How France Built Her Cathedrals Part 37

1180-93), one of the most interesting Romanesque edifices of the duchy, is dismantled, but the Abbaye-aux-Hommes or St. etienne, and the Abbaye-aux-Dames, or Ste. Trinite, are in good repair. All the world knows how William the Conqueror and his good and gentle Matilda of Flanders each founded an abbey in Caen, "that G.o.d might be served by both s.e.xes and thus pardon their transgression." Their marriage disobeyed Church regulations concerning consanguinity and a canonical atonement was required. Matilda's tomb rests in the middle of the choir she built. Her epitaph was inscribed in letters of gold: "Consoler of the needy, lover of piety, a woman who, having lavished her treasures in good works, was poor to herself, but rich to the unfortunate. Thus she sought the fellows.h.i.+p of eternal life on the second of November, 1083."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Crypt of the Abbaye-aux-Dames at Caen (1059-1066)_]

The Abbaye-aux-Dames, begun about 1059, was dedicated in 1066 by the same Archbishop Maurille who blessed the new church at Jumieges. A few weeks after the ceremony, William descended on England, which his knights and villeins conquered to the chant of the _Chanson de Roland_, written by some unknown poet who, like themselves, looked to the Archangel of the Peril for inspiration. Yet a few decades more and Roland's war song was sung by the first crusaders before Jerusalem.

Architecture, crusades, language, literature--many were the vital movements then coming to birth.

On the day of the blessing of Matilda's convent of the Holy Trinity, her little daughter, Cecile, was laid on the altar and dedicated to G.o.d's service. For almost fifty years her aunt, Matilda, daughter of Richard II and the fair Judith of Brittany, ruled the Abbaye-aux-Dames, and then Cecile succeeded as second abbess; _Dame de la ville de Caen_, her brother Henry I of England called her. Cecile was one of the learned ladies of her day, having studied philosophy and belles-lettres under the patriarch of Jerusalem. One recalls that it was a contemporary abbess--at St. Odile in Alsace--who made the first attempt to compile an encyclopedia. Several English princesses were nuns of the Trinite, among them the daughters of Henry III and Edward I. In a later century Charlotte Corday was a pupil of the convent.

It has been thought that Gundulf, a monk of Bec, called to Caen by Lanfranc, was architect of the Abbaye-aux-Dames, where his mother had retired as a nun. This learned and pious man had entered Bec in the same year as St. Anselm, and when he had become the bishop of Rochester he remained faithful to Anselm, then the primate of England, facing bitter troubles with the king. The saint came to attend the good bishop on his deathbed. Gundulf rebuilt Rochester Cathedral, whose crypt and western bays are of his time (1076-1108); Rochester Tower, too, he raised, and the chapel of St. John in London Tower. It was said of him that he was the most skilled of all men in masoncraft.

The apse of the Trinite is considered one of the best things in Caen. It stands over a crypt whose sixteen piers are in four rows. When the choir was renovated, after 1100, some of its sculptures were modeled on certain Byzantine ivories that had been brought as gifts to Abbess Cecile by her crusading brother. The abbatial's triforium is a blind arcade behind whose wall was essayed some very primitive flying b.u.t.tresses. The present s.e.xpart.i.te vault was an early trial of that Norman form of the Gothic masonry roof, and is really a quadripart.i.te vault divided by a transverse rib, the web being unwarped to that intermediate member. Though the XII century replaced the original timber roof of the Trinite by this s.e.xpart.i.te one, exactly when it was done is not known. But those interested in claiming priority for Normandy in the use of diagonal ribs place it before the s.e.xpart.i.te vaulting of St.

Denis. The XIII century added a handsome Gothic chapel to the transept of Matilda's convent church.

As the expiatory abbatial erected by the Conqueror was on a far larger scale than the Abbaye-aux-Dames, it took longer to build; perhaps the same Gundulf of Bec and Rochester was its architect. Over the aisles are deep tribunes, some of whose bays have retained their primitive vaults of the same type as those at Tournus in Burgundy--half barrels placed side by side on lintels at right angles to the axis of the church. The original roof of the princ.i.p.al span was replaced by the actual s.e.xpart.i.te vault (whose web is warped to the six branches) about 1130, said M. Regnier; other archaeologists have placed it a generation later.

By the addition of a s.e.xpart.i.te vaulting the much-discussed Lombard alternate piers were no longer inconsequent. The height to which the wall shafts of the nave are carried indicates that the cowled architect had not purposed originally to cover his main span with a stone roof.

When the Gothic vaulting was added the clearstory was changed in the interior of the church, but the exterior was left as first built.

William and Matilda made Caen their chief residence in Normandy, and Lanfranc was brought from Bec in 1063 to be prior of the duke's new monastery. He opened a school in Caen to which his pupil, Pope Alexander II, sent his relatives as scholars. In the peaceful cloister of St.

etienne the able Italian composed a treatise--to counteract Berengar's heresy on the Eucharist--which is considered a small masterpiece of Christian controversy. Lanfranc was dialectician, administrator, builder, subtle lawyer, and statesman. His genius reached its highest development in the organization of a Norman hierarchy for England. He rebuilt his own church at Canterbury, and two former monks of St.

etienne, Caen, rebuilt the cathedral of Winchester and St. Alban's abbey. Other memorials of Lanfranc's primacy in England are the crypt and eastern end of Gloucester Cathedral, the work of a monk of Mont-Saint-Michel, the crypt at Worcester, choir chapels and ambulatory at Norwich, and the western transept of Ely Cathedral, erected by a monk from St. Ouen, Rouen. It is said that during the century and a half from the Conqueror to John Lackland the Norman prelates in England erected over four hundred churches as expiatory offerings for the grievous wrong perpetrated in the Norman conquest.

In Caen, Lanfranc built the nave of the Abbaye-aux-Hommes, a monument of magnificent proportions, compact, tranquil, and sincere. When archbishop of Canterbury he returned to Caen in 1077 for the dedication of his abbey church. Another ten years and in St. etienne's choir took place the sinister burial of William the Conqueror. In the town was raging a fierce conflagration which was to wipe out half the place. As they lowered into the tomb the proud and wrathful overman whose strength had been so pitiless, whose will so inflexible, a poor townsman stepped forth to forbid the burial, claiming he had been robbed of that special parcel of land. In the disorders that ensued the corpulent body of the dead king was injured, and though incense was burned to purify the infected air, the people deserted the church in horror. _Sic pulvis es._

In 1210 the Romanesque choir of the Abbaye-aux-Hommes was replaced by the present Gothic one. Normandy apparently used annulets about the cl.u.s.tered shafts at a much later date than the Ile-de-France, and it continued to employ its pre-Gothic zigzag decoration. The chapels round the choir were made to open one on the other above low dividing walls; Bayeux and Coutances repeated this, as they did the turrets at the birth of the apse. The exterior aspect of the edifice was enhanced by a row of small rose windows each of which lighted a bay of the choir's tribune. A generation later the same arrangement was employed in the collegiate church at Mantes.

The new Gothic choir of St. etienne at Caen was joined with skill to Lanfranc's grave Romanesque nave. Maitre Guillaume is cited as architect of the new works, and he probably crowned the two western towers that so grandly dominate the city. Few architectural views in France surpa.s.s the stark majesty of the fortresslike church built by the Conqueror, as it appears from across the town, from the rue des Chanoines, when one stands near the convent church of Queen Matilda. St. etienne's towers were the prototypes for the other notable ones at Caen.

During the XVI-century religious wars the Abbaye-aux-Hommes was twice pillaged and the Calvinists scattered the Conqueror's ashes. They stripped the roofing of its lead, which soon caused the collapse of the central lantern and the choir vaults. During two generations the great church lay unused save as a stone quarry. Then the prior, Jean de Baillehache, in 1609, undertook a restoration, carried through so judiciously that were it not for the monastery's official record, and a slight poverty in the sculpture, it would be impossible to detect the new parts from the old.

For the making of towers Caen is a queen city. In descending the rue des Chanoines one pa.s.ses the church of St. Pierre, whose much-admired Renaissance apse (1518-45) was the work of a regional master, Hector Sohier. But it is the tower of St. Pierre which is its glory and the boast of Normandy. It served as model for belfries throughout the duchy and in Brittany. Built from 1308 to 1317, it stands as proof that the tradition of Apogee Gothic continued till the opening of the Hundred Years' War. Apart from the natural rise and fall of things human various causes contributed to the decline of Gothic art after the XIII century.

A soulless mechanical dexterity that crystallized the principles of Gothic architecture succeeded to the creative genius that had made glorious the reigns of Philippe-Auguste and Louis IX. Symbolism and true mysticism gave place to doubt, and--when internal dissensions and foreign invasion rent the land--to superst.i.tion. With the blurring of spiritual vision pa.s.sed the vigor of construction.

The XIV century in France opened under a king who debased the coinage, overtaxed the clergy, persecuted the Jews, and who, by the outrage of Anagni, struck a fatal blow at the prestige of the papacy. Soon followed the Black Death, when a third of Europe's population perished. Radical deterioration of the national art set in after France "went to pieces at the Battle of Crecy" (1346). The royal domain was a field of brigandage: "From the Loire to the Seine, and from the Seine to the Somme, the peasants being killed, all the fields lay uncultivated, and this during many years," wrote Bishop Berenger of Le Mans. In Paris Cathedral a foreigner was crowned king of France.

What horrors reigned in Normandy, many an old record relates. More than a thousand patriot leaders perished when English gold was given for each decapitated corpse. "Houses are without occupants, fields without workers," wrote a XV-century bishop of Lisieux. Bedford's troops pillaged and ma.s.sacred. Near Falaise twelve thousand civilians were butchered in one day. "The land of Normandy was grievously oppressed and _le pauvre peuple detruit_," wrote Monstrelet. "Men and women fled for their lives, by land and by sea, as if in peril of fire. n.o.bles gave up their fiefs, clerks their benefices, burghers their patrimony, rather than take oath to the invader."[324] _Normannia nutrix_ lay almost uninhabited.

Such is the French version. Naturally the English outlook was different.

"The false Frenchman," sings Drayton in his Agincourt ballad. Freeman falls into a vein of self-congratulation. "Go from France proper into Normandy," he writes, "and you at once feel that everything is palpably better; men, women, horses, cows, all are on a grander, better scale.

The good seed planted by the old Saxon and Danish colonists, and watered in aftertimes by Henry V and John, Duke of Bedford, is still there. It is not altogether choked by the tares of Paris."

Gothic art deteriorated, but so persistently lingered the simplicity, the spiritual poignancy of the XIII century that in the late-Gothic day it was still possible to produce the mystic loveliness of Riom's Madonna of the Bird, and the humble prayerfulness of Solesmes' Magdalene.

In the unspoiled years of the XIV century was built the tower of St.

Pierre, at Caen. Its shaft rises in a virile, unbroken ascent from soil to spire tip. On the busiest street corner of the city it stands like a perpetual call to recollection and joy. The Norman will boast with legitimate pride that it is the most beautiful tower in France, excelling those of Chartres and Senlis, whose shafts, he will tell you, are either too high or too short, whereas his loved tower of St. Pierre has spire and shaft in perfect accord. When Caen added this stately monument to its wealth of churches it was as rich a metropolis as Rouen, and it had contributed more than London toward the ransom of Richard Coeur-de-Lion from Teuton captivity. Just before the defeat of Crecy, this, the intellectual capital of Normandy, was besieged by English troops, and all its wealth pillaged, and its streets strewn with dead. Amid havoc wrought, the towers of the Abbaye-aux-Dames were destroyed.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Belfry of St. Pierre at Caen (1308-1317). Prototype for the Gothic Towers of Normandy and Brittany_]

All over the department of Calvados are towers.[325] A Romanesque one crowns the church of Vaucelles, a suburb of Caen. At Ifs, and near Bayeux, at St. Loup (c. 1180), are others. The monk's church of Norrey, a dependency of St. Ouen, at Rouen, noted for the lavishness of its foliate ornamentation, has a tower of the XIII century, and near it, also ten miles from Caen, is Secqueville's Gothic beacon. There are belfries at Bernieres-sur-mer (c. 1150), at Langrune, Thaon, Tour, and Basly.

Three of the most beautiful towers in Calvados crown the abbatial of St.

Pierre-sur-Dives, an edifice, too much a patchwork of five centuries to be altogether pleasing, but linked with a memorable hour of the Gothic story, 1145. Popular enthusiasm then aided Abbot Haimon to reconstruct his church, as he wrote, in a much-quoted letter to the English monks at Tutbury. The same wave of fervor was raising the Primary Gothic towers of Chartres and Rouen. The western towers of St. Pierre-sur-Dives are of Haimon's day only in their lower stories; that to the south has a XIII-century top, and that to the north was finished in the XIV century.[326]

Throughout the final phase of Gothic, Normandy continued to excel in towers. Witness Rouen's Flamboyant beacons. In quiet country places and lesser towns rise belfries as stately as those of cathedrals: at Carville is the "Giant of the Valley" (1512-14), at Harfleur is a most beautiful tower, and still another at Verneuil (1506-30), built by a son of the town, Arthur Fillon, cure of St. Maclou, Rouen, and vicar-general of that lover of n.o.ble structures, Cardinal Georges d'Amboise; when he became bishop of Senlis, he helped to finish the Flamboyant Gothic transept of that cathedral.

THE ROMANESQUE ABBATIAL OF ST. GEORGES DE BOSCHERVILLE[327]

I have borne for forty-two years with happiness the sweet yoke of the Lord.--ORDERICUS VITALIS (xii century).

From Rouen a pleasant six-mile walk through the forest of Roumare leads to the abbatial of St. Georges de Boscherville, an example of the best Anglo-Norman Romanesque. Some have thought it belongs to the first decade of the XII century, but M. Besnard places it a generation earlier. Mr. John Bilson claims that, like its contemporary, the cathedral at Durham, the piers show that from the start the design was to construct ribbed groin vaults over the wide span, and he thinks that the same is true for the now disused Romanesque abbatial of St.

Nicolas, at Caen (1083-93), building twenty years before Durham's choir.

He has cited the diagonals of Lessay's choir and those of the transept of Montvilliers as the primitive Gothic of Normandy, vaults which M. de Lasteyrie considered to be contemporary with Suger's St. Denis. The German archaeologists, Dehio and von Bezold, give priority to Normandy.

The actual intersecting ribs at St. Georges de Boscherville are a XIII-century reconstruction. So solid were the church walls made that no flying b.u.t.tresses have been needed. The tribune at the end of each arm of the transept is supported by an isolated pillar, apsidal chapels project from the eastern wall of the transept, and the central lantern is one of the best in Normandy. The entire church, save its west facade flanked by slender turrets, was the work of some six or seven years only. About 1157, under Abbot Victor, was erected the chapter house that nestles beneath the transept's northern arm. The French students who did not know, or who have not accepted, Mr. John Bilson's theory of Anglo-Norman priority in the use of the essential organ of Gothic architecture, have claimed that the diagonals of St. Georges' chapter house are among the earliest extant of the province, of the same decade as the vaulting of the lower hall of St. Romain's tower at Rouen. Mr.

John Bilson's champions.h.i.+p of Anglo-Norman pioneer work, and Mr. Arthur Kingsley Porter's theory of Lombard priority, have both found supporters among leading French archaeologists; the English scholar is patriotically disgruntled at the American's advocacy of the Italian claims.

It would seem that during the XI century the Normans, like the Lombards, used what Mr. Bilson calls ribbed groined vaults, occasionally, for one reason or another. The Norman developed tentatively the ribbed vault, always a.s.sociating it with the semicircular arch, and without comprehending the wonderful results that were to be derived from concentrating the weight of a masonry roof at fixed points. The possibility of those results was perceived first in the Ile-de-France, and from there, when Gothic architecture had taken on its special characteristics, it entered Normandy by way of the Seine at Rouen and Boscherville, then at Fecamp and Lisieux. The first Gothic cathedrals of Normandy show purely French influence and only gradually were regional ogival traits developed. In the controversy as to who first used diagonals, one can take whichever side one prefers; the question remains open. Light will be thrown on it, doubtless, by a forthcoming paper by Mr. Bilson in the _Archeological Journal_, tracing the evolution of the diagonal rib in Normandy.

The abbey at Boscherville was founded by the lord of Tankerville, high chamberlain of the Conqueror and Henry I. In its abbatial, when his grandson, hereditary constable of Normandy, was knighted, he laid his sword on the altar, and to redeem it presented property to the monastery. If we would comprehend the society that built these churches, we must understand that such donations were voluntary and a matter of civic pride. "If I cannot myself attend to the works of G.o.d," runs an ancient deed of gift, "at least I can a.s.sure a home for those with whom G.o.d loves to dwell. It is only natural to enrich our Holy Mother the Church, and thus to take a hand in caring for Christ's poor."

THE GOTHIC ABBATIAL AT FeCAMP[328]

It is a usage bequeathed to us from our ancestors, never to let anyone depart from our abbey without a gift.

--(From an old Latin chronicle of Fecamp.)

If one would enjoy, without critical comparison, the Gothic of Normandy, her churches should be visited before the taste has become sensitized by loiterings in the Ile-de-France. In that cla.s.sic region of the national art is found a simplicity, a purity, a restraint, a something of imaginative genius that makes of its work the touchstone by which all other manifestations of Gothic are judged. Of the Norman churches, the Trinite, at Fecamp, is most closely related to the Primary Gothic work of the royal domain. Its architect must certainly have come from the Ile-de-France. Monks trained in the Celtic rule by St. Wandrille founded Fecamp, which was wrecked by Norse pirates in 876. William Longsword, the first duke's son, built his palace here, and his son, Richard I the Fearless (d. 996), began a new monastery. In his will Richard ordered: "Bury not my body within the church, but deposit it on the outside, immediately under the eaves, that the dripping of the rain from the holy roof may wash my bones as I lie and may cleanse them of the spots of impurity contracted during a negligent and neglected life." He desired that on every Friday a sarcophagus be filled with wheat and grain for the poor. His son, Richard II the Good (d. 1020), finished Fecamp abbatial, and was laid to rest beside his father. The dukes of Rollo's line especially favored Fecamp, which held a front rank among Normandy's inst.i.tutions, and was the richest of her monasteries down to the Revolution. Henry Plantagenet presented Fecamp town to the monastery.

After Duke Richard the Good had brought that man of administrative genius, William of Volpiano, into his duchy to reorganize its spiritual life, architectural activities took on new vigor. William himself directed the construction of Bernay's[329] church; the abbatial of Mont-Saint-Michel rose when he reformed that house; and the church of Jumieges followed immediately after his reformation there. The Blessed William, in his thirst for souls, used to loiter at the crossroads to gather in the stricken of body or spirit. He pa.s.sed away in Fecamp in 1031, and his ashes are still preserved in a chapel of the present Gothic abbatial. In 1034, in the Romanesque Trinite, Robert the Magnificent gathered the chief men of Normandy to have them swear allegiance to his st.u.r.dy little b.a.s.t.a.r.d son of seven, who was to be known in history as William the Conqueror, after which Duke Robert started on his pilgrimage to the East, from which he was never to return. The abbey church of Fecamp long consisted of the nave begun by Richard I, and a choir built by Abbot Guillaume de Ros (1082-1108), under whose rule the Trinite won the admiration of Europe. He is said to have introduced into Normandy the ambulatory and its radiating chapels.

Two of the radial chapels which he constructed at Fecamp have survived.

While they were building, there lived in the Trinite convent, as prior, Herbert de Lozinga, who, obtaining the bishopric of Norwich, erected on the Norfolk downs a stately Norman cathedral (1096-1119). Abbot Guillaume de Ros carried out the instructions of Richard I to give a loaf of bread to every beggar asking it, and when Fecamp was dissolved at the Revolution its abbot was distributing daily some twelve thousand free loaves of bread.

In 1169 fire wrecked the Romanesque Trinite, whereupon the present Gothic edifice was begun immediately, and in it two of the groin-vaulted chapels from the choir of Guillaume de Ros were incorporated. Abbot Henri de Soullay (1139-87) built the Primary Gothic choir, transept, and half of the nave. After the fifth bay of the nave a new architect took up the work, as is shown by differences in the pier profiles, but the cessation of activities must have been of short duration, as the church is h.o.m.ogeneous. The nave was finished under Abbot Raoul d'Argence (1190-1220), who organized Normandy's first literary academy--a confraternity of jongleurs. Its character was more Norman than the choir, though regional traits had early appeared in the turrets at the birth of the apse and the square central lantern.

To increase the impression of length in the nave its side walls were marked by double the number of arcades that divide the middle church from the aisles. This was accomplished by introducing a fifth rib into each vault section of those side corridors, which rib fell on a shaft engaged in the side walls. Like the minsters of England, Fecamp is more remarkable in its length than in its height.

Abbot Thomas de Saint-Benoit (1297-1307) decided to suppress the deep gallery over the choir's ambulatory, making the chapels that open on the curving aisle of exceptional height. He changed the southern aisle, giving it a coldly elegant Rayonnant aspect, but happily not that to the north, or we would have lost the two interesting Romanesque chapels of Abbot Guillaume de Ros. Some of Fecamp's later abbots were Clement VI, builder of the palace of the popes at Avignon and of the Chaise Dieu in the mountains of Auvergne, and an abbot of the patriotic Estouteville family, who was driven out by the English when Fecamp was besieged in 1415. The tool who succeeded him sat in judgment on Jeanne d'Arc.

The abbot of Fecamp during the transitional Flamboyant Renaissance day was Cardinal Antoine Boyer (1492-1519), a Maecenas who adorned his beautiful church with Italian marbles. He had sculptured, in the same studio at Genoa that provided Louis XII with the Orleans tombs for St.

Denis, an Entombment more spectacular in character than the famous one at Solesmes. Girolamo Viscardo made for him a tabernacle (for the choir's procession path), after the style of Mino da Fiesole. The lovely marble screens that close the side chapels are due to this generous prelate. For him Jacques Le Roux, the noted architect of Rouen, lengthened the Lady chapel. The only later change of importance in the Trinite was the erection of its neo-cla.s.sic facade.

THE GOTHIC ABBATIAL AT EU[330]

La Nature a bien des manieres de sourire. La Normandie est le plus beau sourire de la nature temperee.--O. RECLUS.

The tutelary of Eu is St. Laurence O'Toole, archbishop of Dublin, son of a prince in Leinster, an active continuer of the reforms begun by St.

Malachy of Armagh, who died in St. Bernard's arms at Clairvaux. St.