St Stephen's, Vienna, and the crises of 1408: practice theory and the socio-politics of the medieval building site

ABSTRACT In 1408 Vienna's politics were traversed by violence. Dynastic conflict among the Habsburgs and internecine differences between residents culminated in executions and overthrows of the city's government. Concurrently, building work at the city's largest church – overseen by leading figures in its civic politics, also victims of one of the year's purges – slackened. It was a moment when high politics, architectural production and the everyday practice of urban life intersected in ways unusually visible to the historian. Historians have adopted different historiographical positions for positing medieval architecture as a socio-political phenomenon, based on unilateral acts of princes and churchmen, dynamics of class conflict, administrative techniques of project managers or shared ‘imaginaries’. This article reflects on the events of 1408 using a new approach, taken from practice theory, to describe how the building site, reconceptualised as an open-ended bundle of doings and sayings, constituted and transformed the late medieval Viennese social.


Introduction
In 1408, the vast collegiate church of St Stephen's in Vienna was undergoing a major wave of construction, while, outside its walls, the city's politics was convulsed by bloodshed. 1 At the start of the year, the men who dominated the building project's leadership, all taken from the city's wealthy mercantile minority, had been in control of the city. A spiral of violence began when they had five political opponents, all members of Vienna's artisanal majority, executed. Barely a week later, everything changed. The two sides had been supported by rival Habsburg brothersthe merchants by Ernst 'the Iron' and the craftsmen by Leopold IVbut the two were suddenly reconciled and power within the city shifted to the craftsmen. The manager of the building work at St Stephen's, Hans Mosprunner, the mayor, Konrad Vorlauf, and a number of other powerful merchants were arrested. A few days later, three of them, including Vorlauf, were beheaded. 2 They would have been able to see the church's half-built south tower from the pig market where they were executed. A later chronicler would describe, bonding together the building site and the battle ground, how the men were buried in the place where the foundations for the north tower of St Stephen's would be dug. 3 Meanwhile, building work ground almost to a halt.
This bloody vignette reveals not only how the internecine politics of the Habsburg dynasty met the factional politics of Vienna's civic government but also how their intersection cut through the city's architectural production. St Stephen's was neither straightforwardly a ducal nor a civic building project. 4 On the one hand, it was in the midst of a wave of construction that had been languishing since it was instigated in the late 1350s by Duke Rudolf IV, who had established a college of canons and a Habsburg burial ground there as part of a concerted efforted to raise the status of the city, church and (arch)duchy. 5 Indeed, the Habsburgs (and before them, the Babenbergs) had long tried to raise the church to a cathedralsomething only achieved, and incompletely, in 1469. 6 It was overseen, on the other hand, and substantially funded by the city authorities: Mosprunner was one of a line of exceptionally wealthy citizens who had administered its week-by-week construction. 7 Complicating matters further, Vorlauf and others in the mercantile party had held important roles in the ducal administration as well as having close links to ecclesiastical officials at St Stephen's. 8 The chapter itselfunlike in many towns in the Empire and despite a plan of Rudolf's to the contraryhad no control over the church assets and did not participate in the building accounts, but its involvement in the work can be suggested. 9 Moreover, the building work was not only the result of the assimilation of ducal, ecclesiastical and civic objectives, but also productive of new political, and economic, compacts between the city's mercantile and hereditary elite and its craftsmen and labourers. 10 These relationships were also in flux: since the city's council, formerly dominated by the mercantile and hereditary elite, had been compelled in 1396 to add a large proportion of wealthy craftsmen to its numbersix of a total of 18artisans were both members of the council and opponents to its majoritarian group; both allies of some ducal claimants and opponents of others; both the recipients of funding for architectural production and (part of) its source; both overseeing its audit and direction and being excluded from its direct management (which remained in the hands of the mercantile elite, including men like Mosprunner, until 1526). 11

Politics and architecture in medieval Europe
This brief introduction, to which I shall return later, indicates not only the great complexity of the politics of architectural production in medieval Europe, but also the difficulty of finding historiographical tools for its study. Approaches to the topic, concerning both Vienna and elsewhere, have been overwhelmingly concerned with the semiotic: how major political figures used their commissions as canvases for displaying and communicating their ideals, identities and loyalties or as venues for spectacular pageantries to the same end. Lukas Wolfinger, for example, described St Stephen's as 'a stage and medium of princely self-presentation', both the backdrop (Kulisse) for 'communicative events' and a 'symbol of Rudolf IV' himself; another historian has divided the church into a sequence of Herrschaftszeichen, symbols of lordship, according to the duke most associated with each part of the building. 12 More specifically, Rudolf's plans for St Stephen's are often framed as 'an expression of grudging dependency as well as of admiration' for the Prague court of his father-in-law, Charles IV. 13 The model is textual: buildings are to be 'read' as a compilation of, or setting for, iconographic, ritual or stylistic signifiers that functioned as a vehicle for the patron's communication to a contemporary audience. Often this draws on biographical or dynastic associations, which the historian must then recover, standing in as an idealised contemporary reader and interpreter of patronal intention. Architectural politics, in other words, is understood as a matter of unilateral communication expressive of the interests of an elite individual or institution.
However, at least four other scholarly traditions, often overlapping, can be identified, that have understood socio-politics of medieval architecture more expansively. Marxist architectural historians have described building work as a product of economic forces, and have paid close attention to the means and relations of production (that is, the technological functioning and social organisation of the building site) in general 14 or to the exploitative leadership of clerical patrons, sometimes also expressed in the project's iconography, in particular. 15 For these scholars, the building site is either a localisation of or a tool in a totalising and extractive relationship between lord and worker. 16 A related approach has maintained a Marxist focus on the relations of production but inverted its analysis to describe large-scale social co-operation in medieval church building. 17 It has often used this cohesive social functionalism to make claims about the projects' symbolism, somewhat in the manner of the patronal approach. Concerning Vienna, Johann Böker has described St Stephen's as representing 'the community of all the groups involved in its realisation' such that the southern tower, for example, could be a 'symbol … of the cohesion of all the groups in society under the Habsburg crown'. 18 For him, its construction served a positive 'community building function' but one made possible by, and thus integrating, the Habsburg dukes. 19 Maintaining a focus on cohesion, but jettisoning a Marxist or functionalist account of group co-operation for a Durkheimian collective consciousness, sociologists of architecture have described the broader social relations, or abstract bonds or ideals, that not only produced but were also produced by buildings. Implicit in many such approaches is that 'societies' share a 'central imaginary or constituting foundation' that is expressed and enforced by its architecture, for which the medieval institutional Church (and faith) and its material churches have been posited as a central example. 20  visual presence in even the earliest depictions of the city is often noted. 21 Lastly, and in a broadly Smithian or liberal approach that largely dispenses with either ideals or broader social relations, economic or organisational studies have treated medieval building work as a profit-and-loss enterprise, focusing on fundraising, expenditure and internal administration, in which episcopal or urban leadership is only one small part of a larger managerial complex. 22 The political vision of these scholars has been dominated by the particular and the empirical, local changes in the organisation of management and finance, rather than broader questions of social dynamics, political partiality or building technology. 23 Implicitly, however, an emphasis on practical co-operation and organisation has contrasted with the powerful social tensions recognised by Marxist scholars, the non-material 'imaginaries' of the sociologists, or the strict hierarchical division suggested by scholars of princely patronage. 24 Each model would, however, struggle to encompass the intersecting yet conflicting affinities and interests at work on the St Stephen's building site: the events of 1408 point to neither a unilaterally imposed message, nor a single frontier of class struggle, nor a shared 'imaginary' or cohesive social sphere, nor a problem of administrative oversight. In grouping these diverse scholars of medieval architecture with major schools of social theory, I have intended, however, to point to what I believe is a fruitful future approach to the topic, rooted in a collection of theories that, although traceable in some fashion to Marx, evolved through the later twentieth century to a position of central prominence: social practice. 25 The five approaches just surveyedwhich, for convenience, I will term 'patronal', 'Marxist' (whether antagonistic or cohesive), 'sociological' and 'organisational' do not posit the building site as itself constitutive of the political, the social or the spatial. Rather the political emerges as either localised to princely, ecclesiastical or civic authorities or to their conflicts and co-operations with exploited groups, or idealised as a universal 'imaginary', with architecture as either its field of operation or material symptom. By contrast, practice theory locates 'the social' not in particular centres or ideals but rather across moving bodies and objects as they form regularised 'nexus[es] of doings and sayings', routinised human-object (inter)actions. 26   implicitly depoliticising the city or erasing the dominance of princes and mayors. Quite the opposite, it is rather that the field of the political, even the coercive, is expanded across the total range of practices that make up the city, including those of the building site, itself: 'power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate.' 27 In this article then, Viennese society figures neither as a harmonic whole nor as riven by a single dynamic of class struggle nor as straightforwardly hierarchical, but rather as a 'flat' complex of moving human bodies and things, and building work, not as an expression, representation or tool but as one constitutive part of the social itself. 28 In this, it follows those historians who have described the city as something performed or 'done', rather than as a collection of legal entitlements, governing authorities or static material backdrops. 29 Thus, it is identified not with abstract structures, whether legal or financial, or physical environments, but rather with inter-subjective activity, 'urbanity', itself. 30 Concerning Vienna, the work of Elizabeth Gruber and Susana Zapke has emphasised such approaches. 31 In a similar vein, it is consistent with recent interdisciplinary emphasis on the visual as a 'socially constructed act of recognition' 32 and with those art historians who have researched the uses, often devotional, of objects and images in medieval Europe. 33 Studies of the reception, viewing or visiting of buildings albeit often focused on the structure of the work rather than the practice of particular viewers (or builders)have long been major fields of art historical scholarship. 34 As this paper will argue, building work in Vienna did not represent or communicate the unilateral interests of one party or another, or of the whole, but consisted of distinctive bundles of practices, including the semiotic, that shaped and were shaped by other proximate bundles without fully determining or being determined by them. The politics of construction work at St Stephen's was immanent to its structuring of the complex of everyday interactions between nobility, mayors, civic leaders, clergy, administrators, craftsmen and labourers. 35 It is precisely the identification of these routinised inter-relationships that will prove useful in returning to the events of 1408. This article's purpose is to think the St Stephen's building site as one bundle of openended spatially and temporally specific activities among the many that constituted the Viennese social around the turn of the fifteenth century. Of these, this article addresses in turn three that are relatively visible to the modern historian: the annual audit of the building accounts; the compilation and diversification of texts by the city government; and the reproduction of the building site as a practice of knowing. It is with these bundles in mind that this article will return in its final section to the crises of 1408 as a concentrated moment in which the enduring practical order of the St Stephen's building site reformed around, and resisted, a sequence of political ruptures. By then, the dimensions of the 'building site' will have grown to produce a multitude of interlinked spaces and times away from the area of construction: not only the precinct and the lodge but also the office of the church master (Kirchmeister) and the town hall, and during not only construction but also the remaking of the building as an object of knowledge in the decades afterwards. 36 The distinction between practices of construction, audit, governance and knowing is used here not to suggest typologically distinct domains but rather as a heuristic method for describing the complex inter-relationships between the countless bundles of actions that made up the city in the years around 1408.

Practices of audit and construction
There was, perhaps, no other complex of activities undertaken by a medieval town or village as dense and multiple, or concerning so many different people and objects, as the construction of a major building in stone. It provides many examples of what Theodore Schatzki terms a 'project'that is, a bundle of recurring, directed 'tasks', themselves formed of aggregated, context-specific doings and sayings. 37 The varied vocabulary and payments used in the annual accounts of the church master of St Stephen's, the official who oversaw the administration of the building site, evoke, if they cannot represent, their complexity and repetitiousness. 38 Among the employed were master builders, carvers, layers, wheelwrights, ironworkers, plasterers and mortar makers, while carpenters, binders, glaziers, painters, bricklayers, locksmiths, blacksmiths, rope makers, joiners, wainwrights and pewterers received occasional payments. 39 Such titles somewhat obscure the varied nature of the work on the site which could be paid in terms of the duration, nature or output of the task: thus the same man might have performed different types of work and been paid accordinglywhether by the number, type, size or design of the object produced, the period of work or his skill and experience. Indeed, most recipients are identified by their name, not by task or qualification. Many were employed only for particular periods of the year and in widely varying quantities. 40 The site brought in stone, bricks and timber from villages outside the city, while lime, sand, iron, lead, nails, pitch, grease, building, roof and floor tiles and shingles were purchased from merchants in Vienna. Payments to many workers encompassed money, 36 Cf. Theodore R. Schatzki clothing and food. 41 The combination of definitions of labour by type or period of payment, by type of activity, by its output, by degree of skill or by specialisation, and, indeed, often in a fusion of German and Latin, suggests the struggle that medieval terminology faced in 'capturing' the multiplicity of activities carried out on the building site.
While the day-to-day tasks of the building site integrated a complex range of activities involving, predominantly, labourers and craftsmen, the annual compilation and audit of the accounts was the most prominent 'specific social practice for the production of regulated representations' by civic leaders, ceremoniously (re)producing a bewildering and porous building site as a coherent and delimited administrative project. 42 The account books of the church master of St Stephen's survive from 1404, with considerable gaps, although a fund for donations, endowments, dedications, legacies or indulgences had existed in the thirteenth century and the first recorded lay administrator of the church's assets appeared in the 1260s. 43 The church master was identified formally in 1336. 44 The accounting system was in many ways typical for medieval building accounts: 45 the church clerk compiled weekly lists, raitung or particularzedl, of purchases of individual items and wage payments that were described as 'paid weekly in the lodge'. 46 The clerk sat, indeed, above the workers in the vault of the masons' lodge, quite literally overlaying their work with his. For the annual audit, his weekly accounts were compiled into a paper account book, which preserved the week-by-week structure of his lists, with each heading noting the Saturday on which the payments were made. 47 Something of the practice of the annual audit can be recovered. The 1535 accounts note that they were audited ('gerait und beslossen') by eight men, of which two were taken from the city's inner council, two from the outer, and four from the community, but, if that represents a later innovation, the earlier practice is never described so rigorously. 48 However, a raitbrief, issued by the council to the outgoing church master, is preserved from 1407 and signed by the mayor and 'both councils, the inner and the outer' ('baid rêt, der inner und der ausser'), suggesting perhaps that the audit was carried out by or at least before them, but plausibly by a subcommittee of the kind used in the 1530s. 49 There are strong indications that they were indeed read aloud, presumably by the church master himself rather than by their writer, the church clerk. For example, the accounts begin with a brief introduction, giving the year and name of the church master, written in the first or third person, either in German, Latin or a combination of the 41 In addition to the church clerk, among the church master's staff were the sexton (Küster, guster, laiguster) and the sacristan (Mesner)all were liveried. Schedl two, and evidently a formalised prelude, perhaps written ahead of the event, but then swap invariably into a first person singular that implies recorded speech: 'after this, I received … '. 50 Indeed, the accounts often use phrases such 'the register that my gentlemen from the council have given me', which may well be understood as addressed directly to the auditors. 51 Perhaps the clearest sign of how the accounts were used to prepare for and then adapted in light of a spoken audit are successive entries made in 1404. The first was evidently written before the audit in order to be read aloud and required a verbal response: 'for the church clerk and for the horse, which has not yet been written, this is pending on my lords, what they will give me for it.' Then, in another hand, presumably this time the church master's own, written at the audit itself, comes the response: 'My lords have promised for this £15'. 52 (Evidently some further accounting would need to take place after the audit.) The accounts they heard were similar to many across the continent, listing first income from overdue claims, public funds, foundations, dedications, donations, payments (for tolls, lights, bell ringing, etc.), leases and the sale of wine or building materials, followed by expenditure on craftsmen and labourers, the purchase of materials and liturgical celebrations. 53 Although the church master's appointment seems to have been for a year, many served on successive occasions: at an audit's completion, the church master was dismissed with a raitbrief and the event was celebrated with a meal, generally costing £6-7, paid for out of his own accounts. 54 There is little information in the accounts about this meal, an exception being in 1476 when it was recorded as taking place in the lodge (it was by no means the only meal to be celebrated there). 55 That the audit was combined with a meal is nonetheless revealing: it marked not the growth of the building work, the attainment of some architectural milestone or another, but rather the completion of the administrative practices of the building site, ceremonialised like other major celebrations in urban life. 56 Something of the mutual shaping between the bundle of practices that made up the audit and the bundle that made up construction work can be outlined. The establishment of an accounting systemthat is, a sequence of paper-based practices connecting masons' lodge, church clerk's office, church master's office and auditwas never merely an objective and distanced recording of the work on the building site. In rendering construction practices as a written, financialised and bureaucratised phenomenon, it changed how bodily movements were known, practised and experienced in ways only partially visible to the historian. 57 For an authority that was often not present in personnone of the council's members was a full-time employee, and nor was the 50 Examples can be found in every accounting year. 51 E.g. Uhlirz, Rechnungen, 326. 52 'Von aim kirichschreiber und von aim rozz, das noch nicht geschriben ist, das stet an meinen herren, was sy mir dafür legent. … da habent mein herren furgesprochen 15 tl. dn.' Uhlirz, Rechnungen, 255. 'Tl' is an abbreviation of 'talentum' or 'pound'. church masteraccounts, drawings and contracts proved useful technologies in controlling the space-time of building activities. 58 Indeed, many of these documents were directly concerned with controlling practices away from the formal meetings of civic leaders. 59 The church master's lost 'Church Book', for example, was used by the church master to determine payments due to him from property. 60 Recent scholarship on the high and late medieval connection between accounts and accountability (and the enduring significance of personal ties in this period) has often emphasised the latter as regulatory, controlling and dialogic, rather than punitive. 61 The preponderance of oaths also provides good evidence of the relationship of text, personal responsibility and the control of activity: a contract of 1446, for instance, records that the contractee 'swore' before the council and church master to act 'with faithful and complete diligence'. 62 Most telling is the oath taken by the St Stephen's church clerk, responsible himself for the production of the accounts, recorded in the municipal register during the years 1452-8: 'You are to obey and be responsible to the church master [… and write] all this together with other income and expenditure properly and with diligence in a report, all faithfully and permanently.' 63 The practices of accounting were formed although not, as I will argue shortly, exclusivelyto shape another bundle of practices, those of construction, and, in this, they participated in a distinctive development in Vienna's late-medieval civic government.

Practice of government
The building accounts and audit, and their ritual celebration, were part of an increasingly intensive textualisation of the practice of government in Vienna in the decades around 1400. If the city's civic documentary tradition began, like many cities in the Holy Roman Empire, in the mid thirteenth century, the later fourteenth and early fifteenth century was, nonetheless, a time of renewal, diversification and consolidation, often attendant to new legal entitlements granted to the city from the 1360s, as well as to increasing regulation of trade and guilds and a growing complexity in the organisation of government itself. 64 There were the land registers kept after the reforms of Rudolf IV (Kaufbücher, Gewerbücher, Satzbücher); the law books (Stadtrechtbücher) of c.1400; the wills and kinship proofs in the business books (Geschäftsbücher) of the early fifteenth century; the book recording taxation, tolls, property incomes, market rents and salaries known as the Gültenbuch and collated in 1418; and the annual financial accounts of the Oberkammeramt which are preserved after 1424. 65 Expansion, indeed, required a period of documentary consolidation in the 1430s and 1440s as collections of deeds and guild ordinances (the Handwerksordnungsbuch of 1430, replacing earlier texts) were compiled from older books. 66 It is likely that the city had begun maintaining an archive by the beginning of the fourteenth century, which, at least from the mid fifteenth century, was stored in the town hall. 67 Most pertinently for this article, the earliest evidence of account books dates to 1368, and plausibly provided the basic template for the development of the church master accounts. 68 Patterns of influence could perhaps work the other way too: the accounts of the two chamberlains (Kammeramtsrechnungen), who managed the city's finances, survive from 1424, although they began in 1418, and use a format similar to those of the church master. 69 If the origins of the church master's accounting practices cannot be dated with precision, nonetheless, by the later fourteenth century they were assimilated into the increasingly extensive accounting praxes of late medieval Viennese government.
With these developments, the remaking of architectural work as the object of a documentary practice within municipal government had a new pre-eminence. 70 By no means, however, were civic account books the only textual locus where this took place. On 9 July 1359, Rudolf IV and his wife recorded in a deed that they had laid the first stone of the vastly ambitious south tower of the church, and the start of a major new wave of construction, 'with great devotion and humility in the presence of all the clergy and community of our city of Vienna and the lords of our lands'. 71 It is less significant here that the event was to be described in terms both morally and socially validating than that it was textualised at all. The deed was sealed and signed personally by the duke and duchessas was often the case for important documentsbefore a large group of witnesses, enacting a kind of re-creation of the event itself translated into the practices of deed making. Text was important to Rudolf: he showed considerable interest in providing documentary instructions for the ordering of worship and other major liturgical events at St Stephen's as well as for recording his desire to 'raise and endow' ('aufrichten, und stiften') the church at all. 72 In 1450 the town would similarly provide, in its most notable city book, the Große Stadtbuch or Eisenbuch, a full-page, blow-by-blow account of the laying of the foundation stone of the northern tower of St Stephen's, again carefully listing those present, as if to provide a splendid civic textual balance to the ducal deed for the other tower a century before. 73 Indeed, the event's importance might be measured by the fact that it is somewhat out of place in a book concerned largely with the city's freedoms and privilegesit is surrounded by wine regulations.
These developments constituted not the replacement of praxis by text but rather of one kind of practice by another, characterised by writing activities that were performed in occasional and highly controlled settings but which extended into everyday activity. Two aspects of this textualisation of the building site in the decades around 1400 should be highlighted: the new inter-relationships between bundles of practices that it constituted; and the practices of knowing that it produced, which forms the subject of the next section. New practices of making, editing, hearing, approving, storing, celebrating and reading documents constituted, to use Brian Stock's helpful term, new 'textualities', group behaviours oriented around the existence of texts, regardless of the literacy of those involved. 74 Encounters with documents in Vienna as elsewhere were controlled: some were read aloud and posted in public places, others were not; some were entered into the civic archive, others were not. In 1475, the names of one government council, the Genannten, for example, were painted and displayed alongside statutes for urban trades and professions on wooden tablets; elsewhere in late medieval Vienna, parchments fixed to wooden boards advertised indulgences using text and image. 75 This is not to argue for a simplistic in-and outside to the textual community, but rather that the building site, and the city, were increasingly constituted by a plethora of different textual practices that constituted new patterns in social difference. 76 Indeed, many participated in some form in the textualised building process: from the 1370s, for example, 'service payments' (Dienstzahlungen) to St Stephen's made during sales transactions, testamentary bequests or penalties handed down in court were all entered into civic registers (Kaufbücher, Satzbücher) that had been kept since the reforms to municipal record keeping 72  made by Rudolf IV. 77 In many cases, these were of small sums of money, suggesting they were made by the relatively less wealthy. The building site was growing in all sorts of new directions, flowing, as it were, along new practical possibilities that had been opened up by the proliferation and diversification of record keeping in the city's government from the later fourteenth century.

Practices of knowing
Scholars have generally described the function of the medieval audit and accounts as encompassing both financial and personal accountability: to monitor sources of income and expenditure, to discourage and discover corruption, and to ensure responsible management. 78 But accounting and auditing practices also formed new 'practices of knowing', that is, new practices of understanding, evaluating and describing the building work in terms of its relationship to written accounts. 79 Perhaps the most important of these practices, but also the most obscure to the historian, were among the labourers and craftsmen who were compelled to identify and present their work in financialised terms to the church clerkand so almost certainly to themselves and each other. This article, however, will have to focus on how construction, mediated through practices of auditing and accounts, would have been known to the auditors, church master and their colleagues.
Accounting and auditing not only actualised otherwise bewildering construction practices as temporally linear and quantifiable objects of knowledge but also did so with remarkable continuity in form and structure. As building campaigns waxed and waned, master masons came and went, other civic documents were reformed and replaced, and styles, commissions and designs were agreed and abandoned, the building accounts varied very little, outside modest changes to layout, from 1404 to the last surviving set of accounts in the 1530s. Whatever new knowledge of the site was producedthe unremarkable rise and fall of income, outgoings and debts, the minutiae of payments that typically stretched over many pagesit arrived in an almost unchanging form and according to a little changing praxis. Thus, each year, at the audit, the building site, and the multiplicity of different actions that constituted it, was (re)established as a coherent sequence of formally identical named and costed activities in continuity with each other and with the past, as evoked by the growing collection of accounts in the civic archive.
Knowing the building site as a temporally consistent financial totality was often prioritised over the exercise of accountability and helps to explain why sums did not always add up and why, when they did not, they were not always corrected: 80 such 'mistakes' would not necessarily undermine, and could even support, the performance of the audit as a 77 Schedl, Stephan in Wien, nn. 343-6. 78  practice of knowing. A modest but telling example takes place in the transition between the 1426 and 1427 accounts. The final week of 1426 is mistitled 'the Saturday before the [feast of the] Circumcision', when it should have been the Saturday following it. Nonetheless, the 1427 accounts begin sequentially with 'the Saturday after the [feast of the] Circumcision'. 81 In other words, the 1427 scribe has dated his accounts in order to make them cohere with the previous year's, even at the cost of referential 'accuracy'. The 'mistake' was not corrected at auditbut, indeed, it was no mistake at all if the purpose of the accounts was to provide, at and after the audit, an unbroken knowledge of the work as a single, consistently evolving project.
Indeed, evidently 'missing' sums at a more granular level were tolerated to an extent that suggests financial comprehensiveness was not a dominant concern. The removal of payments for anniversaries or the halving of the master builder's wage suggest payments being exchanged between authorities. 82 One executor, for example, paid directly for a panel painting in the 1460s. 83 Amounts were almost certainly kept off the books when income was spent in full. 84 A memorandum notes various sums owed to St Stephen's that 'do not belong in the accounts (raittung)'. 85 Serious accounting errors are in evidence, even in the prepared annual accounts: in May 1404, for example, two weeks are missing, one occurs twice (once in the incorrect place) and two are misdatedpresumably an error in the weekly compilation that was reproduced in the annual summation. 86 Nevertheless, there is no clear evidence that discrepancies troubled the auditorsno church master or church clerk appears to have been sacked for poor or fraudulent performance, nor was any significant change to accounting or auditing procedure introducedand the accounts almost invariably arrived, in any case, in the correct form and with large surpluses. 87 Presumably the church master (always a merchant and so practised in making accounts work) would take care of this. 88 The church master had many means to render how the building work was known. When money needed to be raised to cover a shortfall, it could be (not least in the form of direct payments by the church master himself); when expenditure needed to be reduced, it could be (not least in the form of delayed payment). Indeed, at St Stephen's, income, and thus overall financial performance, was substantially a question of whether particular public revenues had been designated to pass directly to the project or notsomething that might explain how the church master chose to present his accounts. 89 A sequence of three unusual shortfalls in 1415, 1416 and 1417, for example, followed shortly after the church master noted that payments of the water toll at the Red Tower and part of the beverage taxa major source of public incomehad been in arrears and were replaced by a much smaller source of income. 90 In 1407 it had been recorded in the accounts that the city owed £208 and, in 1412, the church master recorded that no money had been received from the water toll for a decade. Since expenditure was evidently not trimmed accordingly, it is possible that the inclusion of these increasingly substantial deficits, which leapt from £12 to £17 to £65, was intended, at least partly, to know the work as a failure of responsible government and thus persuade the mayor to action at the audit. 91 That the accounts were changing how Vienna's elite knew the building work can be seen in Thomas Ebendorfer's Chronica Austriae, written in the 1450s and 1460s. He reported that Hans Kaufmann, Mosprunner's successor as church master, had told him that the total cost of the tower's construction in his, Kaufman's, time (1409-15) was over 44,000 guilders. 92 Kaufmann's source was, surely, the church master's accounts but such summations do not appear directly in the accounts themselves. The plausibility of the sum is difficult to assess relative to the accounts, which are given in the standard accounting format of pounds, shillings and pence (£1 = 20 shillings = 240 pence). However, by the 1450s, the guilder, a gold coin, was also worth 240 pennies (that is, an accounting pound) and it seems likely that an equivalence is meant by Ebendorfer at a time when giving the sum in silver currency threatened to be almost meaningless as the value of the penny spiralled. 93 If this is right, and given that the surviving accounts from Kaufmann's time invariably show somewhat less than £1000 a year, then the 44,000 sum is plausible, assuming it describes the campaign of building work that had begun some 50 years previously, in 1359. However, given the likelihood of a break in construction until the late 1370s, as well as the evidently rounded off sum, and the obscurity of what it represents, it seems likely that Kaufmann was extrapolating based on his years in office rather than rigorously collating. 94 In any case, this represents a way of knowing the building work that was not only made possible but even suggested, or rather privileged, by the accounting system. 95 It constitutes a kind of 'logic of accounting', to misquote Stock, a new means of knowing made unexpectedly possible, or rather inevitable, by the practice of accounting and the nature of the material accounts themselves. 96 Kaufmann's retroactive recreation of the tower project as a singular financial outlay marked, perhaps, a quiet revolution in the practice of knowing late medieval architecture. 90 Schedl, Stephan in Wien, 81; Perger, 'Rahmen', 217. 91 It is not perhaps incidental that they made increasing use of Latin and ended by eliminating from the accounts the word schuldig to describe the Kirchmeister's responsibility. 92

Change and continuity in 1408
The crises of 1408 offer a rare moment when a political rupture took place during a period of major architectural work for which building accounts survive and so a rare moment when the practice(s) of the building site can be evaluated. Four years earlier, Duke Leopold had taken over the guardianship of Albrecht V and, according to the chronicle of Thomas Ebendorfer, won the support of the community (Gemein, artesani, communitas), while the citizens (cives) sided with his brother Ernst. 97 As described at the start of this article, on 5 January 1408, the wealthy merchant Konrad Vorlauf had five craftsmen executed (none in building trades), who had probably planned an attack on him. 98 On 14 January, however, a peace treaty was concluded between the two Habsburg brothers, Ernst returned to Graz and Leopold entered Vienna. 99 The council subsequently imposed a special tax on wine, the city's most important product, and the community (in this case Ebendorfer uses the term plebei) brought accusations to Leopold for the dismissal of a number of councillors. 100 Leopold had Vorlauf, Mosprunner, Konrad Rampersdorfer (who had taken over Vorlauf's office while he was imprisoned) and several others arrested on 7 July and three of them executed, not on the Hohen Markt, as was usual, but in the pig market, on 11 July 1408. 101 The other men under arrest, including Mosprunner, were released after payment of a fine. 102 On the same day, the city elected a new mayor, Hans Feldsberger, who was probably proposed by the representatives of the craftsmen, and councillors. 103 Ebendorfer records that the new mayor was a parchment-maker named Hermann, 104 but it is likely that the two men are identical: Richard Perger argues persuasively that 'Buchfeller' was Feldsburger's family name and that he was a coiner (Münzer) by profession. 105 Ebendorfer reports that Hermann, 'an excellent and wise man, [was appointed] against his will as mayor; as councillors, poor men were similarly elected from their circle, who were mostly endowed with wisdom but burdened by poverty.' 106 As a coiner, Feldsburger was among the city's wealthiest craftsmen -Ebendorfer's implication, then, is that he had been compelled to serve by a government formed otherwise by members of the Gemein, poorer craftsmen or even (given the term is contrasted with cives) non-citizens. The new council informed Ernst, then in Graz, that the executions were carried out under pressure from the community and for compelling reasons. 107 Ernst wrote back, querying these reasons, but no answer survives. Based on this statement and on Ebendorfer's chronicledrafted from 1449historians have tended to posit the struggle as oriented not around constitutional change and the relative powers of craftsmen and merchants, but between rich and poor, and/or in Leopold's exploitative rabble-rousing. 108 Certainly no legislation akin to that of 1396 was passed and the make-up of the council was unchanged; the main result was to remove Vorlauf's government from office and, perhaps, to allow a degree of financial relief.
The decision to arrest Mosprunner on 7 July would have guaranteed that construction work at St Stephen's would be seriously disrupted or stopped: with his return uncertain, it is doubtful that the workmen could have been paid, new materials or equipment purchased, or important decisions taken. Once appointed, Feldsburger and the new council faced a decision: whether to keep or replace Mosprunner, a merchant and member of Vorlauf's elite party, who had eaten together with Vorlauf that February at the annual audit dinner (which had cost more than at any other time in the accounts). 109 He also occupied an office invariably dominated by the mercantile elite and members of the inner council and which was on a par with the most important offices in Viennamayor, treasurer and hospital masteror in the ducal administration. 110 Indeed, Mosprunner had been serving since 1404 and thus was wholly of the previous administration. 111 To the modern historian, replacing him would appear to be a natural part of the reordering the city administration after a significant revolution and the accession of a new government with hard won powers and explicit ducal support. Indeed, it was an opportunity to explicitly overturn the social ordering of construction: the artisans or the poorer citizens (or at least their representatives) could take over the management of their own work, aping, or even exceeding, the way they had moved into the city's formal leadership over the previous decade.
In fact, the new government did the reverse: it returned Mosprunner to office. He seems to have accounted on Christmas Eve 1408 as usual and includes record of income over the course of the whole year (from Christmas 1407 to St George's Day (24 April); from St George's to Christmas 1408, including Advent). 112 That year the new council heard that timber-work had continued, and joiners and a glazer were paid; materials including nails, lead, walling stone, lighting oil, wax and sand were purchased; and the accounts rigorously kept by the church clerk and Mosprunner. Many craftsmen, in other words, continued to work on the site, receiving their instruction and oversight from Mosprunner. The new administration was willing to preserve intact the managerial structure and much of the week-to-week practices of the building site. The inverse is also true: Mosprunner was now working under the oversight of a council and mayor appointed by his political opponents and which had threatened his freedom. Although he was not executed, he had been imprisoned, fined and come, presumably, close to death at the hands of his new colleagues. At the auditif it took place in his officehe could almost have seen where the bodies of Vorlauf and his party were buried; at the dinner that year, he dined with men who were the beneficiaries of, and perhaps even responsible for, his own imprisonment and his allies' deaths. Nonetheless, he appears to have executed his work as expectedor at least to have presented it that way, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, strategically or willingly.
Historians have tended to emphasise the disturbance to the building work caused by the events of 1408and, indeed, less was spent that year on the works than in any other surviving church master's account. 113 But the emphasis should be nuanced: practices of audit and knowledge making continued unbroken while those of construction changed but did not cease. The church master, a member of the party that had been arrested and threatened with deposition and death, kept his office and executed it for its usual duration under a government led by his opponents. The accounts become an important means for the church master and auditors to determine how disruption was known. When Feldsburger and the council inspected them at the end of the year, they would have learned that the financial basis for construction was secure: some £800 had been raised, comparable in size to previous and later years. 114 Collections did not reduce considerably since these came from major liturgical events: Corpus Christi and the Heiltumsausstellung. The ritual life of St Stephen's seems to have continued, in other words, and to have supplied the usual amount of income. Nonetheless, this generally rosy overall picture was founded on some good fortuneor canny engineering. Some sources of income were in trouble: donations from wills had dropped by two-thirds in 1407 and almost disappeared in 1408, even as payments for gravestones and burials were unchanged. Payments for ringing, lanterns, candles and shrouds reduced considerably (although these were typically volatile). Making up the shortfall, however, was a repayment by the executors of one of the wealthiest men in the city, Franz Heun von Görlitz, of his vast rental debt of £210, which came to a quarter of the Kirchmeister's income. 115 Heun's repayment, usefully delayed until the crisis year, allowed the new government to ascertain that provision for the work had not been jeopardised by the year's violence. The only other named man in the audited income was Rudolf Angerfelder, a former mayor and Mosprunner's predecessor as church master, a suggestion, surely, of continuity between administrations.
Outgoings had dropped but still reached £500. 116 The masons' absence from the accounts figured only as absence per se and could have been understood as no more than a continuation of the previous year since the reduction in activity had begun not with the crisis of January 1408 but in the previous autumn. 117 The 1407 accounts record expenditure on wine for a visit made on 25 June that year of the councillors and the Gesellen (the building craftsmen), and historians have long connected this payment with the story reported by Thomas Ebendorfer that, because of deviations from the original plan, the south tower had to be reduced to the height to which the first master had built it. 118 This, in turn, has been connected with inconsistencies in the masonry in the upper half of the first tower storey and in the figurative brackets. 119 The connection between the visit and the redesign is uncertain: work continued in the lodge until October that year and included works almost certainly intended for the belfry. Nonetheless, after October, the lodge, unusually, closedand would not open again for a year. The tower was given a temporary roof for the cold season. 120 What figures in the accounting process as a major reduction in expenditureand thus, perhaps, as an intrusion of civic strife into the building sitewas knowable quite differently.
The remarkable stability in the administrative and knowledge practices of the building site during the events of 1408 should not be taken to imply that the latter were insignificant or confined merely to a few men at the top of Viennese society. The absence of the masons, the slackening of work, the shorter accountsall suggested that decisions had been delayed, that the everyday practices of numerous people had been disrupted and that the building site had changed in significant and noticeable ways. 121 Indeed, there is clear evidence that the events had not been, but needed to be, integrated into the 'sayings' of the city. In 1430 the three executed men were reburied in St Stephen's under a red marble monument with a long and laudatory Latin epigram. 122 The incapacity to forget the location of their bodies, despite the apparent lack of grave marker, for the 20 years that followed the conflicts of 1408 suggests that writing their slab would resolve an (unavoidable and ongoing) practice of remembering into an (avoidable and occasional) practice of reading. 123 Nonetheless, the disruption of many of the construction practices at St Stephen's, itself partial, took place alongside remarkable continuity in the practical order of administration and the kinds of knowing it made possible.

Conclusion
In an account of Vienna written by the Italian humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini in the 1450s, conflicts between craftsmen and other groups, courtiers or students, are described as common. 124 Mosprunner, Vorlauf and Ebdendorfer would perhaps have agreedthis was, it seems, a discourse in circulation among the city's elite. Less remarkable to these men, and yet dialectically necessary to Piccolomini's observation, was the run of everyday practices that constituted the city qua performance: the kind of order that made disorder notable and even possible; the kind of order that was (re)established in functioning, if only temporarily satisfactory, ways by disorder. Construction work, once figured as a sprawling but regular bundle of practices carried by bodies spread across the city, can take its place as a critical dimension of this process of continual resettlement. As such, the building site cannot be assimilated to a unilateral semiotics, a single economic divide, a collective 'imaginary' or managerial competence (as the 'patronal', 'Marxist', 'sociological' or 'organisational' approaches must posit).
This understanding of construction, as a bundle of practices modulating and being modulated by changes to other overlapping bundles was, perhaps, of especial importance in Vienna in the decades around 1400, as the city underwent both a remarkable building boom, during which every public church or chapel underwent at least one major architectural campaign, and heightened civic and dynastic tensions after the relative calm of the mid fourteenth century. 125 A political dynamic in which violent conflict marked not decisive and destructive ruptures but rather a means of establishing new practices in an ongoing, constructive (re)settlement of rights and responsibilities had long been established. 126 Plenty of more modest developments were taking place concurrently: in the decades after 1360 there is record of changes to craft regulation, hiring and training practices, and wages and payments that indicate changes to the practices of the building site, and beyond it. 127 Conflict, in other words, was not so much resolved as reformed and, in this process, the remarkably tenacious and expansive activities of the building site were, perhaps, especially important in sustaining the city's 'urbanity'. Although the seigneurial conflicts that coursed through late medieval Vienna were distinctive to it, this combination of multi-dimensional conflict and the assimilation of church construction to civic politics was common in late medieval Europe. A virtue of practice theoretical approaches is that no building site is more 'practised' than any other, albeit few have a combination of surviving primary sources as disclosive as those of late medieval Vienna.
The breaks and continuities in construction and administration in 1408 may, evidently, be emplotted into a number of explanatory narrativessuggesting the limit of the new government's ambitions, the tenacious customs of the building site, the dialectical play of order and disorder that enabled the social contract to survive and so forthbut all indicate that bundles of practices were continuously changing and interacting in complex and asymmetrical ways, not always marked by disruption, even during the most extreme civic ruptures. In 1409 building work continued, income and expenditure went back to normal, and the dominance of merchants in the city's government resumed. 128 Kaufmann, the church master after Mosprunner, was also a merchant and councillor. 129 Mosprunner would even return to the role in 1425-9. 130 The next long-serving mayor after Vorlauf was Rudolf Angerfelder (1411-19), who was not only a hereditary citizen (Erbbürger) but had also been among those arrested and imprisoned by Leopold in 1408. Even the master builder, Peter von Prachatitz, remained in post (1404-29), overseeing work on the south tower. 131 None of this occasioned an historically visible reaction from Vienna's artisans. The practice of the cityreinforced by a high degree of continuity on the building sitepersisted.