question: Why did Notre Dame have a 700+ year old wooden frame behind/above its stone walls?
comment: Because it was built several hundred years ago using wood that was several hundred years old already
passages: The dimensions of the chapel were:
  
  BULLET::::- Length of the body of church 19 feet 9 inches (6 meters)
  
  BULLET::::- Width 11 feet(3.3 meters)
  
  BULLET::::- Length of apsoidal (original) chancel 11 feet 6 inches (3.5 meters)
  
  BULLET::::- Width of chancel 9 feet 2 inches (2.8 meters)
   In 1836, due to the negligence of workmen, a fire began which destroyed the lead-covered wooden roof and the two belfries, but the building structure and the stained glass were untouched. The old roof was replaced by a copper-covered roof on an iron frame. At the time, the framework over the crossing had the largest span of any iron-framed construction in Europe.
  
  Section::::History.:World War II.
   Built in 1853, St Hilary church lacked interior decoration. The first church was first built during the Middle Ages.
   The construction of the church started with the building of presbytery in 1240. Walls of the presbytery together with its polygonal ending were made first. Then was built a roof frame, which was protecting the work during the construction of the vault. There was built a temporary wall in a triumphal arch of the presbytery to start the religious ceremonials before the church construction was completed.
   Parochial House made of chosen woods. The aforementioned parish house was supported by a dozen molave "harigues" of extraordinary enormity of eighty centimeters in diameter. It had zinc roof. Until the year one thousand eight hundred and ninety and nine, there was another parish house that existed next to the beach. That, too, was made of strong materials until the upper floor, and the roof was made of wood with covered of nipa. From this house the harigues or pillars were removed to build the new parochial house.
   From the Middle Ages until the turn of the 18th century the skills, knowledge and experience to build ample log structures with plane and well sealed walls, as well as with flush joints, were performances out of the ordinary. The craftsmen from Maramureș who were able to reach such levels were not simple peasants but well specialised church carpenters who inherited and maintained this advanced knowledge to exclusively build houses of worship.
   The Sainte-Chapelle's most obvious architectural precursors include the apsidal chapels of Amiens Cathedral, which it resembles in its general form, and the Bishop's Chapel (c. 1180s) of Noyon Cathedral, from which it borrowed the two-story design. As has often been argued however the major influence on its overall design seems to have come from contemporary metalwork, particularly the precious shrines and reliquaries made by Mosan goldsmiths.
  
  Section::::Architecture.:Interior.
   Whether the material used was stone, ashlar or if the masonry was in bricks, the finish was a painted surface. Thus, in many cases it could not be determined if the exterior was made of stone or brick, which could only be determined from plaster scrapings. The paint finish gave the buildings protection against environmental assaults but these were removed in the nineteenth-century when theories were applied to expose the original building materials.
   The "opus gallicum" served not only as an infrastructural base, but also a superstructural binding element designed to strengthen the masonry. While the arrangement of some of the holes found in preserved structures is often perplexing, leaving doubt as to the exact function of the beams, modern scholarship has largely moved away from the theory that the "opus gallicum" was a rare and inefficient method. Overall the technique was not uncommon in the Middle Ages. 
  
  Section::::Sources.
   The next period, beginning in the second half of the first millennium AD and lasting into the 16th century, includes both structures built of conventional materials, and those hewn from rock. Although most surviving examples of the first are now found in caves, Thomas Pakenham discovered an example in Wollo, protected inside the circular walls of later construction. An example of these built-up churches would be the church of Yemrehana Krestos, which has many resemblances to the church of Debre Damo both in plan and construction.
   Wood cutting was an important aspect of material production. If cutting was done shorter than needed, the builders had to wait until one year later to get the same material thus representing a problem. These issues led to some structural and designing decisions in constructions like the building of second walls inside the proposed building so shorter materials can be used.
   The church is remarkable for its small dimensions: it is and in width. Despite that, it looks surprisingly holistic and large from the inside: the attention of the visitor is drawn to the ceiling which looks very high. The columns in the church are not massive in contrast to other churches of the period. The church has three wide portals.
   One of the new elements was the Latin inscription "Terribilis est locus iste" above the front doors, taken from the Common Dedication of a Church, which translates as: "This is a place of awe"; the rest of the dedication reads "this is God's house, the gate of heaven, and it shall be called the royal court of God." The first part of the dedication is above the front doors—the rest inscribed on the arches over the two front doors of the church.
   No timber structures survive (roofs, floors etc.), so our knowledge of how these were put together is limited. The spans are, in the main, limited and suggest very simple beam and post structures spanning stone walls. For the longer spans, it is uncertain if the Greeks or Romans invented the truss but the Romans certainly used timber roof trusses. Before 650 B.C.E. the now famous ancient Greek temples were built of wood, but after this date began to be built of stone. The process of a timber structure being repeated in stone is called petrification or "petrified carpentry".
   The work continued with a construction of two towers in corners of the western facade. At the same time were built side walls of the church. A main entrance was built in the northern wall, which was quite uncommon. 
   The construction of the current church had already profoundly modified the earlier site. The 18th-century flooring is lower than earlier levels; only the lowest levels of the old foundation still remained. During the excavations they found no foundation, no under-pavement, no lime mortar runoff, and no altar base. The sepulchre lay under the current flooring level only.
   Twenty-two years after the church was built, problems developed when the wide roof began to splay further than it should, due to the strain of the wide-span timber trusses. Civil engineer Robert Mallet, whose father ran an iron foundry in Dublin, created cast-iron trusses to haul the church back into shape.
   In the late fourteenth century, special stone constructions for the Eucharistic bread began to be built, especially in northern Europe. In German and Netherlandish churches of the period, such structures can still be seen: tall towers, known in German as "Sakramentshäuser", in Dutch as "sacramentstorens", usually placed to the north of the altar and often reaching almost to the ceiling. They were in use until the mid-nineteenth century. As the presence of the sanctuary lamp in the adjacent picture shows, some have been returned to their traditional use.
   Around the year 1000, The architects of the abbeys in Burgundy began experimenting with different forms of vaulted ceilings, at first largely to avoid the danger of fires on the wooden roofs. The church of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Philibert de Tournus was an early example. The nave was covered by transversal barrel vaults, perpendicular to the axis of the nave, supported by rows of columns. The weight of the roof pressed down on the columns, not on the walls, This meant that the walls could be thinner, and could have larger windows, filling the church with more light.
   Section::::Evolution.:Tower and circle walls.
  
  In the 11th century a large stone tower (fr."grosses tour, grande tour", or "tour maîtresse") was sometimes built over a water source, and the support buildings lined inside were attached to its circular wall. Stone for these structures would have been fieldstone and not cut; however, much of the structures may have been wood, or wattle and dab, not stone. Like mottes, most exterior wooden walls would have been coated in plaster to reduce fire worries, and making them resemble stone buildings.
  
  Section::::Evolution.:Fortified farm.
   Pre-Romanesque, the first building was formed of a rectangular chamber composed of a plain nave wide, whose length the excavations did not manage to determine. It is possible that as in other small churches of the early Middle Ages, the length of the church was double its width. This edifice may have been the church consecrated between 959 and 971 by Eraclus, abbot of Lobbes and bishop of Liège, which was mentioned in the "Eraclus charter".
  
  Section::::The successive churches.:Second church.
   In the field of material achievements, much had been done by the Recollects and the Bantoanons. They reconstructed the church continually due to devastating typhoons that may come and the surprise attacks of Muslims. Because of these, they paid less attention to the artistic designs of the church concentrating more on building them strong enough to hold on against whatever destructive elements to come.
   The Romans substituted bronze for wood in the roof truss(s) of the Pantheon's portico which was commissioned between 27 BC and 14 AD. The bronze trusses were unique but in 1625 Pope Urban VIII had the trusses replaced with wood and melted the bronze down for other uses. The Romans also made bronze roof tiles
   BULLET::::- Beauvais Cathedral Three fires led to the start of a replacement for the former basilica at the site. The Basse Oeuvre is the remnant of the original church, having survived fires in the 11th and 12th centuries. The ambitious project suffered from structural instability, leading to repeated collapses, in 1284 and 1573.
  
  BULLET::::- Belfort Cathedral A timber church on the site was destroyed by fire in 1212.
   A number of medieval shipyards, notably the "Drassanes" in Barcelona, Spain and the Venetian Arsenal in Venice, Italy survive to this day. Of these two, the "Drassanes" is the most purely Gothic building complex, while the Venetian arsenal was arguably the most important — indeed, it was the largest industrial complex in Europe prior to the Industrial Revolution.
  