The Story of CHARTRES
by C e c i l H e a d l a m
Illustrated by H. Railton etc.

London: J. M. Dent & Co.
Aldine House, 29 and 30 Bedford Street
Covent Garden W.C.

1902

‘Quae qui non vidit jam similia
non videbit, non solum ibi, sed in
totá Francia.’

‘La vile esteit mult bone, de grande antiquité,
Iglise i aveit bele, de grant anctorité;
De la sainte Virge Marie mère de Dé
I esteit la kemise tenue en grant chierté.’
Robert Wace (Roman du Rou).

‘The most wonderful thing in France.’
James Russell Lowell.

‘Notre-dame de Chartres! A world to explore, as
if one explored the entire Middle Ages.’
Walter Pater.

TO
MY FRIEND
GEORGE MONTAGU
IN MEMORY OF DAYS
IN THE
OLD WORLD AND THE NEW

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

An excellent train, leaving the Gare S. Lazare at mid-day, runs through from Paris in one hour and a half. A good déjeuner is served in the train on starting. Returning from Chartres, most of the trains run into the Montparnasse Station, south of the river and twenty minutes’ drive from the Place de l’Opéra.

The road is straight and level and a favourite one with automobilists. Chartres may also, of course, be approached from Normandy viâ Rouen, Évreux, Dreux, and, if you include Amiens to the North-west, and Caen (whence you will visit Bayeux, Lisieux, and Falaise) to the North-east, Chartres will be found to provide the perfect finish to a delightful and instructive, and also economical, tour.

An itinerary for those who have but a short time to spare at Chartres is suggested on page 352.

Hotels—Grand Monarque (Automobile Club de France); Duc de Chartres; France.

CHAPTER I
Druids and Romans: The Crypt

BUILT half on the slope and half on the strath in a depression of calcareous soil, Chartres lies along the banks of the gliding Eure, breaking the long levels of La Beauce.

La Beauce, indeed, is still the waterless, shadeless, woodless plain that the Bishop of Poitiers described in the sixth century, but it is now also one immense field of corn in which man has planted a few scattered farms and pleasure houses.[1] It is the granary of France. Le blé c’est la Beauce et la Beauce c’est Chartres.[2]

And on every side of it, spread out in the summer time like a many-coloured carpet under the great dome of the sky, stretch the cornfields, cut by the black lines of the railway, or by the straight, disheartening lengths of roads which run beyond the distant horizon of monotonous level, to Dreux, to Orléans, to Paris. The twin spires of Chartres are the only landmark. The sole beauty in this country must be found in its fecundity; in the fields of standing corn, which the passing breezes curve into travelling waves, and in the endless perspective of sameness which inspires the same emotions of mingled pleasure and sadness as the sight of the vast and melancholy ocean. And, like a ship for ever a-sail in the distance, everywhere the great Church of Chartres is visible, with the passing light or shadow upon its grey, weather-beaten surfaces, or, as it seemed to Lowell:—

‘Silent and grey as forest-leaguered cliff
Left inland by the ocean’s slow retreat.’

Chartres is no place for an Atheist.[3] The exclamation of Napoleon on first entering the Cathedral of Notre-Dame is the keynote and summary of the town. For from the earliest dawn of its history down to the present day Chartres has preserved, almost unbroken, the tradition of a religious centre. Other notes have indeed been struck here and died away in the distance of ages. There have been discords in the score of her worldly history. The armies of Cæsar and of Hastings have come and gone; the armies of England, of France, of Germany, have marched through the narrow, tortuous streets of this ancient city and left scarce a trace behind. Mediævalism with all its charm and all its vileness has disappeared before the excesses of that Revolution which sowed the seed of modern French civilisation. The thick forests which were once the glory of the Druids have vanished and given place to innumerable acres of tillage, whilst the sound of the woodman’s axe has been replaced by the swish of the scythe and the hum of the threshing machine. But through all these changes Chartres has remained true to her heritage. She has been always the first town of Our Lady, the chosen citadel of the Virgin. The friars of the Middle Ages, who obtained the right of coining money, stamped on their coins the legend Prima Sedes Francie, and Charles-le-Chauve, when he presented to the town the Veil of the Blessed Mary, chose the Church of Chartres as the earliest and most august sanctuary of the cult of the Virgin. And even before the Christian era it was so. For, by a strange coincidence, in which there has been found something more than a coincidence, or nothing more than a reflection of Isis worship, or, again, merely a monkish invention, but by a strange coincidence, at any rate, the grotto, above which, in after years, the mediæval masons were to rear the superb superstructure of their Cathedral, was dedicated by the ancient Druids: ‘To the Virgin who shall bear a son’—Virgini Parituræ.—There, upon the very spot in the dim vast crypt which is to-day the most famous and the most frequented shrine in the world, they worshipped an image which was the forerunner of the statue of Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre.

Were they moved by some echo of those most ancient Eastern rites which include the cult of a virgin mother and child, or had they heard, these wise and inscrutable priests, some echo of Isaiah’s prophecy: A virgin shall conceive and bear a son? Possibly. At any rate, we know that a hundred years before the coming of Christ the Messianic idea had grown familiar to the Gentile world. The works of Greek and Roman writers are eloquent of this fact. Plato, in a passage which seems to echo the very words of Scripture, had long ago foretold what would be the fate of the perfectly just man upon earth; and Vergil, voicing the prevailing belief that the world’s great age was soon to begin anew, and referring to an oracle of the Sybil, prayed for the speedy coming of the promised Saviour in language strikingly like that in which the prophets of the Old Testament speak of the Messiah. The Magi, the wise men and watchful astrologers of the East, waited impatiently for the coming of God upon earth, till they beheld a new star which rose over Bethlehem and announced His Nativity. And these ancient Druids also gave expression to the yearning of all Creation. Virgini Parituræ—To the Virgin who shall bear a son, they dedicated a wooden statue in the mysterious sanctuary hidden in the depths of their sacred forest, beneath the shade of which was the meeting-place of the Carnutes.

Thus it comes about that with the dawn of history we see, through the mist of the ages as it were, a solemn procession winding amongst the trees of the primeval forest.

At the head are two white bulls and the sacrificial priests, and in their train follow bards and novices chanting anthems, and a herald clad in white. The Druids follow. One of them is carrying bread, another a vase full of water, the third an ivory hand, the emblem of Justice. The high priest closes the procession, and about him cluster the other priests of the Oak and the chiefs of the local tribes. For the oak, Pliny tells us in his Natural History, is the Druid’s sacred tree, and the mistletoe that grows thereon they regard as sent from Heaven and as the sign of a tree chosen by God. This golden bough of mistletoe, which they call All-Heal, the high priest is now about to cull from the chosen oak with his golden hook. As it falls, the sacred plant is caught beneath in a white mantle; the victims are slain, and the mistletoe is distributed whilst God is besought to prosper His gift to them unto whom He has vouchsafed it.

Such rites, so it may appear to the least imaginative of us as we behold to-day the pilgrims crowding to the shrine of Our Lady, or the long processions of priests and choristers winding their way from the sculptured portals of the Cathedral to visit the Abbey of S. Père, or the Chapel of Notre-Dame-de-la-Brèche, or through the crypt to the shrine of Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre,[4] are curiously prophetic of the history of the place. So thinking, we shall look at the western towers and note, like Gaston Latour, the bigness of the actual stones of the masonry, contrary to the usual Gothic manner, as if in reminiscence of those old Druidic piles amid which the Virgin of Chartres had been adored, long before the birth of Christ, by a mystic race, possessed of some prophetic sense of the grace in store for them.

Who then were these Druids and who the Carnutes? From the Carnutes the modern name of this their town is derived, and philologists assure us that the root of the name is to be found in the word for oak, which, in Celtic, bears some resemblance to the Latin quercus. Similarly Évreux is derived from the word ebvre = forest. All Central Gaul in those days was covered with oak forests as with a garment. Hence, it is suggested, the name of Carnutes was applied as a generic term to the dwellers in those forests, and was specialised as the title of the Chartrains par excellence on account of the choice of this spot by the Druids for their deliberations and their sacrifices. It may be so. Philology is one of the most amusing diversions. It is quite as intellectual as most other parlour games, and often much more entertaining. Human as heraldry and more profitable than pedigree hunting it certainly is, but somehow it is less convincing. Therefore if anyone prefer to derive this word Carnutes from cairn—the stone which formed the Druidical altar and equally with oaks seems to have played an important part in their ceremonies, he may be as much right as anybody else.

The condition of the Gauls at the time of the Roman conquest has been described by their conqueror. Cæsar in his Commentaries states that the Gauls were divided into three classes—priests, nobles and nobodies. The priests, who enjoyed complete immunity from military service, insisted on oral tradition in the teaching of their tenets. Their object in so doing, as Cæsar conjectured, was to prevent the memory from being weakened and their doctrines from being vulgarised; but the result has been that, apart from the few facts I shall mention and a vast superstructure of theory and legend which has been built upon them, they have faded from the ken of mankind. Chief among their tenets Cæsar mentions the belief in the immortality and the transmigration of the soul. The Druids were properly the highest of three orders of priests—Bards, Soothsayers and Druids, the latter being philosophers who, to the natural science studied by the soothsayers, added the study of ethics. There would seem to have been much of the Pythagorean and something also of the Brahman in these philosophers, whose teaching was once expounded by the Arch-Druid Divitiacus, in Rome, to the sympathetic ears of Marcus Tullius Cicero and his brother Quintus.

That teaching, alas! has not been enshrined in Cicero’s sonorous page, but Lucan in his Pharsalia corroborates Cæsar:—

‘The Druids now, while arms are heard no more,
Old mysteries and barbarous rites restore:
A tribe who singular religion love,
And haunt the lonely coverts of the grove.
If dying mortals’ doom they sing aright
No ghosts descend to dwell in dreadful night,
No parting souls to grisly Pluto go,
Nor seek the dreary silent shades below:
But forth they fly immortal in their kind
And other bodies in new worlds they find.
Thus life forever runs its endless race,
And like a line death but divides the space.
A stop which can but for a moment last,
A point between the future and the past.
Thrice happy they beneath their northern skies
Who that worst fear, the fear of death, despise!’

In another passage the same poet describes in dark colours the gloomy rites of the barbarous priests; their rude, misshapen images, and the scene of their ritual in the sacred wood, smeared with human blood.

But of their ritual we really know nothing, apart from the fact of human sacrifices, which, in extreme cases, they justified by the dogma that ‘unless for the life of a man man’s life be rendered the wrath of the immortal gods cannot be appeased,’ and excepting their veneration for the mistletoe.[5]

The power of this priesthood was not confined to things spiritual. The Druids acted as a court of public arbitration, and the most important private suits, especially cases of murder and homicide, were submitted to their judgment. Now Britain was the headquarters of Druidism, but once a year, it is recorded by Cæsar, a general assembly of the order was held within the territories of the Carnutes, and there the sacred rites were celebrated, the young priests, after a prolonged course of training, initiated, and the Arch-Druid annually elected. It is probable that these ceremonies took place at Chartres—although it is possible that the claim of Dreux, of Senantes, of Alluyes, or of other neighbouring places which can boast Druidical remains, may be as well grounded.

But, at least, it is evident that the Pays Chartrain was a stronghold of priests rather than of fighters, and, perhaps, it was for this reason that in the early years of the Gallic War, the Carnutes, who among the Celtic Gauls were subject to the Remi (Reims), took but little part in the active resistance to Cæsar’s arms. They had, in fact, welcomed rather than resisted the Proconsul, regarding him as their champion and liberator from the invasion of the Helvetii and the threatened dominion of the Germans. But when he began to meddle with their institutions they grew restive, and determined to throw off the Roman yoke. For, before

Cæsar’s time, there had been, apparently, a general movement against monarchical government throughout Gaul, with the result that most of the tribes were free, but with a constitution decidedly aristocratical or theocratic. Thus at Chartres—Autricum was its Latin name—fifty years before the coming of the Romans, Priscus had been reigning.

A pious legend recounts that, during the lifetime of this King the son of one of the great chieftains was drawn lifeless from a deep well into which he had fallen. The father took in his arms the body of his child, already cold in death, mounted his charger, and, riding at a gallop for twenty leagues, approached the altar of the Virgin, whom the Druids worshipped, and laid the boy at her feet. Then life came back to the lad, he opened his eyes and smiled at the sacred statue. King Priscus, the legend adds, on hearing of this miracle, summoned a great assembly of priests and nobles, and appointed the Lady of Miracles his heiress and the Queen of his realms.

Thus legend. In fact we know that after the days of Priscus monarchy no longer obtained among the Carnutes.

But there was a certain Tasgetius, a descendant of the old royal house of the Carnutes. As a reward for his services to the Romans Cæsar restored him to his hereditary throne. The theocracy felt itself attacked; the Druids roused the republican spirit of the people. The doubtful success of Cæsar’s second expedition to Britain seemed to offer a good opportunity for successful revolt. The people rose and assassinated their King, who was also the Roman nominee. Cæsar immediately ordered a legion under Lucius Plancus to advance upon Chartres, punish the conspirators, and take up its winter quarters there.

When the railway was being constructed in 1846, it was necessary to remove a vast mound which lay to the west of the town between the Portes des Épars and Porte Chastelet. Many Roman, Gallic and Carlovingian coins[6] were found in it, and it is supposed that this mound represented in part the material dug out when the foundations of the crypt and of the Cathedral were sunk, and in part the remains of the camp of Plancus.

The threatening aspect of affairs in Gaul called for prompt action on the part of Cæsar. Before the end of the winter (53 B.C.) he made a dash into the country of the Nervii, and then in the early spring held his usual Council of Gaul, probably at Amiens. The Carnutes, Senones and Treveri, omitted to send their representatives. Cæsar took this as a declaration of war. He immediately broke up the Council and ordered it to meet again at Paris, which was a convenient point for operating against the Senones at Sens, and thereafter against their neighbours the Carnutes at Chartres. The brilliant rapidity of his movements terrified these tribes. Acco, the leader of the conspiracy, summoned his supporters to the towns. But whilst they were endeavouring to obey the summons, news came that the Romans were already in their midst. Through the Ædui and Remi, who acted as mediators, the Carnutes and Senones sent to make submission and beg for pardon. Cæsar granted it for the time, and then devoted his energies to the destruction of Ambiorix, and the chastisement of the Treveri and the tribes on the Rhine.

But it was only a short respite, not pardon, that they were granted. Returning at the end of the year from his hunt for Ambiorix and taking his revenge upon the Eburones, Cæsar brought his army back to Reims and then convened the Council of Gaul. An inquiry was held into the conspiracy among the Senones and Carnutes. Acco was condemned to suffer death after the cruel old fashion of the Romans. He was stripped, his neck was thrust into a fork, and he was then flogged to death. But the flames of rebellion thus rudely repressed were not destroyed. They broke out again the same winter with redoubled fury when the absence of Cæsar in Italy afforded an opportunity. The murder of Clodius and the reported anarchy at Rome fanned into a flame the slumbering embers of discontent. The death of Acco was discussed by the Gallic chieftains when they held their councils in their secret woodland retreats, perhaps, indeed, at Chartres itself, and the bitterness of the Roman yoke began to seem intolerable. To regain their lost liberty all were eager for a general revolt. It was decided to begin at once in order to cut Cæsar off from his army in Gaul. When the question rose as to who should incur the danger of leading the way, the Carnutes undertook this duty. They first exacted a solemn pledge of support from their countrymen by the Gallic custom of mingling their standards, then, on the appointed day, under the leadership of Gutruatus and Conconnetodumnus, they gave the signal for the great revolt by murdering every Roman citizen they could find in their chief trading town on the Loire, Orléans. With the terrible struggle that ensued between the brilliant energy of Cæsar and the noble patriotism of Vercingetorix we are not here concerned. Suffice it to say that among his first acts of revenge Cæsar sacked and burned Orléans, the town of the Carnutes. Nothing daunted, the Carnutes furnished 12,000 men to the army raised to deliver Vercingetorix, who was holding Alise with desperate valour. On the fall of that town the Carnutes, in obedience to the advice of their leader, Gutruatus, entered into yet another league for their common deliverance from the yoke of their oppressor. They joined the Bituriges and other peoples of Gaul, but when Cæsar himself marched against them with his sixth and seventh legion they fled with their cattle into the woods. Yet, even in the secret retreats of their mighty forests, they were not safe from the hand of the Roman general. They were compelled to submit and to pass under the yoke, and their chief, Gutruatus, was beaten with rods until he died.

Thus the country of the Chartrains was absorbed into the Roman Empire, and it remained under the domination of Rome, reaping the fruits of that strong administration in the form of roads and good order and the minimum of oppression, until the coming, at the end of the fifth century, of Clovis, the Frankish hero.

Meanwhile, when Augustus gave laws to the conquests of Cæsar, he introduced a division of Gaul equally adapted to the progress of the legions, to the course of the rivers and to the principal national distinctions, which had comprehended above a hundred independent states. The Province in which Chartres (Autricum) now found itself embraced the country between the Loire and the Seine, and was styled Celtic Gaul, or, as it soon came to be known, Gallia Lugdunensis, borrowing its name from the celebrated colony of Lugdunum or Lyons. The principal towns of this Province were still Chartres, Dreux, and, above all, Orléans, to which the Emperor Aurelian was later on to give his name when he separated it from the territory of the Carnutes, and raised it to the rank of a city. For the rest, there were a great number of villages and strongholds even in Cæsar’s day scattered about in the clearings of the forest. These would increase in size and importance as the great Roman roads running from Dieppe to Dreux, from Rouen to Paris, and from Paris to Autun, were built, and as the country grew more settled. For Druidism, which had long shown itself a disturbing influence and an irreconcilable factor, was at length proscribed by Tiberius and Claudius, and thereafter, Dion Cassius assures us, the Loire could be navigated in as much security as the Po or Rhone. ‘The blue waters of the fair-haired Carnutan’ grew familiar, not only to the Roman merchant and official, but also to the Roman poet and traveller.[7]

But if the legend of the Druidical Virgin be indeed true, it would appear that the Druids, equally with the Romans, had done something to prepare the soil for the seed of Christianity. As to the first sowers of that seed there is some dispute, and also as to the first sowing, which some date from the first century, others from the third.

Whether Celtic Gaul was evangelised in the days of the Apostles or not, it is at least historically certain that as early as the middle of the second century the country was sufficiently provided with churches to form the principle theatre of the great persecution under Marcus Aurelius. And as Gaul was notoriously evangelised only piecemeal and slowly, and not by a sudden outburst of religious fervour, it is quite possible that the foundation of the Church of Chartres dates back from the first century. If this is so, it accords well with local traditions drawn from various sources, but agreeing in substance. For it is said[8] that S. Peter sent forth S. Savinian, S. Potentian and S. Albin to preach the Gospel to the Gallic nation. In the course of their mission they came to Sens and converted many virtuous heathen, amongst whom were Sérotin and Eodald. To these two, together with Potentian and Altin, Savinian, warned by a mysterious vision, gave this charge:—‘Take unto you,’ he said, ‘the shield of an unconquerable faith; go through the other towns of Gaul and banish all false superstition by preaching everywhere the truth of the Gospel.’ Leaving him, therefore, to organise the church at Sens, they set forth to Orléans, and thence, coming down that Roman road which is still known as the Chemin de César, they arrived at Chartres. There, perhaps, they found the altar of the Druids and the statue to the Virgin who should bear the Unknown God. Him declared they unto the people. As the word of the missionaries was supported by the miracles they wrought, and the saintly lives they led, a great part of the inhabitants believed on Christ. ‘When they saw this, the holy men of God consecrated a church dedicated to the glory of Mary, Mother of God, and built just within the walls of the town.’

The northern walls of Chartres, under the Romans, ran along the street du Cheval Blanc, where now the houses of the cloister stand. The site of the Church of S. Potentian may therefore be identified, as on other grounds we naturally should identify it, with that of the Chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre in the crypt of the Cathedral. To that impressive underchurch we will pay a visit at the end of this chapter, and endeavour to describe the various stages through which it has passed. But first we will trace the tragic history of these Christian pioneers.

The rapid advance of Christianity soon brought it into conflict with the Roman administration. Domitian decided to check it when it was observed to be spreading among the subject races in opposition to the State religion. It became the duty of governors in the Provinces to treat the refusal to worship the Emperor’s image as an act of sacrilege. There was a governor, Quirinus by name, who proceeded to execute his duty with truly Roman thoroughness and impartiality. He summoned the missionaries of what Tacitus called ‘that pernicious religion’ to his presence and demanded why they had brought hither the ignominy of their absurd doctrine. They answered him boldly, and bade him cease from the worship of idols and embrace the true faith. But Quirinus hardened his heart. He scourged and threw into prison three men ‘hated for their abominations, and known to the vulgar as Christians’; notorious, according to the great Roman historian, ‘for their hatred of the human race.’ Such cases of persecution as this, it should be remembered, were but occasional exceptions to the general tolerance of Roman administration. The Christians were punished, according to the Roman view, for their inflexible obstinacy, their unsocial habits and indiscreet enthusiasm, rather than for the mere holding of their peculiar religious notions.

In the present instance crowds of believers collected about the doors of the prison into which the martyrs had been thrown, and by their continual prayers for the deliverance of their teachers roused Quirinus to savage action. He surrounded them with his soldiers when they were met together to pray and sing hymns to the Lord, and falling upon them suddenly put them to the sword. Amongst those who had been foremost in the faith was a young girl by name Modesta, whom popular tradition asserts to have been the daughter of Quirinus himself. She, it is said, was seized upon this occasion and brought before her father. His fury was increased to madness when he learned that she, his only daughter, had joined the sect and had been baptized. She must abjure, he declared, or she must die.

‘Strike,’ she exclaimed, ‘I am a Christian!’[9] She was brutally tortured, and her body was then thrown along with the bodies of the other martyrs into a deep well, ‘which was situated within the Church of the Mother of God.’

‘The sober discretion of the present age,’ wrote Gibbon, ‘will more readily censure than admire, but can more easily admire than imitate the fervour of the first Christians who, according to the lively expression of Sulpicius Severus, desired martyrdom with more eagerness than his own contemporaries solicited a bishopric.’

The blood of martyrs became here, as elsewhere, the seed of the Church. Quirinus was struck down by sudden death in the midst of his persecutions. His persecutions had only increased the number of the faithful. S. Aventin became the first Bishop of Chartres, and, profiting by the calm which followed Quirinus’s death, rebuilt above the ancient altar of the Druids the church which Potentian had consecrated and the Roman governor destroyed. This building may well have lasted down to the final persecution of the Christians under Diocletian. For in the meantime the indifference of some princes and the indulgence of others permitted the Christians to enjoy though not perhaps a legal yet an actual and public toleration of their religion.

The courage and constancy of these first Christians were not forgotten. The well down which their corpses were thrown came to be known as the Lieu-Fort,[10] and later as the Puits des Saints Forts, in memory of them.

Le Puits des Saints Forts.

It is in connection with this well that one of the most beautiful of the legends of Chartres is told.

‘A ceremony is still observed in the Cathedral’ (wrote Sébastien Rouillard) ‘which surprises many people. The reason of it deserves to be known. When the bishop officiating chants the Pax Vobis or a priest the Dominus Vobiscum, whether at Mass, Vespers or Matins, the choir does not respond in full, but only the nearest priest in a low voice. Some say that this is a perpetual memorial of the first Christian martyrs, in accordance with the saying of the venerable Fulbert in his third epistle, that the divine service which in times of liberty is celebrated with joy and gladness becometh mute during the days of tyranny and oppression. Others say that the custom arose when the crowds of pilgrims and worshippers in the Cathedral were so large and the resulting noise so great that those who were in the choir and at the altar could not easily hear each other so as to sing the responses.’

But there is another explanation. When Godfrey, founder of the Abbey of Josaphat, was Bishop of Chartres (1116), the usual devout and solemn procession to the grottoes and holy places was being made on the eve of All Saints.

Now among the choristers who bore candles in their hands, chanting in this procession, was one beautiful lad, blue-eyed and golden-haired, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow. It was the one joy of her life to listen to the flute-like notes of his glorious treble, and in spirit to join in those praises of the Most High to which her son gave heartfelt, wonderful utterance. And on this occasion she, as ever, was among the crowd of worshippers, hearing only—a mother’s ear is so fond and so fine—amidst the whole chorus of those soaring voices the voice of her beloved son. Suddenly, though the chant had not ceased, there was, for her, silence. She listened and listened in vain for the voice of her boy. Mad with anxiety, she pushed her way through the crowd, only to find a group of grieving priests standing round the Well of the Constant Saints. The boy, all unheeding in the ecstasy of his song, had stepped over the dim unguarded edge and fallen into the fathomless depths.

For days distraught the mother haunted the holy grottoes, ever praying and waiting for her son to be given back to her. At last, on the octave of the feast, the solemn procession wound its way once more through the crypt. The mother listened, dazed with grief, to the chant as it came. But for her there was no music in the sweet harmonies that were sung.

Then suddenly there struck upon her astonished ear the silver notes of that well-known voice, how musical! She raised her eyes, half in hope and half in fear, and beheld, walking in his accustomed place and carrying in his hand a golden candlestick, her lost darling. And his face as he sang was as it had been the face of an angel.

They asked the boy what had happened to him at the bottom of the well, and he told them that he had heard the angels rejoicing and singing in response to the prayers that were being offered in the Church of Chartres. And since that day the choir does not make response aloud to the Pax Vobis. For so men hope that they may hear the angels singing.

That this holy well of the martyrs was near the spot where is now the altar of Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre we are assured by the repeated testimony of old writers. Numerous efforts were made during the nineteenth century to locate it, and made in vain. But in the year 1901 it was at last discovered behind the wall of that altar. Let us take the present opportunity in our history then to visit the crypt,[11] to behold the first beginnings of the Cathedral, the statue of Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre and the new-found ancient well of the martyrs.

‘The crypt,’ says Raoul Boutrais, in his Latin poem in praise of Chartres (1624), ‘lies darkling in a hollow of the earth, resting on many an arch, as long and as wide as is the whole church above it. A dim religious light struggles through the deep-set windows. Enter and behold a sacred altar. Your being is filled with a mysterious awe as you descend. Then by the light of a thousand torches the sacred place becomes visible. The smoke of fragrant incense rises from the altar. Priests move to and fro performing their sacred office before the image of the Virgin. Many offerings of gold and silver, in token of granted prayers, hang at the shrines.

‘We pass into recesses dug deep within the earth, and are conscious of a strange emotion. Here was the first origin of the church, when the early Christians sang their hymns in these dark places to escape the cruel punishments of the Prefect Quirinus, and yet undaunted by the cross, the sword, the fire of his mad rage. He snatched this heroic band from their Christ, and flung their mangled bodies into the deeps of a well. Still may be seen the well, fenced about that none may fall therein; for, ’tis said, that some have fallen. And it was not only to sing their hymns that the Christians assembled here, but here they passed their lives for fear of persecution. Therefore in their hiding they dug a well that they might have to drink.’

It is evident from this and other passages that the famous well was in existence in the first half of the seventeenth century; but shortly afterwards ‘it was covered up by reason of the vapours with which it filled these subterranean places.’[12] It was covered up, and the site of it deliberately falsified when the sanctuary of the Virgin was decorated and the transverse wall between the real site of the well and the altar was built. After the alterations which were then made were completed (1671), the public was informed that the well was now under the step of the new altar, so that those who knelt there, and had a particular devotion to the Martyrs’ Well, appeared to be rendering homage to the Virgin. The statements of the historians to the effect that the well was behind the altar were explained away by the very canon who had superintended the filling up of the well, for he made the misleading assertion that the altar itself had been moved back in the course of the alterations. He was believed. When in the nineteenth century efforts were made again and again to find this well, they were always made on the assumption that the altar had been so moved. The cynical precept which warns us to be on our guard against the occasional untrustworthiness of those who never lie was forgotten. It was not till M. René Merlet’s pamphlet, L’Ancienne Chapelle de Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre, appeared in 1900 that investigations, based on historical research and archæological acumen, began to be prosecuted, and were before long crowned with success. Boutrais’s words are now once more true, and ‘the well may still be seen’ behind the altar of the Virgin.

Crypt: Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre.

The oldest portions of the crypt, and therefore of the Cathedral, that remain to us are to be found in the Martyrium or Chapel of S. Lubin. The crypt, it must be understood, was not in origin a crypt or a martyrium or a meeting-house of prayer dug beneath the level of the soil, but a tiny church set on the crest of the hill, and raised above the surface of the earth. It only became a crypt properly so-called when it had been covered up and the surrounding soil raised by the débris and deposits of succeeding years; so that when the new church was built it was erected naturally upon the top of the old. The spade of the archæologist has proved that the soil of a mediæval European town was raised by the accumulation of dust and rubble as much as one or two feet per century. And at Chartres excavations have revealed Gallo-Roman sub-structures at a depth of some eighteen feet. When we reach the Martyrium or Chapel of S. Lubin we shall find there a piece of the Gallo-Roman walls of the fourth century. This probably is part of the apsidal wall of the church of that date. As the church, with the vicissitudes of the town which we have yet to recount, was alternately built and burnt, destroyed and rebuilt, the crypt was developed until it is now the largest in France, and next to that of S. Peter’s at Rome, and that of Canterbury, the largest in the world. It consists of two lateral galleries which run from the western towers under the aisles of the upper church, and form a horse-shoe curve beneath the choir and sanctuary 366 feet long, and seventeen to eighteen feet broad; of two transepts, seven apsidal chapels, and the martyrium which is under the choir of the upper church.

The successive developments of the crypt may be summarised as follows:—

Against the fourth century apsidal wall, of which traces are found in the martyrium, were built in 858 two large columns to support the new choir above. At the same time the circular wall of the apse was pierced with windows. In order to support the apse of the upper church other two large isolated piers were built in 962, whilst the windows in the circular apse were blocked by a second strengthening wall. The same year saw the addition of a double transept at the commencement of the apse. Fulbert, in 1020, developed these transepts by carrying them out westwards almost to their present extent, and by so doing he left the altar dedicated to the Virgin, though unmoved, no longer before a thick wall, but stranded as it were in a corridor—a situation which aided, and still aids, the progress of the pilgrims past the shrine. The great bishop also extended the crypt by piercing the wall which closed the transepts towards the east, and making the ambulatory out of which opened the three large chapels with deep, round-headed windows (S. Joseph, S. John the Baptist, and S. Anne). To support the vaulting of this ambulatory a new wall was built round the martyrium.

In the twelfth century, when the two western towers were constructed, Fulbert’s long galleries were extended and connected with them. The windows were raised and enlarged with the exception of those which were blinded by the porches of the upper church. Four smaller chapels, with pointed windows, were inserted between the large apsidal chapels of Fulbert, and these still exhibit traces of early thirteenth-century painting. At the same period, the transepts being now prolonged, it was found necessary to make two new flights of steps by which they might be entered.

The beautiful doorway of the south staircase dates from this time. Lastly, when the porches of the Cathedral were completed, the transepts were connected therewith by means of vaulted passages, of which the one on the north side is near the Chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre, and the other southern one was turned into the Chapel of S. Nicholas in 1681.

Entering the crypt by the south-eastern door, after noticing the windows of its apsidal chapels, you descend a stone staircase, and by the dim candlelight perceive on your left the long south gallery begun by Fulbert in 1020, and extended in the following century right up to the western tower.

You are now in the original south transept of the crypt, and much of the masonry dates obviously from the tenth century. Turning to the left, the first chapel on the left is now dedicated to S. Martin. It was not originally a chapel, but in the twelfth century was used as an entrance to the crypt. Altered in the seventeenth century, as the windows and vaulting show, it was converted into a chapel in the nineteenth. It contains a few fragments of the original choir screen of the Cathedral destroyed by seventeenth-century vandals.

These fragments, which represent some scenes from the Birth of Our Lord, are very beautiful. Above them, fixed to the wall, are some admirable keystones of the vaulting, and two bas-reliefs with signs of the Zodiac, which still retain some of their original thirteenth-century colouring. Opposite the wooden nineteenth-century grille is a stone from the Church of S. Martin-le-Viandier, which was destroyed during the Revolution. Upon this stone are represented S. Eustace hunting, and on his knees before Christ, who appears to him between the horns of a stag; S. Martin giving his cloak to a poor man; the Virgin and Child between S. Louis and S. John.

Below is a fine early stoup from the Cathedral and, in the corner, the sarcophagus of S. Calétric (see p. 36). The date inscribed upon it has been changed to suit the date of the translation and festival of this saint, who was Bishop of Chartres, and died 557.

The next chapel on the left is that of S. Nicholas (recently restored by M. Durand). We have already spoken of it. Opposite it is the Chapel of S. Clement, where are some mural decorations of the twelfth century. The figures, beginning from the right, are recognisable as those of S. Nicholas, S. James, S. Giles, and of a King kneeling.

The wooden screen which here crosses the crypt was put up in 1687: behind it on the left is a thirteenth-century piscina, above which is a partly-obliterated twelfth-century fresco of the Nativity. Several windows are blocked by the Cathedral porch; and the lowest and narrowest of these is one of Fulbert’s original windows, which was not enlarged like the rest in the twelfth century, because it was blocked at that time by a porch erected in the eleventh century. At the end of the gallery is a large monolithic font, intended for complete baptismal immersion. It belongs to the eleventh century. The capitals of the four columns which flank it are curious and noteworthy.

The plinths and abaci of the last bay of this gallery betray the fact that it was added in the twelfth century, when the old south-western tower (Clocher Vieux), with which a flight of steps connects it, was built. The walls of this gallery, like that of the northern one, are decorated with modern mural paintings illustrative of events in the history of Chartres, or of the saints who have been connected with the diocese. They are already in a bad state, and even at their best they must always have displayed more science than art.

Turning now and retracing our steps we pass the staircase by which we descended and make our way round the horse-shoe curve of the apse. On our right we perceive the seven apsidal chapels, of which the first, third, fifth and seventh are the Chapels of S. Mary Magdalene, S. Ives (see pp. 91 ff.), S. Fulbert (see pp. 69 ff.), and the Sacristy. They were added in 1194; whilst the second, fourth and sixth are the Chapels of S. Anne, S. John the Baptist, and S. Joseph, and they date from 1020. The window of the Chapel of S. Anne should be noted. S. Anne is represented carrying the Blessed Mary. When we examine the upper church we shall be struck by the importance of the position allotted to S. Anne in glass and statuary—as, for instance, in the great window of the north transept. The explanation is that Louis, Count of Chartres, who died on the fourth Crusade, sent to the Chapter from Constantinople the head of that saint.

Opposite the Sacristy is the entrance to the Martyrium or Chapel of S. Lubin (see p. 36), which is immediately under the sanctuary. Of this chapel enough has been or will be said.[13] At this point it will suffice to call attention to the architectural features which serve to illustrate its history. First, the fact that you descend into it by a modern entrance, which has replaced the old staircase and doorway; and secondly, the depth of the base of the round column on the right, indicating the original level of the primitive church floor; thirdly, the hiding place for the treasure; next, the fourth-century wall, with its layers of thin horizontal Roman bricks; and lastly, the circular wall and the ninth and tenth-century piers. The Gallo-Roman wall on the west is probably a portion of the old enceinte of the town.

Going westwards on leaving the martyrium, we pass a staircase on our right and the Puits des Saints Forts on the left, behind the wall of the altar of Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre. When this wall was built and the well concealed in the seventeenth century, the circular passage by which the chapel could be approached had also to be made, and the masonry was so treated as to suggest the natural rocks of the old Druidical ‘grotto.’

The chapel is at the end of the northern gallery (eleventh and twelfth century), which runs from the base of the Clocher Neuf. It is lit by two long rows of pendant lamps. Here, then, is that mysterious shrine which Boutrais has so well described. Here is that famous statue which for a thousand years has drawn countless myriads of pilgrims from all parts of the earth.[14] Kings and commons, rich and poor, scholars and Crusaders, sinners and saints unnumbered have knelt at this shrine since the day when Fulbert, having completed his crypt, left, it is said, the ‘Statue of the Druids’ in the same place as that in which the Gallic priests had held their assemblies in finibus Carnutum, on Carnutan territory. That statue was held in honour till the year 1793, when it was burnt by the Revolutionists before the Porche Royal. The present Madonna was made on the model of the old, and erected in 1857, after the crypt, which for sixty years had been used as a cooper’s warehouse, was restored to its sacred uses. On the north wall may be seen the traces of three twelfth-century windows, which were blocked when the north porch was built; on the south wall traces of twelfth-century frescoes. Other frescoes in the chapel are recent symbolic work by M. Paul Durand. The vaulting was painted in the seventeenth century.

Whether the statue which was destroyed in 1793 was older than the eleventh century is a doubtful point. Some suppose that the previous Druidical statue ‘Virgini Parituræ’ was burnt in the fire of 1020, and that Fulbert had a new one carved and set up then. Others, arguing from the colour of the wood, believe that it dated from the days of the Druids. For the face of the Madonna was ‘black, but comely,’[15] like that of the Vierge Noire, Notre-Dame-du-Pilier, in the Cathedral proper. But whether this blackness arose from the action of time upon the wood, or whether it was another instance of that tendency to represent Eastern types and colouring and design, which seems to me very noticeable in the glass and statuary of the Cathedral, cannot be definitely decided.

One other curious point remains to be noted. We are told that the eyes of the Child were open, but those of the Mother who held Him on her knees were shut. The Druids, it is said, intended by this device to signify that faith was still in darkness, and that she whom they worshipped was not yet born. But the eyes of the Child, whom she in the fulness of time should supernaturally conceive and bear, were open; for He was without beginning and without end, the Spectator of all time and all existence.

CHAPTER II
Saints and Barbarians

THE early Christians of Chartres were scattered and their churches destroyed during the final persecution under Diocletian. When, therefore, the disciples of S. Denis, S. Chéron and S. Martin came preaching the Gospel through the valley of the Loire, they found but few faithful among the descendants of those who had been converted by the first missionaries. The evangelisation of the Province by S. Martin, the great Bishop of Tours, was commemorated in the title of the church, ‘S. Martin rendant la vie,’ in reference to one of his miracles, and in that of the Monastery S. Martin-au-Val, as also in the window in the clerestory of the nave of the Cathedral (north) and of the choir. Soldier, hermit, bishop and saint, he established the monasteries of Gaul. Two thousand of his disciples followed him to the grave, and his eloquent historian, Sulpicius Severus, challenges the desert of Thebais to produce, in a more favourable climate, a champion of equal virtue. S. Chéron, after completing his work at Chartres, turned his steps towards Paris, but was assassinated on his way at a place since named S. Chéron-du-Chemin. His martyrdom is represented in a bas-relief of the south porch of the Cathedral.

Then Castor, Bishop of Chartres, profiting by the protection of Constantine, built a second basilica, larger than the first, erecting upon the old site a chapel to the ‘Virgin who shall bear a son,’ and, above it, the main church and the principal altar.

Meanwhile the Roman Empire in Gaul was tottering to its fall. That confederacy known as the Franks, which had been formed of the unconquered tribes that dwelt about the Lower Rhine and the Weser, had overrun Spain and Mauritania, and had been flung back from Gaul by the brilliant efforts of the Emperor Probus. Again reduced by Julian, they remained for some time loyal allies of the Empire. But under Clodion, the first of the long-haired kings of the Merovingian dynasty whose name and actions are mentioned in authentic history, they advanced as far as the Somme, and established a Gallic kingdom between that river and the Rhine. On the death of Clodion, his two sons quarrelled over their inheritance; one of them obtained the protection of Rome, the other allied himself with Attila. For the King of the Huns eagerly embraced an alliance which facilitated the passage of the Rhine and justified the invasion of Gaul.

Chartres seems to have escaped as by a miracle the murderous attack of the Huns and Franks. She owed perhaps to the obscurity of her position the immunity which Paris owed to the prayers of S. Geneviève. But Orléans was besieged and defended successfully by Anianus, a bishop of primitive sanctity and consummate prudence, until the arrival of the Roman and Gothic armies compelled Attila to withdraw his innumerable host of marauders, and at length to give battle and suffer defeat in the plains of Châlons. (451 A.D.)

Church of S. Aignan.

Was this Anianus that S. Aignan who founded the church which now bears his name; the S. Aignan who, with his three sisters, Donda, Monda, Ermenonda, endowed it, and was buried in the ancient crypt of that church?[16] On his tomb there was formerly to be read this couplet:—

‘Corpus in his cryptis Aniani præsulis olim
Carnutum recubat, spiritus astra colit.’

(The body of Aignan, once Bishop of the Chartrains, lies in this crypt: his soul is in Heaven.) The crypt (restored sixteenth century) and the windows of this church are well worth seeing. The lower windows have nine of them sixteenth-century[17] glass, and nine of them nineteenth century, chiefly by Lorin of Chartres, whose atelier is in the picturesque Rue de la Tannerie. The upper windows are chiefly seventeenth-century heraldic. The church was often burnt down in the Middle Ages, and for the last time in the sixteenth century.

The architecture is therefore in the style of the Renaissance, though the main entrance belongs to the fourteenth century. The small entrance on the left of the façade is pleasing. The church was sacked during the Revolution and all its artistic treasures stolen. The building itself was used as a magazine, a prison and a military hospital till 1822, when it was restored to religious use by private generosity. The painfully unsuccessful polychrome decorations perpetrated by M. Boeswilwald make it impossible to remember the interior with any pleasure. Perched, as it seems, in the air, the exterior, beheld from the boulevards and bridges south-west of the town, forms, with S. Père and the Cathedral, one of the most prominent features of the most unforgettable view of Chartres. But the tower is destitute of grace, and the building, as a whole, devoid of any beauty of form.

If the nave were worthy of the apse and crypt, it would be another matter, and S. Aignan would be worthy of its place between S. Père and Notre-Dame. Approach it from the Rue Saint-Pierre by the steps of Saint-François, and the east end of the church with the enormous buttresses which support it, and the massive buttressed walls of the street which hold up the old parish cemetery, now the garden of the Presbytère, give you the impression of a mighty fortress frowning above you. But seen from a distance this effect is lost.

There is a legend in connection with this church worth recounting.

A poor tailor of Chartres, the story runs, made a contract to deliver himself body and soul to the Devil at the end of the year if his daughter should recover her health and make the fine marriage on which she had set her heart. At the date fixed when the tailor must fulfil his part of the bargain Satan appeared. It was evening. The man’s wife threw herself on her knees, and by her prayers and entreaties obtained the concession that the infernal treaty should not be enforced so long as the candle burning in the cottage should last. Then the cunning wife rose from her knees, blew out the candle and ran full speed with it to the Church of S. Aignan, where she hid it near the present stoup, in the first pier on the left at which the masons were then working. Wonderful to relate, the pier was immediately completed, and the candle hidden within it safe from the clutches of the Evil One.

Fifty years after the Battle of Châlons, the Franks, under Clovis, established the French monarchy in Gaul. It was not established by the force of arms alone.

The Merovingian King had always allowed his Gallic subjects free exercise of religious worship. Now, at the instance of his wife, Clotilda, niece of the King of Burgundy, he listened to the Bishop of Reims. He and his followers, who were equally ready to follow him to the battlefield or the baptismal font, were received into the Catholic Church at Reims.

This meant that Clovis had on his side the hundred prelates who, under the Roman Empire, had gradually acquired a sovereign power throughout Gaul in matters temporal as well as spiritual. He paid the price in rich gifts to their churches. ‘S. Martin,’ he remarked on a famous occasion, ‘is an expensive friend.’ It was to this alliance with the Church that the establishment of the French monarchy in Gaul was largely due. The valour, policy and seasonable conversion of Clovis soon added the Northern Provinces of Gaul to his kingdom, whilst the great prelates were left free to strengthen their own hold over the people with whose instructions they were entrusted. And with the Franks the social system of nobles and serfs, which was the basis of mediæval life, was introduced.

The Dark Ages creep on. The Frankish conquest of Gaul was followed, says Gibbon, by ten centuries of anarchy and ignorance.

So far as Chartres is concerned, the conversion of Clovis is connected with the name of her first authentic bishop, Solemnis,[18] whom he caused to accompany and catechise him on his campaigns. It is even stated, though without sufficient reason, that Clovis founded the Abbey of S. Père (St. Pierre), of which the extremely interesting fourteenth-sixteenth century church is now all that remains. The rest is cavalry barracks.

Of the secular history of Chartres under the succeeding Merovingian Kings there is nothing worth relating. Whatever there was of sweetness and light in this barbarous epoch survived in the cloister, not the court. One turns with relief from the records of the quarrels and crimes of Clother and his sons to the story of some saintly life like that of S. Lubin, shepherd, monk, hermit, Abbé of Brou, and lastly, Bishop of Chartres in succession to S. Ethère. S. Lubin was a typical and charming saint, whose name and fame still live in the hearts of the people.

His charity to the poor, his compassion for the sick and infirm was without limit. Thus, when Malledegonde, sister of the young Calétric, who lay at death’s door, asked the holy Bishop of Chartres for some drops of oil blessed by his hands, he did at once that which she had not dared to ask. He came in person to the bedside of her dear invalid, bathed his forehead, and prayed that he might be restored to health. Then the young man opened his eyes, and seizing the aged bishop’s hand declared that he was healed. A bas-relief on the south porch of the Cathedral portrays this incident in stone. In glass, a bishop and enthroned, you may see the saint in the second window of the northern clerestory of the nave. From that moment S. Lubin continued to take a paternal interest in the lad, and on his death Calétric succeeded him as Bishop of Chartres. S. Calétric,[19] according to his panegyrist, combined every virtue with every accomplishment, and was, in fact, the personification of that Roman urbanity which the rude manners of the French had almost banished from the Gallic world. His tomb, as we have already seen, is now in the Cathedral crypt, whither it was removed from the Chapel of S. Nicholas, when that building, which was formerly adjacent to the apse of the Cathedral, was destroyed in 1702 to make room for the present bishop’s palace.[20] S. Lubin, like most of the bishops of the sixth and seventh centuries, was still less fortunate in the place of his burial. He was interred in the crypt of

S. Martin-au-Val,

which probably marks the site of the chief extra-mural cemetery of the Chartres of those days. This asylum of the dead was more than once profaned by the ravages of the Northmen and the excesses committed during the civil and religious wars. The nave and aisles were seriously damaged in the fourteenth century by the bands of English soldiers and marauders who overran the country at that time. The Huguenots, also, under Condé (1568) utterly devastated the church crypt, violating the tombs of the bishops and wantonly burning the building. The tomb of S. Lubin, indeed, was flung out of the church and was long used for domestic purposes, until at last it was cracked by the frost. Even then it was not safe from the utilitarian spirit of the day. It was turned to account when the foundations of the cemetery wall were being constructed.

The Church of S. Martin-au-Val was restored in 1659. It now serves as a chapel for the Hospice S. Brice, where between three and four hundred inmates are provided for.

It is not without reason that I have spoken of this chapel here, for it is the most important illustration of the Merovingian period at Chartres. Leave the Place Michel and go down the Rue S. Brice till you come to the Rue Vangeon, which is the first street to your left. The simple front of the church with its three little turrets is now before you.[21] Go to the chief entrance of the Hospital and say that you wish to see the crypt. It lies beneath the raised pavement of the choir, and it is evident that the greater part of it, like the nave, choir and choir aisles, is tenth-century work. You will have noted in this connection the bold abaci of the piers of the nave and the peculiar elongated, round-headed arches of the choir arcade. But here in the crypt, besides the interesting capitals of the detached piers which support the vaulting, are two capitals of extraordinary interest. They are of grey marble in the western hall, on either side of the tablet to Bishop Lescot. Sixth century; Merovingian; crude and barbaric as the age which begot them, there is yet a vigour and directness about these carvings which make them not merely curious or grotesque. Nor are they meaningless. They represent, in the symbolic fashion of old days, the principle of life and death, of good and evil. They were intended, even then, as a warning to the faithful who approached the sanctuary, as a reminder of the fact that ‘the stones shall cry out.’ On the one capital, then, we have a scene of peace and love: two doves supporting the crown of peace, two others kissing. The other capital presents us with a scene of terror. An enormous, savage beast is seen emerging from a forest and seizing a man whose arm it has already half devoured. His friend, meanwhile, has gone to summon aid and is now returning, bringing to succour him a man with a lance....

There is one other matter to mention with regard to this church. That S. Aignan, of whom we have already spoken, and who, some think, was Bishop of Chartres in the third century, was found here, it is said, at the moment of his nomination, lost in prayer. The brethren had to drag him hence by force and carry him on their shoulders to be consecrated in the Church of Notre-Dame. Ever since then the Bishops-elect of Chartres pass the night preceding the day of their solemn entry into the town in pious retreat at S. Martin-au-Val.

Under Clotaire II. the French monarchy was re-established and united. The Chartrain territory was joined to Neustria and thus passed under the government of Pépin d’Heristal, Charles Martel and Pépin-le-Bref[22] successively. And Charles, before becoming King and Emperor under the name of Charlemagne, also ruled Neustria. Pépin, his father, who with the aid of the Pope Zachary, had added to the authority of Charles Martel the crown of Clovis, proved by many gifts to the Church that the gratitude of the Carlovingians could be adequate to its obligations. Among his gifts it is recorded that he assigned to Notre-Dame de Chartres part of the forest of Yveline. Ten years before Pépin was established on the Merovingian throne Chartres had suffered from one among many bitter experiences of the violence of the times.

The annals of Metz record that Hunald, son of Eudes, Count of Aquitane, revolting against Pépin and Carloman, threw himself upon Chartres in 745, sacked and burnt it, and ‘did not spare the church consecrated to the Mother of God.’ This incident was but a fore-taste of the long and ruinous struggle which the Chartrains were destined to maintain against the invasions of those men of the North, whose appearance on the shores of the Baltic had drawn prophetic tears, it was said, from the eyes of the invincible and enlightened Charlemagne.

The church damaged by Hunald was doubtless the one which had been built in the fourth century. The wooden roof and supports were probably consumed by the flames on this occasion, but the thick Roman walls of the ancient basilica—such as you see in the martyrium—would survive many a burning. The church therefore was easily and quickly restored by Bishop Godessald, and was ere long the scene of a memorable event.

Charles, son of Pépin, King of Aquitaine, had been made prisoner in the kingdom of his uncle, Charles-le-Chauve. He was taken before the meeting of the Estates held at Chartres (849), and there he made a declaration aloud from the ambo of the church to the effect that if he turned ecclesiastic it was of his own free will and for the love of God. He was blessed by the bishops and shorn, clad in the garb of a monk and sent to the Monastery of Corbie. Such was one of the ways in which one got rid of a dangerous rival in those days.

It was during the reign of this grandson of his, Charles-le-Fauve, that the storm foreseen by Charlemagne broke over France in a series of thunderbursts, destroying the fruits of his firm administration and wise encouragement of learning.

Warned by the troublous experiences of the times, the Chartrains were not ill-prepared for defence. But their fortifications were of no avail. We will tell the story as it is told by the monk Paul in his Latin Cartulaire de Saint Père de Chartres, which was written between 1066 and 1088:—

‘Chartres at that time’ (858) ‘had a large population and was the richest of the cities of Neustria. It was very famous by reason of the magnitude of its walls, the beauty of its buildings and its cultivation of the fine arts.[23] But there burst upon Neustria a Pagan race from across the seas, who came in their huge beaked boats, and baring the sword of their iniquity cruelly laid waste almost the whole country. They destroyed many seats of the holy and gave them over to the devouring flames: towns, when they took them, they razed to the ground, and the Christians they either slew or led into captivity and sold into everlasting bondage. So furious was the rage of the heathen that they rowed up the Seine ravaging the land on every side, and at length coming to the city of Chartres strove to take it, whilst they laid waste the surrounding territory and rendered it uninhabitable. The city thus cut off from support, and reduced by the loss of many citizens and the enfeeblement of others, was surprised by a night attack and taken. All the Christians were slaughtered like sheep. And the city, which had formerly endured unshaken a ten years’ siege by Julius Cæsar and had repelled the Roman and Argolic armies, for it was built of huge squared stones and strengthened by lofty towers, and was indeed on that account named The City of Stones, and it rejoiced in an abundance of aqueducts and subterranean ways by which it could be supplied with all provisions, was now permitted by Heaven to be burnt and utterly razed to the ground by a nation that knew not God. But the patience of God, which thus corrects the worldliness of His people in order that they may not perish hereafter, did not permit the cruelty of those barbarians to pass unavenged. For the Franks gathered from all sides and hastened to the spot where the enemy had left their boats upon the River Diva. There, meeting them as they returned laden with spoil, they fell upon them with so violent an onslaught that the Northmen went down before them as in autumn the leaves of the forest fall before the blasts of the north wind.’

So the good monk, with an indignant energy that is almost eloquent. The discerning reader will be able to separate in this story the wheat from the chaff. But the fact is certain that Hastings it was who took Chartres upon this occasion. He burnt the town and put to the sword the good Bishop Frotbold, with many of his followers who had sought refuge in Notre-Dame. The church itself, and the Abbeys of S. Père and S. Chéron, he gave to the flames.

The Veil of the Virgin—The Cathedral Treasury.

Three years later Charles-le-Chauve, paying one of his frequent pilgrimages to the shrine which he afterwards described as the first seat of the Virgin in France, beheld the ravages of Hastings. Partly perhaps as a consolation to the inhabitants for their losses, he now made their church the depository of one of the most precious relics of the Virgin known to Christendom—her veil or inner vestment, presented[24] by the Empress Irene to the Emperor Charlemagne at Constantinople. It is and was known as the Sancta Camisia, or, in popular parlance, the Sainte Tunique or Chemisette. Hence the form by which it is represented in the arms of the chapter and in the innumerable emblems which from the thirteenth century onwards have been prepared in metal or ware as tokens for the pious pilgrim. The immediate result of the possession of this sacred veil and the miracles it wrought was an influx of pilgrims to Chartres, who brought wealth enough to enable the Bishop Gislebert to restore the ruined church. He would seem to have still followed the lines of Castor’s church, but he extended it eastwards, over and beyond the Gallo-Roman wall, raising the new sanctuary of the choir so that the floor was two or three yards higher than that of the nave, as in the case of the Church of S. Martin-au-Val, and constructing out of the martyrium a crypt where the veil might be kept safe in the time of danger.

It was not long, if we may believe the chroniclers, before the love and reverence with which all the inhabitants regarded this relic was to be justified and the reputation of the veil as the palladium of the town established.

It was in the year 911 that the Northmen, who had now come to regard Neustria as their own, burst for the last time on the land of France. The people of La Beauce fled to the forests and the churches for refuge; but the forests were soon in flames and the churches were destroyed by the ruthless invaders. The refugees fled with their flocks to seek protection within the walls of Chartres. With them they brought the relics of S. Piat,[25] as some years before they had brought the body of S. Wandegisile to aid them in their defence. For the Normans were coming, those ‘barbarians from across the seas,’ and at their head was Rollo, first Duke of Normandy, Rollo, ancestor of the Conqueror, plundering and pillaging churches and abbeys in a fit of religious madness, so the monkish chroniclers aver, against the priests who had converted to Christianity the children of Odin. He had made a vain attempt upon Paris, and now had come down the Seine, rowing as far as he could, then, leaving his ships, marched upon Chartres and invested it. But he was obliged to raise the siege. The dry fact of history probably is that the approach of Robert, Duke of France, with the aid of the Duke of Burgundy and the Count of Poitiers, compelled Rollo’s men, who were anxious lest their return should be cut off and were disheartened already by their failure to take Paris, to retire when they failed to take Chartres at the first assault. But the traditional account is certainly more picturesque. At the crisis of the siege it was to the Bishop Gasselin, ‘a holy man, glorious and just and true,’ that all men looked for comfort and courage. So Bénoit, the Anglo-Norman trouvère, tells us in his poetical history of the Dukes of Normandy. And Robert Wace,[26] Jehan le Marchand[27] and the monk Paul[28] agree with him in his description of the wondrous episode which ensued. For a bishop, Gasselin was indeed a bishop, potent in prayer and skilled in that art of destroying the human species which is war. He put his trust in Heaven, but did not disdain human succour. He summoned the Dukes of Burgundy and France to his aid. Then, on the day when he learnt that they were at hand, he left the walls on which he had kept watch and ward in prayer, and, ‘tout esploré et larmoyant,’ called the people to the Cathedral. There he first celebrated Mass and offered supplications; next, leaving the altar, he gave absolution to the multitude. Thereafter, having put on his pontifical robes, he, preceded by a cross, led the citizens in armed procession back to the walls. Suddenly, above the gate which is called New, he unfurled as a banner the sacred veil, flung open the portals, and bade the people fight boldly.

‘Vers la bataille vait le pas
Tote la ville sune à glas.’

The sortie was well timed, for just at that moment the helmets and bucklers of the advancing Burgundians and Franks were seen glittering in the distance. The besieged fell with resistless enthusiasm upon the astonished enemy. The enemy, dazed by the glory of the precious relics, caught between the sallying citizens and the relieving force, retreated to the Hill of Lèves and there entrenched themselves. So terrible had been the slaughter that the bodies of the slain (says Paul the monk) heaped in the Eure for a while completely choked the stream. And they tell us that the Place des Épars,[29] in which to-day the principal hotels of the town are found, owes its name to the flight of the Normans who were scattered on this occasion (s’éparpillèrent). Others, however, more prosaically explain the name as meaning the ‘hub’ whence the various roads of the province diverge.

It was at this juncture, when Rollo had rallied his men at Lèves, that the Count of Poitiers arrived on the scene, and bitterly he reproached his brothers of Burgundy and France for having given battle before he arrived. In high dudgeon he set off in pursuit of the enemy. But the Northmen outwitted him. Rollo despatched three soldiers into the plain to sound trumpets and thus draw off the enemy to engage an imaginary foe, whilst he and his followers effected their escape.

This signal victory long left its mark on the land. The plain near the gate where the Normans were defeated was known thereafter as the Field of the Repulse or of the Men Repulsed.[30] And the first bas-relief on the south side of the choir screen, which represents the bishop displaying the holy veil to the besiegers, also commemorates this event.

The veil was brought back in triumphant procession to the Cathedral, and shortly afterwards a skilful goldsmith of the town, Teudon by name, constructed a very rich and beautiful casket of gold and cedar wood to contain it. Many miracles were wrought in favour of the devout who sought the aid of the Virgin, like Edward III. of England and Henry IV. of France, by passing under this coffer. Numerous knights who carried the token of the veil were rescued from the greatest dangers, and women, especially queens, who wore taffeta imitations of it, were protected in the pains and perils of their travail. Countless rings and priceless jewels were inlaid in the sides of the casket and hung upon it by the grateful or the expectant, so that it soon became the most valuable treasure of Chartres, in a treasury, that is, of mediæval jewellery such as we have to make a very systematic effort even to imagine.[31] ‘The still extant register of the furniture and sacred apparel leaves the soul of the ecclesiologist athirst.’ The register to which Pater refers in the sentence I have just quoted was composed in 1682, and an annotated edition of it has been published by M. Merlet (Catalogues des Reliques et Joyaux de Notre-Dame de Chartres). The curious reader will peruse with astonishment and scan with regret the long list of precious offerings which the exactions of kings, the exigencies of warfare and the rapacity of the revolutionists have caused in great part to disappear.

The veil, together with the casket in which it had lain for nearly 800 years, was seized during the Revolution. The casket and jewels were sold. The veil, though rent in twain, was recovered, but not in its entirety (3¼ yards by 6 feet). It is kept now in two coffers of cedar wood, covered with silver gilt. Beneath the veil is another known as the Veil of the Empress Irene, which is made of embroidered Byzantine stuff of the eighth century. The visitor to Chartres should on no account omit to see these curious relics, and the extremely rich enamelled triptich of the School of Limoges (thirteenth century, but in part eighteenth century restoration). For the rest, though the Casket of Teudon, which was valued in 1562 at £8980, without counting the diamonds and rubies, enamels and pearls which adorned it, has disappeared; though the head and the slipper of S. Anne are gone and the relics of many another saint; though the golden eagles of S. Eloi, the sapphires of King Robert, and the gems of Henry III. of England; though cameos and crucifixes of emerald or agate, crystal or ivory, have, like the tapestries of Queen Bertha and the golden girdle of Anne of Brittany, with its fifteen rubies, ten sapphires and sixty-four pearls, and the flagon which contained the blood of Thomas-à-Becket, all been seized and sold by sacrilegious hands, yet there remain to be seen the delicate incense-boat, given by Miles d’Illiers, Bishop of Luçon, in 1540, the graceful chalice of Henry III. (1582), and the green marble altar of the English, dedicated by them in 1420, when Chartres was in their hands.

You will also notice a medal, which was struck to commemorate the outbreak of cholera in 1832 and the part played by the Sainte Chemise at that time. For not once only, or only in the mediæval days, has the veil of the Virgin played a part in the history of Chartres. It was taken at the height of the plague, in obedience to the clamour of the people, in solemn procession through the streets, and from that moment, it is said, the plague was stayed, and all who were ill, save two, who had mocked at this act of piety, recovered.

Nor should it be forgotten that it was the possession of this veil which, when Fulbert’s Cathedral had been burnt down in 1194, stimulated the desire and provided the means to build a still larger and more beautiful cathedral, worthy to contain it, and to be, in the words of the chroniclers, ‘the very couch and chamber of Our Lady.’[32]

A few months after his defeat before Chartres, Rollo the Ganger married the daughter of Charles-le-Simple and embraced the Christian faith. Neustria was ceded to the Normans. Their depredations ceased for a while, but, under the young Duke Richard of Normandy, fifteen years later, there was a heathen reaction in Pirates’ land. Their fleets once more swarmed up the Seine, and Chartres was the central point of their attack. United in its defence, loud and frequent rang the cry of the House of France, ‘Montjoie!’ mingled with that of the Counts of Chartres and Vendôme, ‘Chartres et Passavant!’

‘Frachois crie Mont-joye et Normans Dez-aie,
Flamans crie Afras et Angevin ralie,
Et li cuens Thiebaut Chartre et Passavant crie.’
Wace—Roman de Rou.

But soon these visitations ceased. Gradually heathen Norman pirates became French Christians, their descendants feudal nobles, and Pirates’ land the most loyal of the fiefs of France. Christianity was embraced by all, from duke to peasant. By the people it was welcomed with an almost passionate fanaticism. Every road was crowded with pilgrims. Monasteries rose in every forest glade, cathedrals in every town. The Abbeys of S. Père, S. Chéron and S. Martin, and the Churches of S. Lubin and S. Laumer in the neighbouring vineyards, were re-established and restored. The Church of Bishop Wulphard was built, and this restoration of religious centres meant, in a brutal age, the assertion of the rights of humanity, in an age of ignorance the encouragement of learning, of science and art, in an age of devastation the promotion, by means of pilgrimages, of industry and commerce. The growing number of windmills, wine-presses and tanneries on the monastic properties is the index of the civilising influence of the monks. The fragments of their castles remain as the sign of the more picturesque but less admirable occupation of the knights of chivalry.

CHAPTER III
Theobald-the-Trickster and Fulbert the Bishop

‘Thiebaut li quenz de Chartres fu fel é engignous
Mult out chastels é viles, é mult fu averous;
Chevalier fu mult prous é mult chevalerous
Mez mult part fu cruel é mult envious.’
Robert Wace—Roman de Rou.

ROLO, on his conversion, gave his domain of Malmaison, near Épernon, to Notre-Dame de Chartres. The deed of gift was long preserved, and ran in these terms:—

‘I, Rollo, Duke of Normandy, give to the Brethren of the Church Notre-Dame de Chartres my Castle of Malmaison, which I have won with my sword, and with my sword I will guarantee it to them, as let this knife be witness.’

A knife in the Middle Ages was a symbol of putting in possession. It was a fitting symbol for the siècle de fer, that century of moral and material disorder and disaster in which the country was now involved.

For France was now falling into the iron grip of feudalism. It is the age of castles. As the power of the central authority weakens, the power of the great vassals, dukes, counts, bishops and abbots becomes established as absolute in their fiefs. But during the period of disorder, from which the feudal régime emerged triumphant, the serf had waged with his master the same struggle that the vassal was waging with his lords and the lord with the King. The result was similar in all cases. Usurpation of servile tenures accompanied that of liberal tenures, and, territorial appropriation having taken place in every rank of society, it was as difficult to dispossess a serf of his manse as a seigneur of his benefice. The serf, therefore, emerged from the condition of almost absolute slavery in which he was at the time of the fall of the Western Empire, and from the condition of servitude that had been his up to the end of the reign of Charles-le-Chauve. From this time servitude was transformed into serfage. The serf having withdrawn his person and his field from his master’s hands, owes to him no longer his body and goods, but only a portion of his labour and his income. He ceases to be a slave and becomes a tributary.

With the advent of feudalism the map of the country underwent a change. The Roman arrangement, by which Gaul had been divided into eighteen provinces and 127 dioceses, had been little altered by the Francs, and lasted on under the Carlovingians, but it gradually disappeared in the course of the tenth and eleventh centuries. It was preserved only by the Church, the dioceses of which, up to the time of the Revolution, represented very nearly the ancient divisions of Gaul under the Romans. Before the days of Cæsar it was into pagi that Gaul had been divided. The pagus or pays persisted now; more numerous than the cities, they continued to split up and multiply. But from 800 onwards most of these pays having set up comtés of the same name and same extent began to be known as such—as, for instance, the Comté of Chartres.

When in 987 Hugues Capet, Duke of France, decided to assume the title of King, the political unity of the Chartrains had long been broken by the territorial usurpations of the great officers of the Crown. The government of the country under Charlemagne had been shared by seven counts—Chartres, Dreux, Châteaudun, Blois, Vendôme, Poissy and Mantes. But by Hugh Capet’s time these had been reduced to three—Chartres, Blois and Dreux—and in the person of Thibault-le-Vieux or le Tricheur, who was of Capetan stock, the counties of Blois and Chartres were united. They remained in his family till the death of Thibaut VI., 1218. They were then divided between the two collateral branches of the house, but reunited again in 1269.

Philippe-le-Bel acquired the county of Chartres in 1289, and gave it to his brother, Charles de Valois, whose son, Philippe de Valois, united it to the Crown (1346).

It is convenient to explain this matter of the Comté here, for the present period of the history of Chartres is connected with the dread name of Thibault-le-Tricheur, Theobald the Trickster, Count of Chartres, the chevalier fel et engignous, whom Robert Wace describes.

This first hereditary Count of Chartres was the Robert the Devil of the Pays Chartrain. Through the whole country side, from Tours to Blois, and from Blois to Chartres, the impression of his dreaded personality is indelibly stamped. The legend still runs that Thibault, the old Chasseur, nightly crosses the Loire from Montfrau to Bury with a crowd of his reckless men of arms, bent, you may suppose, on some murderous foray. This turbulent spirit threw himself eagerly into the quarrel between Lothaire and Richard, Duke of Normandy, and took an active part in the cruel war that ensued. He invaded the Duke’s territory, and, availing himself of every device, and employing every ruse, for Thibault was ‘plein d’engin et plein fu de feintie,’ he took Évreux and advanced even to the walls of Rouen. His line of advance was marked by devastation so terrible that, says the Norman chronicler, there was not the bark of a single dog to be heard throughout the county.[33]

A peace was patched up, and Thibault married Richard’s daughter. But the King and the Count shortly afterwards renewed their machinations against the Duke. The latter was hard pressed, but, thanks to his spirit and the valour of his followers, he proved victorious. He ravaged the country of his enemy, and sacked and burnt the town and church of Chartres. It is said that when Thibault, the hardened old Chasseur, came to the town—sa bonne ville de Chartres—he began to count one by one the heads of those whom the Northmen had slain. Suddenly he stopped in his counting and began to utter the cries and laughter of a madman. For the head of his own son lay there before him, and the shock of the sight unhinged his mind forever.

The Rue des Changes lies opposite the south-west corner of the Cathedral. Pursue this street and you will find yourself in the modern vegetable market—the Place Billard. It is the site on which—coolly appropriating some territory which belonged to the Monastery of S. Père—Thibault built the castle and donjon of the Counts of Chartres. It was outside the then walls of the town, between the Porte Évière and the Porte Cendreuse. Not a vestige of it now remains, if we except a few fragments of the old enclosing wall. For the donjon was destroyed in

1587, and the castle in the nineteenth century. The great tower known as the King’s or Count’s Tower (Tour le Roi, Tour le Comte), was used for a prison, and within the spacious halls of the ancient palace most of the general assemblies of Chartres were held. It was here that for five centuries justice was administered, and it was in the chapel of the castle that the bishop, on his entry, was wont to swear that he would not go contrary to the rights of the prince. And it was here that feudal homage was done, à cause de la grosse tour de Chartres.

The castle, with its crenelated donjon, its huge façade on the crest of the hill, its massive walls and buttresses; the Cathedral, with its soaring spires, majestic nave and mystic sculptures, were typical in their juxtaposition. The fortress of the Counts, rising behind armed walls and portcullis; the stronghold of the bishops, secure within the buildings of the cloister, to which there was access only through guarded gates—such, for instance, as that facing the castle, of which you may still see a trace on the corner house of the Rue des Changes and the Rue du Lait—Castle and Cathedral so placed were stone symbols, you might fancy, of the temporal and spiritual powers which ruled with divided sway the old town of Chartres.[34]

For, throughout the Middle Ages, side by side with the persistent power of the bishops and their train of clergy and of serfs, persisted also, but waxing and waning with varying fortune, the power of the Counts. And from the vassals and dependants of these two powers was destined to spring the modern Bourgeoisie. The Counts of Blois, of Chartres, of Meaux pass before us in the pages of history, forever raising levies, waging wars and exacting tolls on merchandise. Sometimes they are in accord with the clergy; sometimes in opposition; and at one moment make large donations to the Church, at another rob it. To-day they fight for their King abroad and on their Crusades, while Viscounts represent them at home. To-morrow they are home again, fighting among themselves, or trying to throw off their allegiance to their King. Counts of Chartres or their relatives mount the throne of England and the throne of France. But war and brigandage remain their business. They pillage the bishops, and the bishops excommunicate the pillagers. They raise troops, and the bishops call their parish to arms. They war with the sword, and the bishops win with the aid of their trained ability, the cunning of their counsel, and their pens.

For the great bishops—such as Fulbert, Ives and John of Salisbury—were indeed remarkable men, and they held their own successfully, not only, if need be, against the interference of their Archbishop of Sens, but also with the Counts of Chartres and the Kings of France and England.

The eleventh century above all was an era of notable bishops.

There were, of course, good bishops and bad. Aganon, who succeeded Gantelme, was in the former class, and he devoted himself to the rebuilding and establishing of the ruined churches and monasteries; among them that of S. Père de Chartres, which had been utterly demolished by the Normans. His nephew, Ragenfroi, succeeded him, and continued in the paths of his uncle. He was one of the greatest benefactors of S. Père, to which he added many buildings, and whither he brought twelve monks from the Monastery of Fleury-sur-Loire. Their fervour and discipline, which was to give new life to the community at Chartres, had been acquired under the rule of their abbot, Vulphard, destined to be one of the great bishop-builders of Chartres.

It was under Ragenfroi that Hugues le Grand, father of Hugues Capet, gave evidence of his lively devotion to the Notre-Dame de Chartres by the donation of the domain of Ingré, ‘with all its lands cultivated or not, vineyards, pasturage and prairies, with its forests and serfs of either sex, and the church which is dedicated to Saint Leu.’ So runs the charter, and the object is ‘that the brethren deriving therefrom the necessaries of life may have the more liberty to perform Divine service and spiritual exercises, and pour out the more abundant prayers for us, our wife and our whole family.’

Hardouin, Bishop of Chartres, succeeded to his brother’s position, but not his religion, says the chronicler; for he was filled with pride and swollen with secular ambition. He waged war with the monks of S. Père, and took from them every privilege and possession he could. And the chronicler adds (writing always from the point of view of S. Père) that several later bishops followed his example, and trod in the same path of sacrilege, wasting their own property and coveting that of others, plotting against the monks and harassing them, and even robbing them of much that the charity of the faithful had bestowed upon them, and, whereas they should have protected them, acting in the blindness of their hearts like tyrants and plunderers. Count Eudes succeeded his father Thibault (977), and the following narrative, which the monk Paul gives us in connection with his name, is sufficiently eloquent of the times.

There was a holy priest, by name Sigismund, whose goodness and sanctity were clearer than the light of day to all people, lay and clerical. Chaste and humble, prudent, prayerful, burning with the fire of faith, yet jocund of speech withal, he shone as an example of all Christian virtues. Now Fulcher, Abbot of S. Lubin,[35] had committed to his care certain vineyards, from which, it appears, the Blessed Sigismund knew how to make good wine. And one day when Count Eudes of Chartres was about to dine, and his men were looking about for the best wine to be obtained, they heard that there was wine to be got for nothing in the cellar of the priest. Overjoyed at the news, they hastened there, and boldly entering the cellar filled their skins and carried them off to the hall. The good Sigismund returned from the house of God and found the chief cup-bearer sitting in his cellar, who mocked him, asking, ‘Master, tell me, is that wine of yours very good or not?’ ‘My brother,’ returned the holy man, ‘you are no novice at wine, and do not need to be told when you have only to taste for yourself.’ ‘Give me a goblet, then,’ said he. ‘Nay; the wine will be better from the cup into which it is drawn.’

The unhappy man placed the cup to his lips, but before he could drink he was seized with a fit, and fell to the earth foaming at the mouth. He was taken back to the palace, and when the Count heard of the affair he summoned Sigismund to his presence and ordered the eyes of those who had stolen the wine to be gouged out and the wine to be restored to its owner. Sigismund, however, when he saw him so roused, would not leave his presence till the Count had calmed his wrath, set the prisoners free, and consented to drink the wine gratis. Then the holy man turned to pray, and thanks to his intercession the cup-bearer was restored to his former health.

Count Eudes—whose widow, Bertha, afterwards became for a while the wife of King Robert—died in 995. He was succeeded by his son, Thibault II., and with him the struggle between the spiritual and temporal powers took the form of a claim to present to the Monastery of S. Père.

Fulbert, who was one day to be the great Bishop of Chartres, has left us an account of the matter, preserved and completed by the monk Paul, which is as curious as it is instructive.

‘The Abbot of S. Père,’ writes Fulbert, ‘was very ill, but still in full possession of his faculties, when a monk named Magenard—up to that time a dear friend of mine’ (more of a courtier than a priest, says Paul!)—‘slipped secretly out of the monastery by night and hastened to Count Thibault, who was all that time lying at Blois, with the view of begging the post of abbot for himself. The Count sent him back to us next day, accompanied by commissioners, who were to secure from the brethren a magnificent reception of him as abbot. But to almost all of us this conduct appeared as horrible as it was unprecedented. We answered, therefore, that we could not consent to their requests, for the appointment was not legal; and an ambitious schemer who had tried to secure the post of abbot before the abbot himself was dead could not be accepted. Magenard rode back in high dudgeon to the Count, and fanned the flames of the young man’s wrath against us. Five days later Gislebert, the abbot, died. The members of the monastery met, and the question was put whether anyone supported the claim of Magenard. One by one the brethren answered no. A deputation was therefore sent to the Count (who was acting as bishop at the time) to inform him of Gislebert’s death, and to ask for regular permission to choose his successor. But this deputation was forestalled by the treacherous conduct of two monks, who hastened to Blois and falsely informed the Count that Magenard had been chosen abbot by the brethren. The Count was delighted at the news, and publicly presented Magenard with the pastoral staff. The brethren who had remained at home were incensed at this fraudulent business, and promptly drew up and signed the following protest:—

‘Know all the Church that we have not chosen Magenard to be our abbot: we do not approve of him, we do not want him, we do not consent; but we disapprove, refuse, and altogether reject him—we, that is, the undersigned monks of Saint Père.’

Fulbert tells us that all the brethren either signed or witnessed their signatures in his presence. On the next day, he continues, the Count Thibault returned to Chartres and requested to be admitted with formal processions into the monastery. The monks replied that they would willingly so receive him provided that he did not bring the false abbot with him. The Count was enraged, but held his hand for one day. On the following day, however, with a noisy crowd of followers, he forced Magenard upon the Monastery of S. Père. At this violence the holy brethren, fearing to be contaminated by the presence of the intruder, bade farewell, with tears in their eyes, to the sanctuary of the Lord, and took refuge in the Cathedral. The Cathedral also lacked a bishop, and within its walls the two flocks of monks, like sheep without a shepherd, mingled their tears with mutual consolation.

The monks found a resting-place in the monastery of Lagni, and Magenard was installed by a foreign bishop, in the absence of the clergy, amidst the indignation of the people, and in spite of the open protest of the Archbishop of Sens and a few of the remaining monks of S. Père.

Not the least dramatic part of this curious story is its end. Magenard remained quietly in possession of the monastery, and ‘there was not one bishop in all France whose heart was touched by feelings of piety or love of sacred law to interfere on behalf of the monks who had been expelled.’ But presently (1004), on his return from a pilgrimage to Rome, Count Thibault died, and his body was brought back to be laid next his brother Thierry in the Chapel of S. Père. His gravestone, restored in the seventeenth century, at the time of the reconstruction of the abbey, is now to be found in the Hôtel de Ville. Now, on the death of the Count, Raoul, the Dean of Notre-Dame, who had welcomed the monks of S. Père in their flight, was appointed bishop in his stead. The bitter feeling against Magenard, which had long been smouldering, now burst into flame. He was deprived of his pastoral staff and compelled to pass some days in the bishop’s house. But when men saw how instant he was in prayer, and how fervent in vigil, how wise in speech and accomplished in letters, the flames of the quarrel died down. His staff was restored to him, together with the conduct of the monastery, and, adds the chronicler, as long as he breathed this vital air so long did he full well and lovingly feed the flock which was confided to his charge.

Bishop Hardouin died eight days after the destruction of the town and church in 962, and the pious and able Vulphard was appointed in his stead. The people of Chartres set themselves with undaunted energy to rebuild their town, and they seized the opportunity of making their houses more substantial, and of enlarging their churches. Look at the tenth-century remains of Notre-Dame and S. Père, and judge how massive was the material they used. Their houses, of course, were still made mostly of wood. Vulphard devoted himself to the business of constructing a new cathedral, which should be more beautiful than any yet conceived.

The martyrium is the kernel of the crypt of Notre-Dame. The latter half of the tenth century was the period of vast crypts, and Vulphard, not content with merely renewing the martyrium of Gislebert, added a broad ambulatory round it, enclosed with a strong circular wall, which was broken by three advanced chapels. This was intended to make the martyrium, as the depository of the treasure and the Veil, safe from all accidents. We shall see presently how well it fulfilled its purpose. The church itself was extended westwards as far as the line marked now by the labyrinth in the pavement of the nave. Two great piers were inserted in the martyrium to support the raised choir.

In order to understand the growth of the Cathedral, which is in itself, to the eye that can see, an almost complete history of Christian architecture, it is necessary to form some idea of the church which Vulphard built. For in size and site it approached the modern building.

If we count the circular portion embracing the martyrium, and connected by stairs with the main building, it must have been over 100 yards long, and in breadth at least thirty, including the Chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre on the one side, and the sacristy on the south. But the nave and the aisles—the floor of which was on a level with that of Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre—were together only as broad as the modern nave by itself.

Like the tenth century Church of S. Martin-au-Val, the choir was raised ten or twelve steps above the nave, and was surrounded by an ambulatory. There was a double transept: and it may be that we can trace it in the recesses which now form the Chapels of S. Savinian, S. Potentian and the Saints Forts on the one side, and the Chapel of S. Clement on the other.

As to the details and ornamentation of the church nothing remains, but we can say from our knowledge of the times, and from a comparison with what tenth century work there is in Chartres, what could and what could not have been, if not what was. There may, for instance, have been a belfry, and, seeing that the great square tower of the Abbey Church of S. Père was at that time being built, there probably was. Perhaps two such towers flanked the two extremities of the façade. They would have had no spires, but a four-sided, pyramidal roof. Squat columns or square pillars, one may suppose, carried the series of plain round arches of brick and stone which connected the aisles with the central nave. But the great ‘Triumphal Arch,’ as it was called, separating choir from nave, was richly adorned with sculpture and painting.

The capitals of the pillars and their bases would be in most instances romanesque, after the fashion of that which serves as a font in the Chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre, whilst others would be decorated like those of S. Martin-au-Val with foliage and forms of real or fantastic animals, the mystic symbols of Mediæval Masonry, the language in which the Masters of the Living Stone were now beginning to speak. The walls may have been enriched with mosaics and paintings in accordance with the precepts of Charlemagne. Above the aisles may have run a triforium or gallery, set apart for the prayers of virgins and widows. If you look at the entrance of Vulphard’s crypt you will see that the doorways were simple, and they offer a striking contrast to the porches of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with their wealth of sculpture, which records, as it were, in brief the history of Christianity, and serves as a preface to the book of the Cathedral. Without going into further detail, we may add, that as the complete art of vaulting was not yet known, though the small roof of the martyrium may have been vaulted, the large roof of the Cathedral can only have been a flat wooden ceiling.

The building of this church was completed before Vulphard’s death. But the decoration of it lagged under his successor. The skilled monks engaged for that purpose disappeared. The artists had retired to their cloister to await their last hour in prayer and fasting. For the end of the world was expected. The ancient and popular doctrine of the millennium possessed all minds. Every sign, it seemed, had been given.

Wars, famine and pestilence, and the ravages of the Normans and Saracens had produced a depression of spirit, which, combined with an erroneous interpretation of the Apocalypse, led men to think that the reign of Antichrist and the end of the world must surely be at hand. The beginning of the year 1000, it began to be believed, was the appointed date of this dread climax.

‘A long and unceasing series of signs,’ writes one in 985, when bequeathing his property to the Abbey of S. Père, ‘bears witness to the approaching end of the world, and of the passing of all things therein.’

Private wars and the revolt of the Norman peasantry, who had dared to utter the word ‘commune’ and had been ferociously crushed by the feudal barons, the breaking up of the Roman Empire, and Charlemagne’s after it, the plague of S. Anthony’s fire and the scourge of famine, these and a thousand others not less awful were surely signs enough to fill the world with terror and despair. And what should a man do but seek refuge in the house of God and prepare himself

by frenzied supplication against the great day of the Lord?

But when the year was passed and the world was still unended, a wave of religious feeling swept over Europe and men went with one accord to render thanks at the holy shrines. Pilgrims crowded to the sanctuary of Chartres to make their offerings to the Holy Veil and to acknowledge the protection of the blessed Virgin. They came also to seek relief from the terrible malady known as S. Anthony’s Fire or Mal des Ardents.

S. Fulbert[36] himself, the successor of Eudes, was afflicted with this painful plague. William of Malmesbury records the miracle by which he was healed.

‘He was sick unto death,’ he tells us, ‘of the sickness called the Sacred Fire or Mal des Ardents (erysipelas), which was devouring his tongue with grievous pain. One night, when his agony was most extreme, he beheld a beautiful lady approach with an air of majesty, attended by a numerous suite. She bade him open his mouth, and the sick man obeyed. Thereupon the mysterious lady did unto him as a mother does who suckles her infant child; she pressed upon his burning tongue some drops of her virginal milk, which refreshed his tongue and healed him instantly.

‘Even the cheeks of the saint were sprinkled with the precious liquid, and he, having wiped off some drops thereof with costly linen, left them to the Church of Chartres as relics, and as a token of the miracle which had been wrought in his favour.’ ‘Qui se veoid encores parmi les reliques,’ adds Souchet.

But Fulbert’s reputation does not rest on these passive acts of sanctity. An event was to happen shortly which brought out all the energy that lay beneath his mild excellence and his scholarly instructions.

‘It was on the 7th September 1020,’ says Souchet, ‘that the burning of the Church of Chartres happened, on the eve of the nativity of Our Lady. It is not known how or by whose agency this disaster occurred; but there was nothing in this holy temple that the fire did not consume.’ Rouillard (1608) piously supposes that lightning was sent from heaven to destroy the church, as a punishment for the sins of the pilgrims, some of whom, among the crowds of both sexes who kept vigil there, may by some act of impurity have defiled the sanctity of the place.

However it may have been, the church was once more destroyed, and, as was happening all over Italy and France at this period, it was destroyed only to rise from its ashes more beautiful than ever. So Angers, Poitiers, Beauvais, Cambrai, Rouen were rebuilt almost as soon as burnt, in the enthusiastic rivalry of the Christian builders of the day. ‘Humanity,’ in the fine phrase of Raoul Glaber, ‘rose from its long agony and set itself to build, and to shake off the rags of its old age in order to put on the white robe of the churches.’

The great bishop with whose name the new Cathedral at Chartres was to be indissolubly connected, the Fulbert of Fulbert’s Cathedral, had been the favourite pupil of Gerbert of Reims and had practised medicine in the Monastery of S. Père, where that art was long held in high honour. But Fulbert was more than a mere doctor. He was a poet, a mathematician, a theologian, grammarian and skilful musician as well. When, therefore, he became the head of the School of Chartres (from which a few years later John, called the Deaf, was to issue, doctor of Henry I. and chief of the sect of Nominalists, whose pupil was Rosselin, whose pupil Abeilard) scholars flocked from England, Germany, Denmark and all parts of France to listen to the teachings of the French Socrates, and to receive from his eloquent lips the precepts of wisdom and the counsel of friendship. For his knowledge was immense and his learning encyclopædic, ranging from the minutest details of the exact sciences to the most daring speculations of metaphysics. Fulbert, we are told, like a modern Plato, would often withdraw to a garden near the bishop’s palace, watered by the clear stream (it was clear in those days), and there, surrounded by his chosen pupils, expound with mingled sweetness and force the tenets of philosophy and the doctrines of faith. ‘The teacher of philosophers, the marvel of his age, the sun whose rays gave life,’ his pupil Adelmann called him. And among the philosophers he taught, and the rare flowers of intellect which in this age of brute force expanded beneath the quickening rays of his mind, Adelmann enumerates Lanfranc, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Walter of Burgundy, Lambert and Engelbert of Paris and Orléans, Hildier, wise as Socrates and learned as Pythagoras, and Sigo, the musician of the delicate ear. Fulbert’s letters,[37] which place him among the most interesting historians of this obscure period, reveal him as a theologian firm and decided, as a statesman eager to enforce order and to secure the administration of justice, as a man broad-minded, charming, enthusiastic, humane.

Inspired by a mysterious voice which bade him ‘build a sanctuary worthy of his filial love and the divine majesty,’ Fulbert now set about procuring funds to build first a veritable crypt, and then above it the new Cathedral, adopting, however, the general plan of the church left by his predecessor in order to make use of the enormous existing foundations.[38] The subterranean aspect of the old church, built about the grottoes and heaped round by the rapid deposit of rubbish which continually raised the soil of mediæval towns, would naturally suggest this scheme. But to carry it out funds beyond the ordinary were needed.

Fortunately Fulbert was no ordinary beggar. Not only did he know how to use the usual means of encouraging gifts, in money and in kind, from the clergy and people of the diocese by holding special assemblies on the site of the proposed church, and by sermons which promised heavenly rewards for those who took part in the building, but he used his connections with the great world and his power of letter-writing to the best advantage.

He wrote first of all to ‘his beloved Lord,’ the ‘good King Robert,’ in whom the historian sees more of a monk than of a sovereign.

‘All our resources fail us for the rebuilding of our church, and a great necessity is upon us. Come then to our aid, O holy father; strengthen our weakness and succour our distress to the end that God may reward your soul with all blessings.’

And doubtless the ‘father of religious architecture’ responded generously to this eloquent appeal from his former teacher.

Meanwhile every belfry in the diocese attested by its silence the disaster of the church and the sorrow of its bishop. ‘On account of the disaster,’ he writes, ‘which has befallen my church, I wish to make known my profound grief to all. In consequence I have commanded that all the bells which are wont to ring with joy and gladness shall attest henceforth by their silence my bitter sadness.’

Fulbert wrote next to his most beloved and pious Duke of Aquitaine, and he received handsome annual subscriptions from him whilst the Cathedral was a-building. ‘Your marvellous and inexhaustible charity,’ writes the bishop, ‘is pleased to overwhelm me with many gifts which I do not deserve. I should blush to receive your offerings were I not sure that you will be magnificently rewarded hereafter.’

Eudes II., Count of Chartres and Blois, was, before he met his death in the Battle of Bar-le-Duc, a generous contributor. That was to be expected from so rich a seigneur for the restoration of the principal church of his own county and town, but deeply was Fulbert touched by the receipt of a contribution from Cnut, King of Denmark and England, who, as William of Malmesbury records, ‘sent many sums to the churches across the seas, and chiefly enriched that of Chartres, where flourished Fulbert, renowned for his holiness and philosophy.’

In acknowledging the esterlings of the great Danish King, the bishop speaks of him in terms which the verdict of history has confirmed.

‘To the very noble King of Denmark, Cnut, Fulbert, by the grace of God, Bishop of Chartres, with his clerks and his monks, promises the recommendation of his prayers.

‘When we saw the offering which you deigned to send us we admired at once your astonishing wisdom and religious spirit—your wisdom in that you, a prince divided from us by language and by sea, are zealously concerned not only with the things around you, but also with the things that touch us; at your religious spirit, in that you, of whom we had heard speak as a Pagan King, show yourself a very Christian and generous benefactor of the churches and servants of God. We render lively thanks to the King of Kings, through whose mercy your gifts have descended upon us, and we beseech Him to make your reign happy and prosperous, and to deliver your soul from all sin.’

Such were the means by which the courtly bishop extracted donations from the great, and such the spiritual consolation with which he rewarded the generosity of his royal patrons.

Fulbert’s labours, supported by the enthusiastic devotion of the people, were interrupted by the turbulent behaviour of Godfrey, Viscount of Châteaudun. He, since Eudes had acquired the county of Champagne, and took, therefore, little interest in the affairs of Chartres, had, like the other great vassals of Eudes, followed the example of his suzerain. He was endeavouring, by building himself first the Castle of Gallardon, and now of Illiers, in the very centre of the bishop’s possessions, to aggrandise himself at the expense of the King and the Church. Fulbert could not prevail upon the monkish Robert to repress Godfrey by force. The spiritual arms which he himself used only roused the Count to take reprisals by plundering the episcopal farms. Eudes himself, who had assumed the title of Count Palatine, was too much occupied with his own ambitious schemes, and his opposition to King Robert and King Robert’s successor, to have either the wish or the time to interfere. For, although he had acquiesced in Fulbert’s advice, followed by Robert the Good, that Henry, the third son, should be appointed to succeed to the throne, yet, when King Robert died, Eudes espoused the cause of the fourth. He was obliged to yield at last to the force of Henry’s arms, and some years later this turbulent Count was killed at Bar-le-Duc when striving to take vengeance on the Emperor Conrad by attacking his vassal, Gothelon.

In spite of his many reverses, Eudes had greatly increased the power and repute of the house of Chartres. So far as Chartres was concerned he had made many rich presents to the Cathedral and to the Monastery of S. Père. He endowed the small church and foundation which was afterwards to become the Monastery of S. Jean-en-Vallée.[39]

But his chief act of interference was when, on the death of Fulbert, the Chapter appealed to him to uphold their election of Albert the Dean to the episcopal seat against the appointment of Theodoric, a creature of Queen Constance. Eudes, seizing the opportunity of opposing the royal will, declared that he would not admit the new bishop into his town until he had been examined by a bench of bishops, for he was said to be a man of little sense and no education. Theodoric’s appointment was, however, in the end made good.

The vast possessions of Eudes were divided between his sons, who, following the family tradition, refused to pay homage to the King. They were surprised by the energy of their royal suzerain, overpowered and held captive for six years. Étienne, the younger, died; but Thibault, at the price of the county of Tours, was set free by Geoffrey of Anjou. Thibault was now Count of Chartres, Blois, Brie and Champagne, but as to the delimitations of their territories endless hostilities arose between him and the Angevin prince. And when his hands were not full with the attentions of this neighbour he waged disastrous war for his King against William I., Duke of Normandy (1058).

But in spite of wars and famine and disease, in spite of the violence of Counts and the weakness of Kings, Fulbert’s Cathedral was completed ere his death. The fire had left but a few columns and fragments of wall standing where once was the Cathedral of Vulphard. The winter of 1020 was devoted to clearing away the débris, and so active was the work, that by September in the following year Fulbert could write ‘we have finished our crypts, and’ (this is the reason why he cannot accept the invitation of William of Aquitaine to be present at the solemn dedication of the Cathedral of Poitiers) ‘we must devote all our energies to covering them before the inclemency of the winter damages them.’ But in the following year the work had made such progress that he was able to undertake a journey at King Robert’s request to Rome, leaving the building to his canons and architect. Who that architect was may perhaps be indicated by the entry in the Nécrologie de Notre-Dame, under date October 22:—Bérenger. ‘Berengarius hujus matris ecclesiæ, Artifex Bonus.’

The martyrium had suffered less than the rest of the Cathedral, but it was thought necessary to place a large round column on the Gallo-Roman wall, in order to strengthen the vaulted roof. On this column you may descry the word Fulbert, cut not in modern days, nor yet at any great distance of time.

‘The circular part of our crypt,’ says l’Abbé Bulteau,[40] ‘with its vaulting, is to-day just as it was left then.’ But the floor was probably much lower if one may judge by the embrasures of the windows.

The convex wall of the martyrium was strengthened on the outside by a double thickness, for it had to support not only the thrust of the new vaulting, but also the weight of the upper church.

As to the rectilinear portions of the crypt, in spite of the alterations of the twelfth century, we may easily recognise the seal of the eleventh century in the piers and the abaci. To S. Fulbert we may also attribute the construction of two sacristies for Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre, that on the south side now being the Chapel of S. Martin, that on the north the Cave au Bois, known formerly as the ‘Place of the Iron Chest.’

The upper church was built of the same dimensions as those of the former one, but the ground level of the whole was raised considerably, almost to the height of that of the choir.

The length of the church may be indicated by the excavations of 1849 at the centre of the labyrinth known as La Lieue, where fragments were discovered which are supposed to have been the débris of the western façade. There was a double ambulatory round the choir and chapels corresponding to those of the crypt, and two sacristies may be reckoned to have been built above those of the Sous Terre.

A transept and two side-doors existed in the same place, but of less size than those of to-day.

The decoration of the Cathedral was left in great part to Fulbert’s successors.

Henry I., who came to the throne when death had surprised his father, Robert the Good, as he was copying a manuscript in the Church of Melun, owed his succession in some degree, as we have seen, to Fulbert.

He cancelled his debt in part by paying for the wooden roof[41] of the Cathedral—wooden, for the art of extensive vaulting in stone was not yet understood—whilst Henry’s doctor, Jean le Sourd, the Chartrain pupil of Fulbert and leader of the sect of Nominalists in the battle of the schools, was responsible for the construction of the south gate and many other details. Teudon, who had made the Sainte Chasse for the Veil, undertook the principal façade. A big bell weighing 5000 livres was also hung in one of Vulphard’s towers, which still stood.

Fulbert died in the year 1028, but so rapid had the work been that he did not die before his Cathedral was complete. For William of Malmesbury (Gest., Vol. II. chap. XXV.) records that ‘Bishop Fulbert, among other proofs of his efficient labours, very magnificently completed the Church of Our Lady S. Mary, of which he himself had laid the foundations, and which, moreover,’ he adds, ‘doing everything he could for its honour, he rendered celebrated by many musical modulations. The man who has heard his chaunts, breathing only celestial vows, is best able to conceive the love he manifested in honour of the Virgin.’

Under Fulbert, indeed, the school of Chartres became famous for its music and for its plain-song renderings of the sacred offices. The celebrated François de Cologne and many others are mentioned as having belonged to this school. But Fulbert himself excelled them all in his compositions.[42] For amongst other beautiful canticles he composed, in collaboration, it is said, with King Robert, the famous responses of the Nativity of the Virgin, a feast which he, in grateful remembrance of his wondrous visitant, was the first to celebrate in France. I shall be forgiven for quoting in the untranslatable Latin this noble hymn of love, which is the most beautiful blossom of the poetic crown of Mary.

‘Solem justitiæ, regem paritura supremum
Stella Maria maris hodie processit ad ortum;
Cernere divinum lumen gaudete fideles!

Stirps Jesse virgam produxit, virgaque florem,
Et super hunc florem requiescit Spiritus almus,
Virgo dei genitrix virga est, flos filius ejus.

Ad nutum Domini nostrum ditantis honorem,
Sicut spina rosam genuit, Judæa Mariam,
Ut vitium virtus operiret, gratia culpam.’[43]

Fulbert himself left a great part of his wealth to complete the work which he had begun. That work was carried on by his successor, Theodoric. But it must have been interrupted for a while by the terrible famine which came upon France at this period—a famine so terrible that during its course human flesh, it is said, was exposed for sale, and the bodies of the dead were dug up and eaten. The abundant harvest of 1034 put an end to this infliction, and men turned again to finish the decoration of God’s house. It would seem, indeed, as if Theodoric turned this task to the purpose of relief-works. For the monk Paul says of him ‘that his abounding wealth, poured out in a lavish stream, issuing ever to provide for the hunger and thirst of the needy, completed the famous work of the court of our gracious Lady, the Mother of God, and makes him worthy of saintly renown.’

But it was not till the year 1037 that the solemn dedication of the Cathedral by Theodoric took place in the presence of Henri I. and his whole Court.

Theodoric was buried by the side of Fulbert, and on his tomb in S. Père was written, ‘Holy Virgin, he wished to raise to thee a temple, the design of which the author had taken from Heaven itself.’

CHAPTER IV
S. Ives and the Crusades

‘A pretty burgh and such as Fancy loves
For bygone grandeurs.’—Lowell.

THE town of Chartres is clearly divided into two sections—the upper (quartier du luxe), modern, unimpressive and inelegant, and the lower, picturesque, poor, mediæval. This lower part of the town is watered by an arm of the Eure,

‘Dont l’eau distille
Autour de notre ville,
Et d’un murmurant flot
Maint beau verger enclot,’

as a local sixteenth-century poet has it. Like most old towns, Chartres consisted originally of a small city enclosed by strong walls and of suburbs stretching along the main roads which led to it. As these suburbs increased in size and importance, the enceinte was enlarged so as to include them. This took place at Chartres notably in the twelfth century. But up to that time the area enclosed was remarkably small, for after Hastings had sacked the town ‘the inhabitants had not the heart,’ says the monk Paul, ‘to rebuild all their city, but contented themselves with fortifying the little corner of the ancient town which is still’ (1060) ‘surrounded with walls.’

The line of the enceinte enclosing this ‘little corner of the ancient town’ cannot be exactly traced. But

it certainly ran from the Place de l’Étape-au-Vin (the picturesque old shop built out on wooden supports), and, passing behind the Church of S. Aignan, the Castle of the Counts (Place Billard), crossed the Petit-Boucherie to join the Tertre S. Eman,[44] where was the Porte Evière (Porta Aquaria). Tertres, it should be remarked, are, in Chartrain dialect, little streets of stone steps which facilitate communication between the upper and lower towns. The rest of the town was defended by ditches and ramparts. A few wooden forts guarded the bridges.

Within the walls, the Cathedral and the castle frowned over the rest of the town and other churches, representing the double power of bishop and count, around which was growing up the crowd of dependants who were destined, in the fulness of time, to become the bourgeoisie of Chartres. And without the walls lay the Monastery of S. Père, waxing yearly in lands and wealth, stirring the jealousy of bishops and tempting the cupidity of counts. About the castle, the Cathedral and the monastery there were gradually being established groups of artisans who, by instinct and necessity, herded together in distinct quarters of the town, and thus gradually formed the redoubtable corporations and guilds of the Middle Ages—unions which, in the learned and unlearned professions alike, still exercise so potent an influence in England and on the Continent. Already there were the quarters of the money-changers, the saddlers, the skinners, the goldsmiths in Chartres. Later, as we shall see, almost every street will fly the banner of some particular Craft.

The liberty of the peasant was also being gradually asserted throughout this period. He was passing from the condition of a farmer under a proprietor to that of a proprietor owing duties to a lord. From these duties and obligations, again, the tendency now was for the peasant, by purchase or refusal, to free himself.

Side by side with this very gradual exaltation of the humble and meek, there begin to occur, as the era of the Crusades approaches, numerous instances of the voluntary abasement of the great. Old seigneurs, in strange paroxysms of religious enthusiasm, giving up their old way of life, left lance and sword to younger hands and themselves put on the armour of God. The example of these soldiers of the Lord, having become pauvre et peuple for the kingdom of heaven’s sake, living as mere monks in the Monastery of S. Père, went some way towards inspiring pity and consideration for the truly poor and the naturally low-born.

Generally, also, throughout this period there is a tendency to substitute for arbitrary exactions and violence arrangements settled by charter and definite duties and rights. But it is only a tendency. The amelioration of life was only very gradual. Neither life nor property in the eleventh and twelfth century were, as a rule, what we should call secure. Take for an instance the behaviour of the sons of one Échambaud when they had a difference over the possession of some land with the Abbot of S. Père. They refused to submit their case either to the jurisdiction of the Church courts or of Hélisende, the lady of the land. For they preferred to have recourse to the intervention of a powerful friend named John, living at Étampes, who was a total stranger to the matter in dispute. Relying upon his protection, these sons of Échambaud proceeded to plunder the property of the abbey and to burn the houses of the tenants. They were only induced to cease from their ways and to follow the peaceable paths of justice when the monks presented themselves at Étampes and threatened to excommunicate the town.

Crimes were paid for in cash. There was indeed a regular tariff for injuries done in the Middle Ages. The material damage once made good, the moral damage was left out of account. We learn from the Cartulaire the price of a monk of S. Père, for it is there recorded that Richard de Réviers, having slain one of these, Giraud by name, bought the pardon (pax) of the monks by making over to them four acres of land and an annual tribute of four quartants of corn. A century later (1239) we find the monks releasing from prison a man, who had slain a clerk, on receipt of a promise to pay thirty sous tournois yearly, in addition to certain other minor considerations.

Private wars arising from personal quarrels and ambitions, or damages of the sort described, were very frequent. The intervention of the Crown was rare. We have an instance of the exercise of the royal prerogative, however, when Louis le Gros stepped in and destroyed, after three years’ war, the fortress of the Seigneurs du Puiset, who had long been a thorn in the side of Chartres, continually committing brigandage on the Church lands and caring nothing for ecclesiastical pains and penalties. The King abolished the oppressive institutions of these lords, and re-established in their ancient liberty the possessions of Notre-Dame and the Monastery of S. Père.

In the thirteenth century the power of the King grew stronger, and asserted itself over the monastic property. The monks of S. Père none the less retained the right of jurisdiction in their own lands. Thus when Geoffroi, Seigneur d’Illiers, had arrested a murderer in an inn on their property and had hung the man (1229), he was afterwards constrained to admit that he had exceeded his rights. All jurisdiction, he acknowledged, appertained to the abbot and monks; he gave them satisfaction, and paid them a fine.

Whilst they upheld their rights against the encroachments of Grands Seigneurs in this fashion, the monks were no less frequently involved in similar disputes with the Communes. Such disputes were often carried for settlement to the court of the King. Occasionally we find the courts ordering a point in dispute to be decided by judicial combat. These combats seldom actually took place. The proposal of them seems to have stimulated both parties to come to some arrangement, or to have frightened one of them perhaps into withdrawal. The absurd and cruel practice of trial by single combat had been borrowed from the warlike tribes of Germany, who could not believe that a brave man deserved to suffer or that a coward deserved to live. The old, the feeble and infirm, therefore, in civil and criminal proceedings, were exposed to mortal challenge from the antagonist who was destitute of legal proofs, and thus condemned to renounce their fairest claims and possessions, to sustain the danger of an unequal conflict, or to trust the doubtful aid of a mercenary champion. Two instances of such challenges are recorded by the monk Paul, and are full of human interest.

The Lord Payen de Rémalard brought an action (1090) against the Abbot of S. Père with regard to some land in the possession of the monastery. The two parties appeared in the Bishop’s Court. S. Ives was the Bishop of Chartres, and he appeared among the witnesses for the monks. Geoffrey, Count of Perche and many others were present on behalf of Rémalard. The advocates on either side had begun to discuss and expound the case, when suddenly a servant of S. Père, Laurent by name, burst into the middle of the assembly and cried aloud that he had witnessed the gift of the property in question by the Lady Ermengarde to the monks. Rémalard himself, he further asserted, was present at the time and had made no objection then. Rémalard denied the story; the servant affirmed it again and again. Neither would give way. It was a question of word against word, and who was to decide which was the better? At last, at the suggestion of the monks, and with the assent of Rémalard, Laurent boldly named diem belli et locum—the day and place of combat. But on the day, and at the place named, Rémalard failed to put in an appearance—suam presentiam minime exhibuit, and the land passed peaceably into the undisputed possession of the monastery.

On another occasion, some twenty years later, the men of God proved themselves too sturdy for their opponents. Again it was the question about the donation of some property. Again one of the witnesses for the monastery, Walter of Treleveisin, offered to make good in a duel his testimony that he had been present on the occasion of the gift. This time once more the offer was accepted, and the opposite party, thinking to succeed by means of many subterfuges which they had prepared, at first put on a bold face. But when there was no sign of wavering on the part of the monks, the adversary’s heart failed him; we are told his conscience smote him. He acknowledged the wrong he had done, and begged pardon of the abbot, promising, in the presence of the whole Chapter, that in future he would champion the cause of the monastery, both by word and deed, in court and in battle.

Occasionally, when temporal power failed to secure them justice, Divine aid helped the monks to maintain their rights. Wiard, son of Drogon de Conflans, found this to his cost when he had wrongfully exacted a horse from the Monastery of S. Père. Each time that he mounted the beast he was attacked by a sudden malady. So much so that, after making four unsuccessful attempts, he gave in and restored the horse to the monks, as is recorded by the monk Paul in the year 1098.

The same writer relates an incident of the same year, which throws a vivid light upon the social conditions of the days of chivalry. War was the profession of your true chevalier and brigandage his pastime. The excesses of a life spent in these occupations were to be repeated and at the same time expiated by the Crusader. The preliminary expenses of equipment for the Holy War were only to be met by selling some portion of his property to the Church. Many transactions of this sort are recorded in the telltale Chartularies of Notre-Dame and S. Père. The incident to which I refer will serve as an example of this:—

Nivelon, son of Faucher, Lord of Fréteval, confesses that, as often as he was carried away by chivalrous ardour (of a sort sufficiently inconvenient to his neighbours), it was his custom to fall upon the village of Emprainville with a troop of his followers and to ‘commandeer’ all the provisions to be found there belonging to the men of the Abbey of S. Père. But when, in after years, he determined to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he agreed, in order to obtain pardon for his trespasses and money for his journey, in consideration, that is, of thirteen silver pounds from the monks, to forego this vexatious habit of his.

And he adds that if any of his descendants dispute the validity of this concession, he hopes he may ‘be struck down by the thunderbolt that awaiteth on perjurers, and that he may be condemned with Dathan and Abiram to hell fire, and there to suffer everlasting torture.’ There is a fine ecclesiastical ring about the legal documents of those days, it will be noticed. Imprecations on breakers of contracts are indeed common enough in mediæval diplomatics. The monk Paul supplies us with an instance in which the guilty man is consigned ‘to the everlasting fires of hell along with Nero, who caused the Apostle S. Peter to perish on the cross, and S. Paul the Apostle to perish by the sword.’ In another case the hope is expressed that the transgressor may incur, amongst other inconveniences, the penalty of eternal damnation, the loss of his eyesight, and the infliction of the mal royal.

Nor was it a marauding knight only or an aggressive seigneur who was likely to interrupt the even tenor of a man’s way in those times. There were not infrequently bishops in his path also—bishops of the feudal, fighting, robbing sort, whose style of blessing was a blow with a sword.

Notable among these persecuting Bishops of Chartres is Robert of Tours, Cardinal and Legate (1065), who excommunicated a whole parcel of monks because they refused to accept the abbot he wished to force upon them. Then, too, there was Arrald, deceitful and fair of speech, against whom the chronicler is mightily wroth. But the bishop must at least have had a sense of humour. For his dictum was that gold and silver and the precious ornaments of the Church had no place in a monastery; they were only provocative of pride and the occasion of wantonness in the monks. Therefore he would take such things away, to save them from temptation. He remarked, too, that it was a wicked thing for monks to eat fish or the fat of beasts; they ought to eat simple herbs only, and he advised them to strive to be xerophagi, or eaters of dry, plain food. And to help them, no doubt, he confiscated their fish ponds, for he had a nice taste in good fish himself, and a liking for foreign dishes, ‘always indulging,’ adds our monk savagely, ‘his own natural tendency to gormandise’ (ventri suo castrimargiam semper habens vernaculam)![45] But it is the monks themselves who have left us an imperishable tradition of gormandising; even on fast days they would put a fowl in the pot, and salve their consciences with the argument that as birds and fishes had been created on the same day, they might be of the same species; and, as to drink, they were often under the patronage of S. Martin, in cloisters or at the tavern, quite theologically drunk. As early as 847 the councils of the Church were busy with the scandals of monks in inns. And cleanliness of the body they considered to be a culpable vanity, a pollution of the soul.

But, whether Arrald deserved the censure of the monk Paul or not, that kind of bishop was not uncommon in this century. Geoffrey the First, seven years later, was excommunicated for simony and other vices. His simony he had defended with shameless cynicism.

When the King reproached him with having given to others the benefices which he had asked of him, ‘I have not given them at all, sire,’ he replied; ‘I have sold them very profitably.’

But his treason, his adulteries and his perjuries became at last unbearable. Pope Gregory VII. determined to make an example of him. He was compelled to resign his bishopric, and in his stead was appointed one of the greatest of Chartrain Bishops—S. Ives.

The Feast of S. Ives is kept at Chartres on the 20th of May, when his relics, which are kept in the Treasury of the Cathedral, are shown. His name has been given to the passage in the cloister opposite the great north porch, and it lives in the mouth of the peasants as S. Yvre, protector of sheep; his stone image stands near that of Fulbert on the clôture of the choir, but his spirit lives most surely in those square grey towers which he began to build, and which, so massive and yet so spiritual, point with their spires heavenwards, like hands that have been clasped and raised in prayer.