Editing Chartres Cathedral (section)

===Windows in aisles and the choir ambulatory===
{{main|The Good Samaritan Window, Chartres Cathedral}}

<gallery mode="packed" heights="250">
File:Christ telling the Good Samaritan parable to a couple Pharisees.jpg|Scene from the Good Samaritan window; Christ tells the Good Samaritan parable to the Pharisees
File:Chartres Bay 44 Good Samaritan Full.jpg|The Good Samaritan window
File:Chartres Bay 44 Good Samaritan Panel 02.jpg|Shoemakers at work in the Good Samaritan window
</gallery>

Each bay of the aisles and the choir ambulatory contains one large lancet window, most of them roughly 8.1m high by 2.2m wide.<ref>The most complete survey is Yves Delaporte, ''Les Vitraux De La Cathedrale De Chartres'', Paris, 1926</ref> The subjects depicted in these windows, made between 1205 and 1235, include stories from the Old and New Testament and the Lives of the Saints as well as typological cycles and symbolic images such as the signs of the zodiac and labours of the months. One of the most famous examples is [[The Good Samaritan Window, Cathedral of Notre-Dame: Chartres, France|the Good Samaritan parable]].

Several of the windows at Chartres include images of local tradesmen or labourers in the lowest two or three panels, often with details of their equipment and working methods. Traditionally it was claimed that these images represented the guilds of the donors who paid for the windows. In recent years however this view has largely been discounted, not least because each window would have cost around as much as a large mansion house to make – while most of the labourers depicted would have been subsistence workers with little or no disposable income. Furthermore, although they became powerful and wealthy organisations in the later medieval period, none of these trade guilds had actually been founded when the glass was being made in the early 13th century.<ref>Jane Welch Williams, ''Bread, Wine and Money: the Windows of the Trades at Chartres Cathedral'', Chicago, 1993</ref> Another possible explanation is that the cathedral clergy wanted to emphasise the universal reach of the Church, particularly at a time when their relationship with the local community was often a troubled one.