Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine Part 5

At Saint-Evroul we ought to think first of all of Saint Evroul; we do think first of all of Orderic the Englishman, called in religion Vital.[55] We called him just now a chronicler; but that is a.s.suredly not his right description. If he were more of a chronicler, that is, if he told his story in a more orderly way, without so many repet.i.tions and runnings to and fro, that is, if he were other than the kindly, gossiping, rambling old monk who has made Saint-Evroul a household word for all students of English and Norman history in his own day we ought not to feel so warmly drawn to him as we are. It was the home of Orderic that we wished to see. But it was very hard to find out whether his home had anything left to show us. Not a word could we find in any guidebook to say whether the abbey was living or ruined or desecrated or wholly swept away. It might be as unlucky as Avranches or as lucky as Saint Peter-on-Dives. And a monastic site from which everything monastic has been swept away is not so instructive as a fortified site from which the fortifications are gone. We should be best pleased to find at Saint-Evroul a church in which Orderic may have wors.h.i.+pped, but it would be better to find a later church--we had almost said one with discontinuous imposts to its pillars--rather than no church at all. We set forth in faith, not knowing what we are to find, but determined that we will at least see the place where the Ecclesiastical History of Normandy was written. One little incident of the journey may be mentioned. We reached Saint-Evroul; we saw more of Saint-Evroul's Abbey than we had ventured to hope that we should find there. But before we reached it our driver stopped near a house and buildings which seemed in no way attractive. Asked why he stopped there, he said that was where the landlady at Laigle had told him to stop. There were the great gla.s.s-works for which Saint-Evroul is now best known. And it was the Saint-Evroul of the gla.s.s-work that we were thought to have set forth to see, not the Saint-Evroul of Orderic or of Saint Evroul himself.

Orderic, son of a French father and an English mother, born by the banks of the Severn ten years after King William came into England, in the year of the martyrdom of Waltheof, was before all things Orderic the Englishman. If we are to take his words literally, English must have been the only language of his childhood. He was sent in his childhood to be a monk of Saint-Evroul;[56] one wonders why, as his father might surely have found him a cell either in the Orleans of his birth or the Shrewsbury of his adoption. Himself more truly the founder of Shrewsbury Abbey than his patron, Earl Roger, Odelerius of Ettingsham, the married priest, preferred Saint-Evroul to any other house of religion as the home of his son. The Abbey had lately been set up again, after a time of decay, by the bounty of several members of the houses of Geroy and Grantmesnil, one of whom, Abbot Robert, who plays also a part in Calabria and Sicily, was at least as turbulent as bountiful. But nothing would have more deeply grieved the monastic soul of Orderic than the thought that any one could think more of him than of the local saint and first founder. "Father Evroul," "Pater Ebrulfus," the man of the world who turned hermit in the days of Chlotocher, and around whose cell the monastery first grew up, lived in the devout memory of his spiritual children. One asks whether Orderic, "tenellus exsul" in his Norman monastery, like Joseph in Egypt hearing a strange language, ever stopped to think of the true meaning of his patron's name, how the softened _Ebrulfus_ and _Evroul_ disguised the two fierce beasts which went to make up the name of _Eoforwulf_. Perhaps, indeed, Orderic the Englishman, and all other Englishmen, had some right to see a kinsman, however distant, in the saint who bore so terrible a name. For Ebrulfus came of the city or land of Bayeux, and in Chlotocher's day, and long after, the land of Bayeux was still the _Otlingua Saxonica_, an abiding trace of those harryings and settlements of Sidonius's times, which planted the Saxon on both sides of the Channel. Still, to us Orderic is more than Evroul, even in the form of Eoforwulf. It is for his sake that we take our journey through the wood of Ouche till we come to the little stream of the Charenton, where the hermit chose out his solitary cell, where the monastery twice arose in his honour, and where now the gla.s.s-works are thought to be a greater attraction than the monastery.

The remains of the abbey soon catch our eye, as we draw near from the east side, the side of Laigle. They are not placed quite at the bottom of the valley; they gently climb up the hill to the west, the hill up which the small low street of Saint-Evroul leads to the highest point, where we find another sign of our own day in the railway station. The church of the monastery is a mere ruin; but it at least stands open to the sky; it is not desecrated and disfigured by being put to any profane use. Quite enough is left to put together the whole plan of the building. There is perhaps a slight feeling of disappointment at finding that here at Saint-Evroul there is nothing directly to remind us of the man for whose sake we have come thither. We would fain see something that had met the eyes of the island-born child in the first years of his coming to his foreign home. We would fain see even the church of Robert of Grantmesnil, much more the elder church from which the High Chancellor of Duke Hugh the Great carried away the body of Saint Evroul himself, as a piece of holy spoil which Normandy had to yield to France.[57] We would fain see the cloister where in Orderic's day, King Henry of England, victor of Tinchebray, sat a long time in thought, and the chapter-house where the Lion of Justice conferred with the brethren, where he praised their good order and devotion, and was, at his earnest request, admitted to their spiritual fellows.h.i.+p. And truly nowhere in kingdom or duchy had he a more loyal subject than the chronicler who knew so well what a work it was to bring some approach to peace and order into a land torn in pieces by n.o.ble brigands. Hopes of this kind, hopes of any immediate memory of the days of Orderic or of days before Orderic are not fated to be gratified; but we have done well to come to Saint-Evroul none the less.

The ruined church offers us much to see and study. The only thing that suggests itself as a possible memorial of Orderic's day is the foundation of the apse. But as it is only a foundation and not a crypt, there is no need to think that he ever saw it. The apse itself has fallen; but traces enough are left to show that inside at least it was polygonal. But it was an apse of the old simple pattern, without surrounding aisles and chapels. It could not have been there when the young novice from Shrops.h.i.+re came to Saint-Evroul. It may have been built in the latter part of his long sojourn. And the stumps of the great round pillars of the choir are most likely of the same date. The use of such pillars is a fas.h.i.+on English rather than Norman; but it is hard to believe that the "tenellus exsul" from Ettingsham brought with him any architectural tastes. The choir was of some length, and its length was broken by an apsidal chapel on each side, pointing north and south, so as to form a kind of small eastern transept. But the greater part of what is left is very fine work of the thirteenth century, finished at the west end in the fourteenth. The pillars and arches of the nave are broken down, leaving only stumps; but enough is left at the west end and at the crossing to show the design. Cl.u.s.tering shafts surrounded a central pillar; the mouldings of the arches are, as often happens in Normandy, as well and deeply cut as they would be in England.

Above the arcade was a tall clerestory, seemingly without any triforium or with the triforium thrown into the clerestory. Altogether there is about enough left to suggest the memory of Glas...o...b..ry, though Saint-Evroul is certainly not on the scale of Glas...o...b..ry, even without the western church. The west front must have been very remarkable. The first impression on approaching from outside is that two western towers stood out in front of the nave, as at Holyrood, or as the single towers at Dunkeld and Brechin. A second glance shows that what seemed to be the lower part of a south-western tower is really a building in advance of such a tower. That is to say, a large porch, or rather portico, with three tall arches, stood out in front of the western towers and of the end of the nave. It must have looked just enough like Peterborough to suggest Peterborough, but also to suggest the contrast between Peterborough and itself. At Peterborough the great portico stands indeed, as here, in advance of a west front with two towers. But it may be said to have supplanted that front. One tower was never finished; the other was thrown into insignificance. The portico is of the full height, and became the real west front. Here at Saint-Evroul the portico was not the whole of the west front, but only part; the towers must have risen a long way above it. One would like to be able to judge of the effect of such a design.

There is little or nothing left of the other buildings of the abbey, except the gateway by which we enter, with a larger and a smaller pointed arch. The field to the south of the church, where cloister, chapter-house, refectory, and the rest must have stood, had a locked gateway, and the owner had gone off with the key. But there seemed to be nothing, at least nothing standing up. Yet we should have liked to see at least the traces of the cloister on the southern wall. But Saint Evroul is not forgotten in his own place, or even within the walls of his own abbey. For a little chapel has been made within the buildings of the gate-house. He has also a cross and fountain, of which the cross, a modern one, is more visible than the fountain. And in the parish church on the opposite hill some relics of the abbey, indeed of the saint himself, are still preserved. There is specially a good fragment of an ancient triptych. The surviving small church looks down on the relics of the great one below. And the thought comes, so different from any suggested by the monastic ruins of England, how short a time it after all is since the great church of Saint-Evroul was a living thing as well as the small one. A visitor of no wonderful age could do a sum and find that his own father was at least able to walk and talk while Robert of Grantmesnil had still a less famous, but perhaps less unquiet successor.

TILLIeRES AND VERNEUIL

1892

Our second excursion from Laigle has quite another kind of interest from that of Saint-Evroul. We go more strictly to see places, and not as it were to commune with a single man. And the places that we go to see are primarily military, and not ecclesiastical. We do not go for a great church, not knowing whether we shall find it perfect or ruined, or wholly swept away. We go to see two castles or sites of castles, knowing that we shall find something more than their sites, and with a notion that we shall also get something ecclesiastical thrown into the balance.

Our object is to see the two border castles of Tillieres and Verneuil, both easily reached by railway from our central point at Laigle, and which by a more roundabout way, may be reached from Evreux also.

Tillieres is famous in the early wars of Normandy and France. Verneuil is best known in the days when Normandy had become the battle ground of England and France, and when Scotland threw herself on the French side.

As a matter of fact, we saw Verneuil first; we then went on to Tillieres, and thence back to Laigle, getting of course a second clear view of Verneuil by the way. But it will be more convenient to speak first of the place of more ancient fame.

Tillieres, Tillieres on the Arve, if it were left in its ancient state, would be an almost ideal border-fortress. It is close indeed on the border. When Wace describes Alencon, he tells us that one side of the water was Norman and the other side was Mansel. So here at Tillieres one side of the water was Norman and the other side was French. But the stream of Arve at Tillieres is so much narrower than the stream of Sarthe at Alencon that French and Norman stood much nearer together at Tillieres than Mansel and Norman stood at Alencon. Alencon again, as far as its history goes back, has always been a considerable town. Tillieres is now a mere village, except so far as so many of these villages put on the character of very small towns. But town or village, Tillieres is simply something which has grown up at the foot of the castle, while at Alencon one might say that one object at least of the castle was to defend the town. There is high ground on each side of the stream; that on the north side is Norman soil, that on the south is French. A projecting point of the Norman height was seized for the building of the great border-fortress of Normandy. A few dwellings of men, dependants doubtless of the castle and its lords, arose under its shadow, just within the Norman border. That this was done while France and Normandy were still foreign and hostile lands is shown by the western doorway of the church of Tillieres, a piece of plain Romanesque, of late eleventh or early twelfth century. Meanwhile, it does not appear that the opposite height was crowned by any French fortress. Tillieres must have been a standing menace to France, without there being any standing menace to Normandy back again. Here are our topographical facts, very clear and simple, quite enough to account for the part which Tillieres plays in the history of the Norman duchy.

That part may be told in a few sentences, but it is a striking story none the less. Tillieres, _Tegulense castrum_, bears a name cognate with the Kerameikos of Athens and with the Tuilleries of Paris. It was first fortified by Duke Richard the Good, the Duke who would have none but gentlemen about him, and in whose days the peasants arose against their masters. He gave his sister Matilda in marriage to Odo, Count of Chartres; he gave her lands by the Arve as her dowry; but when she died childless, he held that he had a right to take them back again. To this doctrine the widower naturally did not agree; disputes arose between the two princes, and the fortress of Tillieres--one would like to know its exact shape in those days--arose as a bulwark of Normandy, beneath whose walls the Count of Chartres underwent a defeat at the hands of Duke Richard's lieutenants. They were Neal of Coutances and Ralph of Toesny, speaking names in Norman history. We next hear of Tillieres in the young days of William the Great, when King Henry could no longer endure such a standing menace to France as the castle above the Arve. It is the Norman writers who tell us, and we have no French tale to set against this, how the King of the French demanded the castle of Tillieres--how the young duke's guardians found it prudent to yield to his demand--how its valiant governor, Gilbert Crispin, refused to give it up--how the united forces of France and Normandy constrained him--how the border-fortress was burned before all men, while the King swore that it should not be set again for four years. But they go on to tell us how the faithless King went on into the land of Exmes, how he burned Argentan, and came back to fortify Tillieres again as a bulwark of France against Normandy.[58] Time pa.s.sed on. King Henry fought with Duke William at Val-es-dunes, and fled before him at Varaville; and, as a fruit of the last Norman victory, Tillieres pa.s.sed back again to its old use as the border defence of Normandy.

With such a history as this, and with a site so well suited to the history, one could wish that there was more at Tillieres to describe than there actually is. We should be best pleased of all if the castle hill of Tillieres was still crowned with an ancient donjon; next to that we should like to see it in the same case as Exmes or rather as Almeneches. But the height is taken possession of by a house of much more pretension than the harmless farm at Almeneches, and the pa.s.sing wayfarer can do little more than follow the outer wall of the castle--a wall with work of endless dates--round a good part of its compa.s.s.

Looking down from the height, looking up from the village, best of all perhaps from a point of the railway just west of the Tillieres station, the general relations of castle, village, stream, and the once hostile hills beyond, can be well taken in; but not much more than the general relations. And the village has little to show beyond its church; and there the Romanesque doorway is the choicest thing, as being part of our chain of evidence. But it seems not to be on this ground that the church of Tillieres is counted among "historic monuments," that is, forbidden to be pulled about by any one else, but destined sooner or later, to be pulled about by the national powers. Its qualification for admission into this cla.s.s seems to be the _Renaissance_ choir. On the outside this is about as poor a jumble of bad Gothic and bad Italian as can well be thought of; within it has a somewhat better effect with a vault and rich pendants. Still they are nothing like so striking as those in Saint Gervase at Falaise, which do really make us wonder how they are kept up.

More really interesting, perhaps, is the wooden roof of the nave, evidently as great a feat as a French artist was capable of in the way of wooden roofs. And an eye from Somerset looks kindly at this outlandish attempt to make a kind of coved roof, and to paint it withal.

Such a one hopes that the French Republic will not turn diocesan architect, and try to get rid of it. But he thinks that he could show better coved roofs at home, and he wonders why, if the coved shaped was chosen, a system of South-Saxon tie-beams and king-posts was thrust in as well.

We turn to the other famous border-fortress of Verneuil. Here the position, as a position, is in no way to be compared to that of Tillieres; but we have one grand military tower; we have a much larger town, containing several important churches and houses, and one ecclesiastical tower which may claim a place in the very first rank of its own cla.s.s. Verneuil is a border-fortress; but it is not so ideal a border-fortress as Tillieres. It is not so close on the border; for here Normandy has a small _Peraia_, a certain amount of territory beyond the river. And, as Verneuil presented no such commanding point for a castle site as Tillieres did, the fortress was not placed on a height at all, but in the lower part of the town, to guard the stream. There is a distinct ascent in Verneuil; but nothing like the slope at Tillieres from the Norman castle down to the border-stream and from the border-stream up again to the French hills. But there is enough rise to make the grand ecclesiastical tower on the high ground stand out as the most prominent object in the approach, while the grand military tower down below makes no show at all. We were a little puzzled by Joanne's account of Verneuil, in which he said that the castle had been completely demolished, but that the donjon existed still. It seems that at Verneuil, as at Argentan, castle and donjon are distinguished; but at Verneuil castle and donjon are not, as at Argentan, separate buildings joined only by a long wall; they stand close together and formed part of one work. Nor is the castle as distinguished from the donjon, completely demolished; there is a considerable fragment standing very near. The donjon, called locally _Tourgrise_ from the colour of its stone, is a round tower, not quite a rival of Coucy, but tall enough and big enough to have a very striking effect. It has been lately restored or set up again in some way, perhaps cleared out and roofed in. Anyhow Verneuil is not a little proud of the fact, and marks its thankfulness by a great number of rather foolish inscriptions. The tower is proclaimed to be the work of Henry I., our Henry of Tinchebray, not the developed rebuilder of Tillieres; but this seems out of the question, as the small doorways--we cannot guarantee the windows--have pointed arches, which seem to be original. But the ruined fragment of the castle hard by, with its ruder masonry and a shattered round-headed window seemed certainly to be as early as Henry's day and very likely a good bit earlier. Hard by the donjon seems to be a small piece of town walls; otherwise the walls have vanished, and are, as usual, marked by boulevards. That on the north side still keeps the character of a rampart, and is a good place for studying the most visible ornaments of the town.

Verneuil has much to show both in churches and houses. Of the latter, besides a good many of timber and brick, which are always pleasant to see, there are two which are more remarkable. One is a singularly good bit of late Gothic with windows and a graceful _tourelle_. The other has a _tourelle_ of the same kind, but it runs off into _Renaissance_. Both have a curious kind of masonry, squares alternately of brick and stone.

The greatest church is that of Saint Mary Magdalen, in the great open place in the upper part of the town. Here is the grand tower, built between 1506 and 1530, a n.o.ble design, and carried out without any infection of foreign detail. It is practically detached, standing at the south-west corner of a low nave. If the nave had ever been rebuilt, as was doubtless designed, to match the later and loftier choir, the effect of the tower would have suffered a good deal. As it is, from some points, where the nave is not seen at all, it reminded one a little of Limoges Cathedral, as it stood before the rebuilding of the nave was begun. It rises by two tall stages above the church; then the square tower changes to an octagon, a very small octagon supporting one still smaller. It would have been far better to have given the octagon more importance, as in most of the other great examples, French and English, starting with Boston stump. It is further complained, and the complaint is true, that the upper part of the square tower looks top-heavy. It was just the same with the other Magdalen tower at Taunton till its rebuilding. Since then, strange to say, though no difference of detail can be seen in the rebuilt tower, the effect of top-heaviness is gone.

In both cases that effect was, doubtless, due to the piling of stage upon stage, without making them gradually increase in lightness and richness towards the top, as at Bishops Lydeard. But it is not a case to find fault; the vast height, the grandeur of design, the purity of detail at so late a time, all mark this tower as one of the n.o.blest works of the late French Gothic. A little way to the west is another tower, attached to a now desecrated church, we believe of Saint John, which was clearly built as a rival to the Magdalen tower. It is rather smaller, and in its lower stages plainer--no fault in that; but a little higher it begins to Italianise, and then stops altogether. An ugly modern top is all that answers to the upper stages and octagon of the Magdalen. The people of the Magdalen parish must have been strongly tempted to say of their nearest neighbours, "These men began to build, and were not able to finish."

The church to which this most stately tower is attached is not of any great interest, beyond a simple Romanesque doorway and window in the west front, and some very plain arches to match in the transepts. The choir is rather poor late Gothic, spoiled by a great blank s.p.a.ce between arcade and clerestory. Of the nave we hardly know what to say. As it stands, it is plainly modern; the great round pillars are hollow; but the design is one which we can hardly fancy coming into anybody's head, unless it reproduced something older. It is something like Boxgrove, something like some German churches, but not exactly. A pair of pier-arches are grouped under a single arch containing a single clerestory window, and there is a barrel-vault above all. A church in the hands of Huguenots, called "La Salle des Conferences," seems to have a Romanesque sh.e.l.l and keeps three windows in a flat east end. Not far from the donjon is the Decorated church of Saint Lawrence, where the usual late Gothic dies off into _Renaissance_ at the west end. But the other great piece of ecclesiastical work in Verneuil, besides the Magdalen tower, is the choir of the church of Our Lady, lower down in the town. There is an east end, such as one hardly sees on so small a scale out of Auvergne. Here is the apse, the surrounding aisle, the apses again projecting from the aisle; and the varied outline is made yet more varied by a round turret of the same date and style thrown in among the apses. The general air is early, the work plain, the masonry simple; but the clerestory windows have pointed arches. We gaze with delight on an outline more thoroughly picturesque than we have seen for a long while, and which carries back our thoughts to a land of which all the memories are pleasing. We purpose to look at it once more before we finally turn away from Verneuil; but good intentions are not always carried out. Let us dream of another Arvernian journey, so planned as to take Verneuil on the road.

BEAUMONT-LE-ROGER

1892

The name of Roger of Beaumont must be well known to any who have studied the details of the Norman Conquest of England, though Roger's own position with regard to that event is a negative one. His sons play a part in the Conquest itself, and yet more in the events that followed the Conquest. In the reign of Henry I. Robert of Meulan, son of Roger of Beaumont, but called from the French fief of his mother, is the most prominent person after the King himself and Anselm. But Roger himself, the old Roger, stayed in Normandy as the counsellor of d.u.c.h.ess Matilda, while his eldest son followed Duke William to the war. There is interest enough about the man himself and his belongings to give attraction to the place which specially bears his name, and which, in truth, was his own creation. The man and the place are called after one another. Roger is the Roger of Beaumont; Beaumont is the Beaumont of Roger. He was not always Roger of Beaumont; he first appears as Roger, son of Humfrey _de Vetulis_. One learns one's map of Normandy by degrees. The description of _De Vetulis_ is a little puzzling; it has been turned into French and English in more ways than are right. But get out at the Beaumont station of the Paris and Cherbourg Railway--it comes between Evreux and Bernay--and walk to the little town of Beaumont, and a fresh light is gained. Perhaps it strikes us for the first time, perhaps it comes up again as a sc.r.a.p of knowledge lighted up afresh, when, between the station and the town, we pa.s.s through the _faubourg_ of _Les Vieilles_.

How it came by the name we need not ask; the name was there and is there, and we see that Humfrey _de Vetulis_ is simply Humfrey of _Les Vieilles_. We see that here down below was the earliest seat of the house, till Roger climbed the _Bellus Mons_, to found his castle, to give it his name, and to take his name from it. It is a pleasant process when these small facts come out on the spot with a life that they can never get out of books. A scoffer might ask whether it were worth while to go to Beaumont-le-Roger simply to get a clearer notion of the meaning of the words "Humfredus de Vetulis." But it is clearly worth while to go to Beaumont-le-Roger, both for the a.s.sociation of the place and to see what Roger made and what others have made since his day. At Hauteville we could simply guess at the spot which may have witnessed the earliest wiles of Robert the _Wiscard_: there is no doubt at all as to the scene of the earliest wiles of one who might have been called Robert the Wiscard just as truly. Here were spent the early days of Robert, son of Roger, great in three lands--Lord of Beaumont, Count of Meulan, and Earl of Leicester, forefather in the female line of the most glorious holder of his earldom.[59]

We walk from the station with the _Bellus Mons_ plainly before us in a general way, in the shape of a well-wooded range of high ground. But we see no castle standing up. An abiding castle of Roger's day we hardly look for; but we do not even see any special mount rising above the pa.s.s of the hill, or standing out as a promontory in front of it. The most prominent object is the parish church nestling at the foot of the hill.

We see that it has a rich tower; we presently see that it has also one of those wonderfully lofty choirs, which seldom get westward as far as the tower, but which, if they did, would cut down the tower to insignificance. We are used to these things; we know that the work that we see must be late; but that does not cut off the hope that the church may contain something of the age of Roger or his sons. A building of Roger's youth would be something precious. It would rank with d.u.c.h.ess Judith's Abbey at Bernay, with the long and ma.s.sive nave of the church at Breteuil, in which, notwithstanding modern tamperings, we are tempted to see a work of William Fitz-Osborn, while he was still only lord of Breteuil, and not yet Earl of Hereford. But of Roger and his house the church of Beaumont has no signs; all is late, save the pillars with Transitional capitals, which peep out. The choir is very late, and in its details very bad; here, as in a hundred other places, we wonder how men who had such grand general conceptions could be so unlucky in the way of carrying them out. The aisles have some good Flamboyant windows, and the tower, if it had been carried up to its full height, would have been a fine example of the style. And against it now lean two memorial stones commemorating founders and foundations, but not of the house of _De Vetulis_. They are brought from the neighbouring abbey, of which we shall presently have to speak.

Close above the church we take a road up the hill-side. It is well to turn presently, to take in the strange grouping of the tower and the tall choir, as seen from a point a little above them. But our object now is that which is historically the central, physically the loftiest, point at Beaumont, the castle on the _Bellus Mons_ itself. We soon begin to see fragments of masonry rising above us on the left hand. Here, then, is the castle; and so in a sense it is. That is, it is part of its works, within its precincts; but it is not the head work of all. We go on a little further, and we see signs of mound and ditch plainly enough. But we do not take in their full grandeur, till we are kindly admitted within the gate of one of the small holdings into which the site of the fortress of Roger's rearing is now cut up. Then we see, indeed, why it was that "Rogerius de Vetulis" was changed into "Rogerius de Bello Monte."

It is, indeed, a "_bellus mons_" in the sense of commanding a wide and pleasant outlook. The town and church of Beaumont, from some points the abbey close below, the wide vale of the Rille and the hills beyond, make up a cheerful landscape. But if by the "_bellus mons_" we were to understand a fair natural hill, we should be led astray. The actual site of Roger's keep is neither a natural hill nor an artificial mound. It is a piece of the natural hill artificially cut off from the general ma.s.s.

The founder chose a point of the hill-side which suited his objects. Its southern face, towards the open country, was steep enough for purposes of defence; for the rest, he cut off the piece of ground that was to be fortified by a gigantic ditch in the form of a horse-shoe. It is a ditch indeed, one that gladdens the eye that is looking out for such things.

There is not so much of it, but what there is seems as grand as anything at Arques or Old Sarum. Lilybaeum stands apart; Roger must have had plenty of labour at his command; but he had not, like the engineers of Carthage, to dig through the solid rock. It is a ditch to look down on from above, and also to walk along in its depth, and to look up on each side. The ground is not absolutely open all round; some obstructions of farm-buildings, and the like, hinder one from stepping out the horse-shoe quite as far as it goes; but the top of the mound--if mound is the right word--is perfectly free. There are fragments of masonry left everywhere, _but_ there is no continuous wall anywhere, nor any sc.r.a.p of detail by which we could fix a date. Still, enough is left for all purposes of historical a.s.sociation, enough to show in what kind of a place Roger of _Les Vieilles_ fixed his home. It is not exactly an eagle's nest; for that kind of dwelling Normandy supplies fewer opportunities than some other lands. But it comes much more nearly to an eagle's nest than the home of any lord of Laigle who dwelled at Laigle.

The exact ground-plan Mr. Clark, and few besides Mr. Clark, could make out. But without making out the exact ground-plan, we learn enough to teach us not a little about both Roger's Beaumont and Beaumont's Roger.

Was the lord of Beaumont-le-Roger ent.i.tled to a _sainte chapelle_ in his castle? Perhaps he might seem to be so when he was also Count of Meulan and Earl of Leicester. Perhaps it might seem so still more when Beaumont had come into the hands of French kings, and had begun to be granted out as a _comte-pairie_ for their sons. But, seemingly before that time, which did not come till the fourteenth century, a building arose which is not exactly a _sainte chapelle_ within the castle, but which is very near to the castle, and which has very much the air of a _sainte chapelle_. When we speak of a _sainte chapelle_ we, of course, mean a _sainte chapelle_ anywhere, whether at Riom, Paris, or anywhere else. This building is the abbey church of Beaumont, which stands just below the castle on the hill-side, a building once evidently of remarkable beauty. Perhaps the most notable feature about it is the ascent from the road below to the abbey buildings, a covered pa.s.sage lighted by large early Geometrical windows. We make our way up and presently reach the abbey itself. It is plain that on this narrow ledge on the hill-side it was no more possible than it was on the steep of Saint Michael's Mount to put the several buildings of the monastery in their accustomed relation to the church and to one another. Too much has perished for any one but a specialist in monastic arrangements to attempt to spell out the buildings of the monastery in detail; but it seems that a good deal lay to the westward of the church which in ordinary cases would have been placed to the north or south. The church is but a fragment; the north and east walls are there, and from them we can reconstruct it. "East Wall" is here a phrase that may be used; for we are a little amazed to find that the church had no apse, but an English-looking flat end. The large east window has lost its tracery, which should have been something of the pattern of the Angels' Choir at Lincoln. The whole of the work that remains is of the best French Early Gothic. Seen from below, from the bridge across the Rille at no great distance, there is something wonderfully striking in this single side of the church, an inside seen from outside, with its sheltered windows and vaulting-shafts, standing against the side of the castle-hill. How was it when both abbey and castle were perfect? As it is, the abbey is the more prominent of the two. We can see at least a piece of it, while we have to guess at the castle; none of its fragments stand out at any distance. Yet, even looking thus, the abbey seems something subordinate, something dependent; it seems crowded into an unnatural position in order to be an appendage to something else. The parish church stands out boldly enough. It has a right to do so; it came in the order of nature.

It proclaims the separate being of the town of Beaumont. The town of Beaumont doubtless sprang up because of the presence of the castle; but it sprang up by an independent growth; it was not the personal creation of any of its lords. The abbey, on the other hand, placed on so strange a site, was clearly the personal device of its own founder, who may have felt a number of very different feelings gratified, as he saw an abbey of his own making at his feet.

The result is an abbatial church unlike all other abbatial churches. The abbey of Beaumont is very beautiful, while the abbey of Almeneches is very ugly; yet Almeneches comes one degree nearer than Beaumont to one's ordinary notion of an abbey church. The abbey of Beaumont must have been a lovely chapel, but only a chapel. If it stood in its perfect state at Caen, among that wonderful group of n.o.ble minsters and great parish churches, it would strike us as a beautiful, but a small thing. This is not the usual position of the church of an abbey. It was, in fact, a pious and artistic fancy; while not, in strictness of description, a _sainte chapelle_ or other chapel of a castle, it has all the effect of being such. Or in its position against the hill-side, it may call up the memory of Brantome far away in Perigord;[60] it has nothing in common with a typical abbey church like Saint-Evroul, except the accident of being much of the same date and style.

One building still remains to be noticed in the Beaumont of Roger. That is the church of his earliest home at Les Vieilles. It had, or was meant to have, a pretty thirteenth-century tower. But the church is a mere fragment, mutilated, desecrated, shut up. A decently kept ruin is far less offensive than a church in such a state as this. But the thought again comes, as at Saint-Evroul, how short a time has pa.s.sed since the parish church of Les Vieilles and the abbey church of Beaumont were both living things. No man now alive can remember them such; but not so many years back many could. In 1861 we talked with one who remembered the abbey church of Bernay in the full extent of its choir and Lady-chapel.

We go back after thirty years to find the church of the Conqueror's grandmother in other things much as it was, still desecrated, but with no more of actual destruction. But we find that the one genuine Roman shaft that was there, one of the very few such north of Loire, has either perished or has been so covered up with timber framework as to be quite out of sight. And one later, but still early capital, had been knocked away to make a convenient resting-place for a wooden beam. One would think that such a building as this, even if it cannot be restored to divine wors.h.i.+p, might at least be made _monument historique_ and taken care of. Only then the State would some day come and take away every real shaft and every real capital, and put imitation shafts and capitals in their stead. And that might be even worse than the wooden beams.

JUBLAINS

1876

We know not how far the name of Silchester may be known among Frenchmen, but we suspect that the name of Jublains is very little known among Englishmen. The two places certainly very nearly answer to one another in the two countries. Both alike are buried Roman towns whose sites had been forsaken, or occupied only by small villages; both have supplied modern inquirers with endless stores both of walls and foundations and of movable relics; and the two spots further agree in this, that both at Silchester and at Jublains the history of the place has to be made out from the place itself; all that we can do is to make out the Roman names; we have no record of the history of either.[61] The names which the two places now bear respectively ill.u.s.trate the rules of French and English nomenclature. Silchester proclaims itself by its English name to have been a Roman _castrum_, but it keeps no trace of its Roman name of Calleva. But Naeodunum of the Diablintes follows the same rule as Lutetia of the Parisii. The old name of the town itself is forgotten, but the name of the tribe still lives. The case is not quite so clear as that of Paris; some unlucky etymologists have seen in the name Jublains traces of _Jules_ and of _bains_; but a moment's thought will show that the name is a natural corruption of _Diablintes_. The name is spelled several ways, of which _Jublains_ is now the one in vogue; but another form, _Jublent_, better brings out its origin. As for the two places themselves, Jublains and Silchester, each of them has its points in which it surpa.s.ses the other. At Silchester there is the town-wall, nearly perfect throughout the whole of its circuit. Jublains fails here; but, on the other hand, Silchester has no one object to set against the magnificent remains of the fortress or citadel, the traditional camp of Caesar. Silchester again has the great advantage of being systematically and skilfully dug out, while Jublains has been examined only piecemeal.

This again ill.u.s.trates the difference between the state of owners.h.i.+p in England and in France. Silchester is at the command of a single will, which happily is in the present generation wisely guided. Jublains must fare as may seem good to a mult.i.tude of separate wills, of which it is too much to expect that all will at any time be wisely guided. But it is worth while to remember on the other hand that a single foolish Duke may easily do more mischief than several wise Dukes can do good, and that out of the many owners of Jublains, if we cannot expect all at any time to be wise, there is a fair chance that at no moment will every one of them be foolish.

At the present moment most certainly several of the owners of Jublains are the opposite of foolish, and the most important monument of all is placed beyond the individual caprice of any man. The great fortress is diligently taken care of under the authority of the local Archaeological Society; the theatre is the property of M. Henri Barbe, a zealous resident antiquary and the historian of the place; and the other chief remains are easily accessible, and, as far as we can see, stand in no danger. But it is of course impossible to dig up the whole place in the same way as Silchester has been dug up. The modern Diablintes must live somewhere; no power short of that of an Eastern despot can expel them all from the sites of their predecessors, even to make the ways and works of those predecessors more clearly known.

But we have as yet hardly said what and where Jublains is. It lies in the old county and diocese of Maine, in the modern department of Mayenne, on the road between the towns of Mayenne and Evron. The site was, as the local historian well points out, one admirably chosen for the site of a town, standing as it does at the point of junction of the roads from various parts of Central and Northern Gaul and from the Constantine and Armorican peninsulas. It stands on a gently sloping height, with a wide view over the flatter land to the south, and over the Cenomannian hills more to the east, the peak of Montaigu, namesake of our own Montacute, forming a prominent object. The traveller coming along the road from Mayenne, the most likely point of approach, will hardly notice anything remarkable till he reaches the parish church, a building of no special importance, but which has a bell-gable of a type more familiar in Britain than in Gaul. Here, if he has any eyes at all, he will see that the church is built on the foundations of some much larger and earlier building. The ma.s.ses of Roman masonry are clear enough, with two round projections near the two western angles of the church. These are the remains of the _thermae_ of Naeodunum, and the traveller has in fact pa.s.sed through the greater part of the ancient city to reach them. There are plenty of other and far greater remains; but this is the only one which lies immediately on the road by which the traveller is likely to come. The enclosed s.p.a.ce of the town was an irregular four-sided figure, with no distinct four streets of a _chester_, but rather with a greater number of ways meeting together, like our G.o.dmanchester. The whole eastern side of the town is full of remains among the fields and gardens; not far from the northern entrance, a field or two away from the road, are the very distinct foundations of a temple locally known as that of Fortune. A walk over two or three more fields, crossed by traces of foundations at almost every step, brings the traveller to a more singular object, known locally as _La Tonnelle_, which looks very much like the foundation of a round temple, such as that of Hercules (late Vesta) at Rome. And something like the effect of such a temple is accidentally preserved. A line of trees follows the circular sweep of the foundations, and their trunks really make no bad representatives of the columns of the temple.

In short, when the traveller is once put upon the scent, he finds sc.r.a.ps of ancient Naeodunum at every step of his walk through Jublains and its fields.

But the most important remains of all lie in the south-western part of the old enclosure. To the extreme south of the city lies the theatre.

This is happily the property of M. Barbe, who lives and carries on his researches within its precinct. Its general plan has been made out, and, as diggings go on, the rows of seats are gradually becoming visible. It differs from the shape of most other theatres, as its curved line occupies more than a semicircle, like the shape of a Saracenic horse-shoe arch. It seems that no signs of an amphitheatre had been found at Jublains; so M. Barbe is driven to the conclusion that the same building must have been used for both purposes. How far this is archaeologically sound we must leave to those who are specially learned in amphitheatres to determine. But we cannot forget the dissatisfied audience in Horace who, between the acts, or even during the performance itself, called for "aut ursum aut pugiles." The position, sloping away to the south, is indeed a lovely one, and we may congratulate the man who has found at once his home and his work on such a spot.

But the great sight of all at Jublains, that which gives its special character to the place, but which has also a history of its own distinct from the place, has yet to be spoken of. We have kept it for the last, both because of its special history and because it seems to be the only thing which is locally recognised as a place of pilgrimage. Tell your driver to take you to Jublains, and he will at once take you to "le camp de Jules Cesar." He knows the other objects perfectly well; but, unless he is specially asked, he a.s.sumes that this one point is the object of the journey. Nor is this wonderful; for the camp, fortress, citadel, whatever it is to be called, though most a.s.suredly not the work of the great Dictator, is after all the great object at Jublains, which gives Jublains its special place among Gaulish and Roman cities. More than this, it is the one object which stands out before all eyes, and which must fix on itself the notice of the most careless pa.s.ser-by. Suddenly, by the roadside, we come on ma.s.sive Roman walls, preserved to an unusual proportion of their height. Their circuit may in everyday speech be called a square, though strict mathematical accuracy must p.r.o.nounce it to be a trapezium. Near the entrance we mark some fragments gathered together, and the eye is regaled, as it so often is in Italy and so seldom in Britain and Northern Gaul, with the sight of the Corinthian acanthus leaf. The wall itself, on the other hand, is of that construction of which we see so much in Britain and in Northern Gaul, but which is unknown in Rome itself. Here are the familiar layers of small stones with the alternate ranges of bricks. We enter where the eastern gate has been, and find a second line of defence, a wall of earth, square, or nearly so, but with its angles rounded off, with its single entrance near the south-east angle carefully kept away from either of the approaches in the outer wall. Within this again is the fortress itself, again quadrangular, with projections at the angles. The more finished parts of its walls, the gateways, and the parts adjoining them, give us specimens of Roman masonry whose vast stones carry us back, be it to the wall of _Roma Quadrata_ at one end or to the Black Gate of Trier at the other, and which specially call back the latter in the marks of the metal clamps which have been torn away. Details must be studied on the spot or in the works of M. Barbe, which is nearly the same thing, as they seem to be had only on the spot. But there are not many remains of Roman work more striking than this, and it is more striking still if we try to make out its probable history from the internal evidence, which is all that we have to guide us.

That this fortress does not belong to any early period of the Roman occupation is clear from its construction, the alternate layers of brick and stone, and the bricks with wide joints of masonry between them, as in all the later Roman work. And again, the fact that among the materials of the fortress have been found pieces of other buildings used up again might suggest that it was not built till after some time of change, perhaps of destruction, had come over the city. But it is the numismatic evidence which clearly parts off the history of the fortress from the general history of the city. Jublains has no inscriptions to show, but its numismatic wealth is great. Among the many coins found, not many are earlier than the time of Nero, and those which there are are chiefly coins of Germanicus. From Nero to Constantine coins of all dates are common. It is M. Barbe's inference that it was in Nero's reign that the place began to be of importance, and that its great temple was built. But the numismatic stores of the fortress taken by itself tell quite another story. There, not a coin has been found earlier than Domitian, nor one later than Aurelian, saving a chance find of two Carolingian pieces of Charles the Bald and a modern French piece of Charles the Sixth. Again, though coins are found from Domitian onwards, it is only with Valerian and Gallienus that they become at all common, while the great ma.s.s belong to Tetricus and his son. One alone is of Aurelian. That is to say, of 169 coins found in the fortress, 151 come in the twenty years from 258 to 273, while 110 belong to the single reign of the Tetrici. After Aurelian there is nothing earlier than Charles the Bald. It is clear then that the fortress must have been deserted in the reign of Aurelian; it is clear that the time of its chief importance must have been just before, in the time of Tetricus. It looks as if the fortress had had but a very short life. The conclusion of the local antiquaries is that it was most likely raised by Postumus, and that it perished in some revolt or sedition, or merely as the result of the overthrow of Tetricus by Aurelian. A mere glance at the building would have tempted us to put it a little later, to have set it down as part of the defences of Probus, or even of some Emperor much later than Probus. But the numismatic evidence seems irresistible; it seems impossible to escape the conclusion that this splendid piece of Roman military work belongs to the middle of the third century, and that it was forsaken, most likely slighted, within a very few years after its first building.

This is as curious and conclusive a piece of internal evidence as we often light upon; but it must be remembered that all this applies only to the fortress, and not to the town of Naeodunum. That had a much longer life. It began long before the fortress, and it went on long after. The diggings at Jublains have brought to light a great number of Christian Frankish objects, which shows that the place kept on some measure of importance long after the Teutonic conquest of Gaul. It seems also to be looked upon as a kind of secondary seat of the Cenomannian bishopric.

But it must either have died out bit by bit, or else have perished in some later convulsion. The local inquirers seem to incline to attribute the final destruction of Naeodunum, the City of the Diablintes in the nomenclature of the time, to the incursions of the Northmen in the ninth century. That they did a great deal of mischief in Maine is certain; and is a likely enough time for the city to have been finally swept away as a city, and to have left only the insignificant modern village which has grown up amongst its ruins.

Jublains then, Diablintes, Naeodunum, whatever it is to be called, has a special place among fallen Roman cities. Aquileia and Salona once ranked among the great cities of the earth; their destruction is matter of recorded history. The destruction of Uriconium is so far matter of recorded history that a reference to it has been detected in the wail of a British poet. The fall of Anderida was sung by our own gleemen and recorded by our own chroniclers. But the fall of Calleva and the fall of Naeodunum are alike matters of inference. Geography shows that Calleva fell in the northern march of Cerdic, and the most speaking of all Roman relics, the treasured and hidden eagle, abides as a witness of the day when our fathers overthrew it.[62] Naeodunum seems to have undergone no such overthrow as those wrought by the Hun, the Avar, and the Saxon. But the evidence of buildings and of coins reveals to us a most important and singular piece of the internal history of the Roman province of Gaul. The city of the Diablintes itself may have been finally swept away by Hasting or Rolf; but the greatest thing in Naeodunum, the Roman fortress, must have been, perhaps broken down, certainly forsaken, by the hands of men who called themselves Romans, while its bricks and stones were still in their first freshness. Nowhere is the truth more strongly brought home to us that there is another kind of evidence besides chronicles, besides even written doc.u.ments, the evidence of the works of the men themselves who did deeds which no one took the trouble to record with the pen or with the graving tool.