviction runs deep enough to push material and craft beyond their known limits. Not faith in the religious sense. Faith in the act of building something you will never see completed.
Churches across France are emptying. The question writes itself: why do cathedrals still pull people in?
Lucie answered in three words. “Parce que c’est beau.”
Because they are beautiful.
This article was created in cooperation with Lucie Legroux, Guide-conférencière, Office du Tourisme Laon
LUX Travel Tips
- Book your guided tour at the local Office de Tourisme
- While exploring Notre-Dame de Laon and its captivating tale, don’t forget to venture to the magnificent Abbey Church of St. Martin, a timeless treasure established in 1124.
- I stayed in an authentique French hotel, Hotel de La Banniere de France. No fancy modern rooms, but warm and cosy and a great host. Located just a 5 minute walk from the cathedral and 5 minutes to St. Martin’s. You’ll support this website if you book your hotel with this link (we get a small commission), so thank you!
- We had an excellent dinner at ‘Le Passage au Verre’, just 1 minute walk from the cathedral. It’s a charming establishment that offers a delightful dining experience.
Read more:
Laon Cathedral: What the Oxen See
Interview with Lucie Legroux, official tour guide of Laon Cathedral. She takes you on an online guided tour into this magnificent early Gothic cathedral.
Beauvais Cathedral: Gothic Ambition That Reached for Heaven
Why was Beauvais Cathedral never finished? Let Aldéric Carpentier (guide and volunteer) take you through this story of ambition, disaster, and hope.
Unveiling the Secrets of the Sint-Servaas Basilica – Expert Pieternel Coenen on 16 Centuries of History
Discover the hidden history of Maastricht’s Sint-Servaas Basilica with expert Pieternel Coenen. From medieval kings to sacred relics, explore 16 centuries of faith, power, and art inside the Netherlands’ oldest church.
