Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
CLIFF CASTLES AND CAVE DWELLINGS OF EUROPE
BY
S. BARING-GOULD, M.A.
[Illustration: CLIFF-CASTLE, BRENGUES. In this castle the Bishop of Cahors took refuge from the English, to whom he refused to submit, and in it he died in 1367. It was however captured by the English in 1377.]
"The house i' the rock
. . . no life to ours."
CYMBELINE III. 3.
PREFACE
When in 1850 appeared the Report of the Secretary of War for the United States, containing Mr. J. H. Simpson's account of the Cliff Dwellings in Colorado, great surprise was awakened in America, and since then these remains have been investigated by many explorers, of whom I need only name Holmes' "Report of the Ancient Ruins in South-West Colorado during the Summers of 1875 and 1876," and Jackson's "Ruins of South- West Colorado in 1875 and 1877." Powell, Newberry, &c., have also described them. A summary is in "Prehistoric America," by the Marquis de Nadaillac, 1885, and the latest contribution to the subject are articles in Scribner's Magazine by E. S. Curtis, 1906 and 1909.
The Pueblos Indians dwell for the most part at a short distance from the Rio Grande; the Zuñi, however, one of their best known tribes, are settled far from that river, near the sources of the Gila. In the Pueblos country are tremendous cañons of red sandstone, and in their sides are the habitations of human beings perched on every ledge in inaccessible positions. Major Powell, United States Geologist, expressed his amazement at seeing nothing for whole days but perpendicular cliffs everywhere riddled with human dwellings resembling the cells of a honeycomb. The apparently inaccessible heights were scaled by means of long poles with lateral teeth disposed like the rungs of a ladder, and inserted at intervals in notches let into the face of the perpendicular rock. The most curious of these dwellings, compared to which the most Alpine chalet is of easy access, have ceased to be occupied, but the Maqui, in North-West Arizona, still inhabit villages of stone built on sandstone tables, standing isolated in the midst of a sandy ocean almost destitute of vegetation.
The cause of the abandonment of the cliff dwellings has been the diminished rainfall, that rendering the land barren has sent its population elsewhere. The rivers, the very streams, are dried up, and only parched water-courses show where they once flowed.
"The early inhabitants of the region under notice were wonderfully skilful in turning the result of the natural weathering of the rocks to account. To construct a cave-dwelling, the entrance to the cave or the front of the open gallery was walled up with adobes, leaving only a small opening serving for both door and window. The cliff houses take the form and dimensions of the platform or ledge from which they rise. The masonry is well laid, and it is wonderful with what skill the walls are joined to the cliff, and with what care the aspect of the neighbouring rocks has been imitated in the external architecture." [Footnote: Nadaillac, "Prehistoric America," Lond. 1885, p. 205.]
In Asia also these rock-dwellings abound. The limestone cliffs of Palestine are riddled with them. They are found also in Armenia and in Afghanistan. At Bamian, in the latter, "the rocks are perforated in every direction. A whole people could put up in the 'Twelve Thousand Galleries' which occupy the slopes of the valley for a distance of eight miles. Isolated bluffs are pierced with so many chambers that they look like honeycombs." [Footnote: Reclus, "Asia," iii. p. 245.]
That Troglodytes have inhabited rocks in Africa has been known since the time of Pliny.
But it has hardly been realised to what an extent similar cliff dwellings have existed and do still exist in Europe.
In 1894, in my book, "The Deserts of Southern France," I drew attention to rock habitations in Dordogne and Lot, but I had to crush all my information on this subject into a single chapter. The subject, however, is too interesting and too greatly ramified to be thus compressed. It is one, moreover, that throws sidelights on manners and modes of life in the past that cannot fail to be of interest. The description given above of cliff dwellings in Oregon might be employed, without changing a word, for those in Europe.
To the best of my knowledge, the theme of European Troglodytes has remained hitherto undealt with, though occasional mention has been made of those on the Loire. It has been taken for granted that cave-dwellers belonged to a remote past in civilised Europe; but they are only now being expelled in Nottinghamshire and Shropshire, by the interference of sanitary officers.
Elsewhere, the race is by no means extinct. In France more people live underground than most suppose. And they show no inclination to leave their dwellings. Just one month ago from the date of writing this page, I sketched the new front that a man had erected to his paternal cave at Villiers in Loir et Cher. The habitation was wholly subterranean, but then it consisted of one room alone. The freshly completed face was cut in freestone, with door and window, and above were sculptured the aces of hearts, spades, and diamonds, an anchor, a cogwheel and a fish. Separated from this mansion was a second, divided from it by a buttress of untrimmed rock, and this other also was newly fronted, occupied by a neat and pleasant-spoken woman who was vastly proud of her cavern residence. "Mais c'est tout ce qu'on peut désirer. Enfin on s'y trouve très bien."
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PREHISTORIC CAVE-DWELLERS
Formation of chalk—Of dolomitic limestone—Where did the first men live—Their Eden in the chalk lands—Migration elsewhere—Pit dwellings—Civilisation stationary—Troglodytes—Antiquity of man—Les Eyzies—Hôtel du Paradis—The first colonists of the Vézère Valley— Their artistic accomplishments—Painting and sculpture—Rock dwellings in Champagne—Of a later period—Civilisation does not progress uniformly—The earth—Book of the Revelation of the past—La Laugerie Basse—Blandas—Conduché—Grotte de Han—The race of Troglodytes not extinct
CHAPTER II
MODERN TROGLODYTES
Troglodytes of the Etang de Berre—The underground town of Og, King of
Bashan—Trôo—Sanitation—Ancient mode of disposing of refuse—The
talking well—Les Roches—Chateau de Bandan—Chapel of S. Gervais—La
Grotte des Vierges—Rochambeau—Le Roi des Halles—La Roche Corbon—
Human refuse at Ezy—Saumur—Are there still pagans among them?—
Bourré—Courtineau—The basket-makers of Villaines—Grioteaux—Sauliac
—Cuzorn—Brantôme—La Roche Beaucourt—The Swabian Alb—Sibyllen loch—
Vrena Beutlers Höhle—Schillingsloch—Schlössberg Höhle—Rock village
in Sicily—In the Crimea—In Egypt—In volcanic breccia—Balmes de
Montbrun—Grottoes de Boissière—Grottoes de Jonas—The rock Ceyssac—
The sandstone cave-dwellings of Corrèze—Their internal arrangement—
Cluseaux—Cave-dwellings in England—In Nottinghamshire—In
Staffordshire—In Cornwall—In Scotland—The savage in man—Reversion
to savagery—The Gubbins—A stone-cutter—Daniel Gumb—A gentleman of
Sens—Toller of Clun Downs
CHAPTER III
SOUTERRAINS
Prussian invasion of Bohemia—Adersbach and Wickelsdorf labyrinths— Refuges of the Israelites—Gauls suffocated in caves by Cæsar— Armenians by Corbulo—Story of Julius Sabinus—Saracen invasion—The devastation of Aquitaine by Pepin—Rock refuges in Quercy—The Northmen—Persecution of the Albigenses—The cave of Lombrive—The English domination of Guyenne—Two kinds of refuges—Saint Macaire— Alban—Refuge of Château Robin—Exploration—Methods of defence— Souterrain of Fayrolle—Of Saint Gauderic—Of Fauroux—Of Olmie— Aubeterre—Refuges under castles—Enormous number of souterrains in France—Victor Hugo's account of those in Brittany—Refuges resorted to in the time of the European War—Those in Picardy—Gapennes—Some comparatively modern—Condition of the peasantry during the Hundred Years' War—Tyranny of the nobles—Their barbarities—Refuges in Ireland—In England—The Dene Holes—at Chislehurst—At Tilbury—Their origin—Fogous in Cornwall—Refuges in Haddingtonshire—In Egg— Slaughter of the Macdonalds—Refuges in the Isle of Rathlin—Massacre by John Norris—Refuges in Crete—Christians suffocated in one by the Turks—Lamorciere in Algeria. . . . . .
CHAPTER IV
CLIFF REFUGES
Distinction between souterrain and cliff refuges—How these latter were reached—Gazelles—Peuch Saint Sour—Story of S. Sour—The Roc d'Aucor —Exploration—How formerly reached—Boundoulaou—Riou Ferrand—Cliff refuge near Brengues—Les Mées—Fadarelles—Puy Labrousse—Soulier-de- Chasteaux—Refuges in Auvergne—Meschers—In Ariège—The Albigenses— Caves in Derbyshire—Reynard's cave—Cotton's cave—John Cann's cave— Elford's cave on Sheep's Tor…. 103-116
CHAPTER V
CLIFF CASTLES. THE ROUTIERS
The seigneural castle—Protection sought against the foes without and against the peasant in revolt—Instance of the Château Les Eyzies— Independence of the petty nobles—Condition of the country in France— In Germany—Weakness of the Emperor—The Raubritter—Italy—The nobles brought into the towns—Their towers—Division of the subject— Difference between the English manor-house and the foreign feudal castle—The English in France—The Hundred Years' War—Hopeless condition of the people—The Free Companies—How recruited—Crusade against the Albigenses—Barons no better than Routiers—Death of chivalry—Routiers were rarely Englishmen—Had no scruples as to whom they served—Disregarded treaties—The captains were Gascons or French —The nobles of the south on the English side—Nests in the rock— Depopulation and devastation—Insolence of the Companies—Bigaroque— Roc de Tayac—Corn—Roquefort—Brengues—The Bishop of Cahors dies there—Château du Diable at Cabrerets—Défilé des Anglais—Peyrousse— Les Roches du Tailleur—Trosky—The scolding women—The English not forgotten in Guyenne . . . . . 117-141
CHAPTER VI
CLIFF CASTLES—Continued
The difference between feudal castles and those of the Routiers— Illustration of the character of the nobles—Two Counts of Perigord— The nobles in Auvergne—"Les grands Jours"—La Roche Saint Christophe— Surprised and destroyed—Reoccupied by the Huguenots—Final destruction—La Roche Gageac—Its history—Jean Tarde—Ravages of the Huguenots—Gluges—La Roche Lambert—Habichstein—Bürgstein—The spy— Kronmetz—Covolo—Puxerloch—The shadowless man—Nottingham Castle— Arrest of Mortimer—Outmost castles—La Grotte de Jioux—Clovis crosses the Vienne—Le Gué du Loir—Antoine de Bourbon—Calvin at Saint Saturnin—His cave—La Roche Corail—Cave in which the "Institute of the Christian Religion" was written—Effects produced by this work —Preparation of men's minds for reform—Havoc wrought to art by the Calvinists—La Rochebrune—A cave-colander—Necessity for outlook stations—Frontier fortifications
CHAPTER VII
SUBTERRANEAN CHURCHES
Basilicas and catacumbal churches—Preference of the people for the latter—The cult of martyrs encouraged this—Crypts—Elevation of relics—Church of SS. John and Paul on the Coelian Hill—Temples were originally sepulchres—Basilican churches converted into mausoleums— Dedications—Altars of wood changed for altars of stone—At first the bodies of martyrs were not dismembered—But dismemberment was made necessary by the transformation—The Martyrium of Poitiers—S. Emilion —Carvings—Crypt—Aubeterre—A Huguenot stronghold—Orders issued by Jeanne d'Albret—Her extended powers—The monolithic church—Menaced by ruin—Rocamadour—Lirac—Mimet—Caudon—Natural caves used as churches—Gurat—Lanmeur—Story of S. Melor—Dolmen Chapel of the Seven Sleepers—Another at Cangas-de-Ones—Confolens—Subterranean churches in Egypt—In Crete—The sacred caves in Palestine—Revival of cave sanctuaries by the Crusaders—Springs of water in crypts
CHAPTER VIII
ROCK HERMITAGES
Tibetian recluses—Christian hermits in Syria and Egypt—The Essenes
and Therapeutæ—Description by Philo of the latter—Buddhist and
Manichæean influence—Difference in motive—Likeness superficial—
Possible necessity for the adoption of asceticism—Instance of
extravagant asceticism in Syria—Extravagances in Ireland—In England
—Early European solitaries—The Beatus Höhle—Grotto of S. Cybard—
Decadence—Hermits in Languedoc—In Germany—A grocer hermit—
Hermitage at S. Maurice—The Wild Kirchlein—The cave of S. Verena at
Soleure—That of Magdalen at Freiburg—Oberstein—Hermitage at Brive—
La Sainte Beaume—Sougé—Villiers—Montserrat—Subiaco—La Vernia—
Warkworth—Knaresborough—Robin Hood's stable—Roche—Anchor Church—
Royston cave—Its carvings—Kindly remembrance of the hermit—The
hermit a loss
CHAPTER IX
ROCK MONASTERIES
The hermits self-excommunicate—Liability to create a schism—S. Paul— S. Mary of Egypt—S. Anthony—Enormous number of solitaries compels organisation into monasteries—Causes inducing flight to the desert—S. Athanasius at Trèves—Writes the "Life of S. Anthony"—Impulse given to flight from the world in the West—S. Martin—Desires to imitate the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert—At Poitiers—Founds Ligugé—Rock cells—Later history and ruin—Martin becomes Bishop of Tours—Founds Marmoutier—History and ruin—Martin and the masqueraders—Present state—Baptistry—The Seven Sleepers—Brice elected bishop—Obliged to fly the see—Return and penance—Cave of S. Leobard—Abbey of Brantôme —Underground church—Other caves—"Papists' Holes" at Nottingham—Rock monastery of Meteora—Der el Adra—Inkermann
CHAPTER X
CAVE ORACLES
Polignac—Greek oracles—Charonion—Cave of the Nymphs—Exhalations— Delos—Care of Trophonios—Experiences of Pausanius—Cave at Acharaca —Sibylline oracles—Destruction—Forged oracles—Oracles among the Jews—Story of Hallbjörn—Sounds issuing from caves—Echo—Æolian cave of Terni—Purgatory of S. Patrick—The Knight Owain—Visit by Sir William Lisle—By a monk of Eymstadt—Prohibited by Alexander VI.— Prohibition rescinded by Pius III.—Destroyed in 1622—Revival of pilgrimages—Description by Gough—Friar Conrad—Lazarus Aigner— Roderic, King of the Goths—Sortes Sacræ—Condemned by the Church— Nevertheless practised—Instances from Gregory of Tours—Incubation in pagan shrines—The cave of Cybele—Temples of Isis and Esculapius— Churches founded by Constantino dedicated to S. Michael—Incubation practiced in them—Instances—Churches of S. Cosmas and Damian— Practice at Caerleon—Superstition hard to kill—Grotto of Lourdes
CHAPTER XI
ROBBERS' DENS
Humphrey Kynaston—His adventurous life—Cave at Ness Cliff—Chinamen—
David at Adullam—Bandit caves in Palestine—Lombrive—Surtshellir—
Feruiden's cave—Gargas—La Crouzafce—The haunts of Grettir—
Dunterton—Precautions against burglary—Story of K. F. Masch—His
capture—The Leichtweishohle—Adersbach retreats—Babinsky—His capture
CHAPTER XII
BOOK SEPULCHRES
Difference between the tombs of the Israelites and those of the Egyptians—The reason for this—Jewish catacombs at Rome—Christian catacombs—Puticoli—Numerous catacombs—Those of Syracuse—Those of Paris—Crypts became vaults for kings and nobles—Desecration—That of Louis XI.—The instinct of immortality—Cave burials—In the Petit Morin—Scandinavian burials—Death regarded as suspended animation— Hervor at the cairn of Angantyr—The cairn-breaking of Gest—The barrow of Gunnar—Sigrun visits her husband in his cairn—The story of Asmund and Asvid—The same ideas in Christian times—Mamertinus and Corcodemus—"De Miraculis Mortuorum"—Ancestor worship—Persistence of usages derived from a remote antiquity—Neglect of thought of the dead —Double nature of man—The spiritual world—A walking postman— Conclusion
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
CLIFF CASTLE, BRENGUES
CAVE DWELLERS AT DUCLAIR
SAULIAC (Photo by GIBMA)
GRIOTEAUX
LA ROCHEBRUNE
SKETCH PLAN OF ROCK STABLE, COMMARQUES
PLAN OF ROCK HOLES IN NOTTINGHAM PARK
DRAKELOW
AUBETERRE
PLAN OF THE REFUGE OF CHÂTEAU ROBIN
THE CHÂTEAU OF FAYROLLES
CLUSEAU DE FAUROUX
LA ROCHE GAGEAC
LE PEUCH S. SOUR
CAVES OF MESCHERS
CAVE REFUGE AT SOULIER DE CHASTEAU
LE DÉFILÉ DES ANGLAIS, LOT (Photo by BAUDEL, S. CÉRÉ)
CHÂTEAU DES ANGLAIS, BRENGUES
CHÂTEAU DU DIABLE, CABRERETS (EXTERIOR)
CHÂTEAU DU DIABLE, CABRERETS (INTERIOR) (Photo by BAUDEL, S.
CÉRÉ)
CORN, LOT (Photo by BAUDEL, S. CÉRÉ)
CHÂTEAU DES ANGLAIS, AUTOIRE (Photo by BAUDEL, S. CÉRÉ)
COVOLO
LA ROCHE DU TAILLEUR
KRONMETZ
THE PUXERLOCH, STYRIA
HABICHSTEIN, BOHEMIA
ROCK MONASTERY, NOTTINGHAM PARK
ROCK MONASTERY, NOTTINGHAM PARK
LA ROCHE CORAIL
LA ROCHE CORAIL THE FIRST HALL
GUÉ DE LOIR
LES ROCHES
PLAN OF MARTYRIUM
MONOLITHIC CHURCH OF S. EMILION
AUBETERRE, CHARENTE, INTERIOR OP MONOLITHIC CHURCH (Photo by
DELAGE)
ROCAMADOUR (Photo by BAUDEL, S. CÉRÉ)
AUBETERRE, CHARENTE (Photo by DELAGE)
SUBTERRANEAN CHURCH, AUBETERRE (_Photo by_DELAGE)
DOLMEN CHAPEL OF THE SEVEN SLEEPERS
PLAN OF DOLMEN CHAPEL NEAR PLOUARET
PLAN OF CHAPEL OF S. AMADOU
SCULPTURE IN ROYSTON CAVE (Photo by R.H. CLARK, ROYSTON)
SCULPTURE IN ROYSTON CAVE (Photo by R.H. CLARK, ROYSTON)
ROYSTON CAVE (Photo by R. H. CLARK, ROYSTON)
CHATEAU DE RIGNAC
LE TROU BOUROU
ROCK BAPTISTERY OF ST. MARTIN
TRIUMPH OF CHRIST OVER DEATH (Photo by LACROIX)
CAVES OF LIGUGÉ
NESS CLIFF
KYNASTON'S CAVE
CLIFF CASTLES AND CAVE DWELLINGS OF EUROPE
CHAPTER I
PREHISTORIC CAVE-DWELLERS
In a vastly remote past, and for a vastly extended period, the mighty deep rolled over the surface of a world inform and void, depositing a sediment of its used up living tenants, the microscopic cases of foraminiferæ, sponges, sea-urchins, husks, and the cast limbs of crustaceans. The descending shells of the diatoms like a subaqueous snow gradually buried the larger dejections. This went on till the sediment had attained a thickness of over one thousand feet. Then the earth beneath, heaved and tossed in sleep, cast off its white featherbed, projected it on high to become the chalk formation that occupies so distinct and extended a position in the geological structure of the globe. The chalk may be traced from the North of Ireland to the Crimea, a distance of about 11,140 geographical miles, and, in an opposite direction, from the South of Sweden to Bordeaux, a distance of 840 geographical miles.
It extends as a broad belt across France, like the sash of a Republican mayor. You may travel from Calais to Vendôme, to Tours, Poitiers, Angoulême, to the Gironde, and you are on chalk the whole way. It stretches through Central Europe, and is seen in North Africa. From the Crimea it reaches into Syria, and may be traced as far as the shores of the sea of Aral in Central Asia.
The chalk is not throughout alike in texture; hard beds alternate with others that are soft—beds with flints like plum-cake, and beds without, like white Spanish bread.
We are accustomed in England to chalk in rolling downs, except where bitten into by the sea, but elsewhere it is riven, and presents cliffs, and these cliffs are not at all like that of Shakespeare at Dover, but overhang, where hard beds alternate with others that are friable. These latter are corroded by the weather, and leave the more compact projecting like the roofs of penthouses. They are furrowed horizontally, licked smooth by the wind and rain. Not only so, but the chalk cliffs are riddled with caves, that are ancient water-courses. The rain falling on the surface is drunk by the thirsty soil, and it sinks till, finding where the chalk is tender, it forms a channel and flows as a subterranean rill, spouts forth on the face of the crags, till sinking still lower, it finds an exit at the bottom of the cliff, when it leaves its ancient conduit high and dry.
But before the chalk was tossed aloft there had been an earlier upheaval from the depths of the ocean, that of the Jurassic limestone. This was built up by coral insects working indefatigably through long ages, piling up their structures, as the sea-bottom slowly sank, straining ever higher, till at length their building was crushed together and projected on high, to form elevated plateaux, as the Causses of Quercy, and Alpine ranges, as the Dolomites of Brixen. But in the uplifting of this deposit, as it was inelastic, the strain split it in every direction, and down the rifts thus formed danced the torrents from higher granitic and schistous ranges, forming the gorges of the Tarn, the Ardêche, the Herault, the Gaves, and the Timée, in France.
It has been a puzzle to decide which appeared first, the egg out of which the fowl was hatched, or the hen which laid the egg; and it is an equal puzzle to the anthropologist to say whether man was first brought into existence as a babe or in maturity. In both cases he would be helpless. The babe would need its mother, and the man be paralysed into incapacity through lack of experience. But without stopping to debate this question, we may conclude that naked, shivering and homeless humanity would have to be pupil to the beasts to learn where to shelter his head. Where did man first appear? Where was the Garden of Eden? Indisputably on the chalk. There he found all his first demands supplied. The walls of cretaceous rock furnished him with shelter under its ledges of overhanging beds, flints out of which to fashion his tools, and nodules of pyrites wherewith to kindle a fire. Providence through aeons had built up the chalk to be man's first home.
Incontestably, the great centres of population in the primeval ages were the chalklands, and next to them those of limestone. The chalk first, for it furnished man with flints, and the limestone next when he had learned to barter.
He could have lived nowhere else, till, after the lapse of ages, he had developed invention and adaptability. Besant and Rice, in "Ready-money Mortiboy," speak of Divine Discontent as the motive power impelling man to progress. Not till the chalk and the limestone shelters were stocked, and could hold no more, would men be driven to invent for themselves other dwellings. The first men being sent into the world without a natural coat of fur or feathers, would settle into caves or under overhanging roofs of rock, and with flint picked out of it, chipped and pointed, secure the flesh of the beast for food and its hide for clothing. Having accomplished this, man would sit down complacently for long ages. Indeed, there are certain branches of the human family that have progressed no further and display no ambition to advance.
Only when the districts of chalk and limestone were overstocked would the overflow be constrained to look elsewhere for shelter. Then some daring innovators, driven from the favoured land, would construct habitations by grubbing into the soil, and covering them with a roof of turf. The ancient Germans, according to Tacitus, lived in underground cabins, heaped over with dung to keep them warm during the long winter. With the invention of the earthenware stove, the German Bauer has been enabled to rise above the surface; but he cherishes the manure round his house, so to speak, about his feet, as affectionately as when it warmed his head.
For a long time it was supposed that our British ancestors lived in pit dwellings, and whole clusters of them were recorded and mapped on the Yorkshire Wolds, and a British metropolis of them, Caer Penselcoit, was reported in Somersetshire. Habitations sunk deep in the rock, with only a roof above ground. But the spade has cracked these archæological theories like filberts, and has proved that the pits in the wolds were sunk after iron ore, or those in Somerset were burrowings for the extraction of chert. [Footnote: Atkinson, "Forty Years in a Moorland Parish." Lond. 1891, p. 161, et seq. Some pits are, however, not so dubious. At Hurstbourne, in Hants, pit habitations have been explored; others, in Kent and Oxfordshire, undoubtedly once dwelt in. In one of the Kentish pits 900 flakes and cores of flint were found. The Chysoyster huts in Cornwall and the "Picts houses" in Scotland were built up of stones, underground.] But the original paleolithic man did not get beyond the cavern or the rock-shelter. This latter was a retreat beneath an overhanging stratum of hard rock, screened against the weather by a curtain of skins. And why should he wish to change so long as these were available? We, from our advanced position, sitting in padded arm-chairs, before a coal fire, can see that there was room for improvement; but he could not. The rock-dwelling was commodious, dry, warm in winter and cool in summer, and it cost him no trouble to fashion it, or keep it in repair. He had not the prophetic eye to look forward to the arm-chair and the coal fire. Indeed, at all periods, down to the present day, those who desire to lead the simple life, and those who have been reared in these nature-formed dwelling-places, feel no ambition to occupy stone-built houses. In North Devon the cottages are reared of cob, kneaded clay, and thatched. A squire on his estate pulled down those he possessed and built in their place brick houses with slated roofs. The cottagers bitterly resented the change, their old mud-hovels were so much warmer. And in like manner the primeval man would not exchange his abris for a structural dwelling unless constrained so to do.
The ancients knew that the first homes of mankind were grottoes. They wrote of Troglodytes in Africa and of cave-dwellers in Liguria. In Arabia Petræa, a highly civilized people converted their simple rock- dwellings into sumptuous palaces.
I might fill pages with quotations to the purpose from the classic authors, but the reader would skip them all. It is not my intention to give a detailed account of the prehistoric cave-dwellers. They have been written about repeatedly. In 1882, Dr. Buckland published the results of his exploration of the Kirkdale Cave in Yorkshire in Reliquiæ Diluvianæ, and sought to establish that the remains there found pertained to the men who were swept away by Noah's flood. The publication of Sir Charles Lyall's "The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man," in 1863, was a shock to all such as clung to the traditional view that these deposits were due to a cosmic deluge, and that man was created 4004 B.C.
At first the announcements proving the antiquity of man were received with orthodox incredulity, because, although the strata, in which the remains were found, are the most modern of all earth's formations, still the testimony so completely contravened traditional beliefs, that the most conclusive evidence was required for its proof. Such evidence has been found, and is so strong, and so cumulative in character as to be now generally accepted as conclusive.
Evidence substantiating the thesis of Lyall had been accumulating, and the researches of Lartet and Christy in the Vézère valley, published in 1865-75, as Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ, conclusively proved that man in Perigord had been a naked savage, contemporary with the mammoth, the reindeer and the cave-bear, that he had not learned to domesticate animals, to sow fields, to make pots, and that he was entirely ignorant of the use of the metals.
Since then, in the valley of the Vézère, Les Eyzies in the Department of Dordogne, has become a classic spot. I have already described it in another work, [Footnote: "The Deserts of Southern France." Lond., Methuen, 1894.] but I must here say a few more words concerning it. On reaching the valley of the Vézère by the train from Perigueux, one is swung down from the plateau into a trough between steep scarps of chalk-rock that rise from 150 to 300 feet above the placid river. These scarps have been ploughed by the weather in long horizontal furrows, so that they lean over as though desirous of contemplating their dirty faces in the limpid water. Out of their clefts spring evergreen oaks, juniper, box and sloe-bushes. Moss and lichen stain the white walls that are streaked by black tricklings from above, and are accordingly not beautiful—their faces are like that of a pale, dirty, and weeping child with a cold in its head, who does not use a pocket-handkerchief. Jackdaws haunt the upper ledges and smaller caves that gape on all sides chattering like boys escaped from school, and anon a raven starts forth and hoarsely calls for silence. At the foot of the stooping crags, bowing to each other across the stream, lie masses that have broken from above, and atop and behind these is to be seen a string of cottages built into the rock, taking advantage of the overarching stratum of hard chalk; and cutting into it are russet, tiled roofs, where the cottagers have sought to expand beyond the natural shelter: they are in an intermediate position. Just as I have seen a caddis-worm emancipating itself from its cage, half in as a worm, half out as a fly.
Nature would seem to have specially favoured this little nook of France, which must have been the Eden of primeval man on Gallic soil. There he found ready-made habitations, a river abounding in fish, a forest teeming with game; constrained periodically to descend from the waterless plateaux, at such points as favoured a descent, to slake their thirst at the stream, and there was the nude hunter lurking in the scrub or behind a stone, with bow or spear awaiting his prey—his dinner and his jacket.
What beasts did he slay? The wild horse, with huge head, was driven by him over the edge of the precipice, and when it fell with broken limbs or spine, was cut up with flint knives and greedily devoured. The reindeer was also hunted, and the cumbersome mammoth enabled a whole tribe to gorge itself.
The grottoes perforating the cliff, like bubbles in Gruyère cheese, have been occupied consecutively to the present day. Opposite to Les Eyzies, hanging like a net or skein of black thread to the face of the precipice, is a hotel, part gallery, part cave—l'Auberge du Paradis; and a notice in large capitals invites the visitor to a "Course aux Canards."
When I was last there, reaching the tavern by a ladder erected in a grotto, I learned that an American couple on their honeymoon had recently slept in the guest-chamber scooped out of the living rock. The kitchen itself is a cavern, and in it are shelves, staged against the rock, offering Chartreuse, green and yellow, Benedictine, and Crème de Menthe. The proprietor also possesses a gramophone, and its strident notes we may well suppose imitate the tones of the first inhabitants of this den. Of the Roc de Tayac, in and against which this paradisaical hotel is plastered, I shall have more to say in another chapter.
The first men who settled in this favoured valley under shelters open to the blaze of the sun, in a soft and pleasant climate, where the air when not in proximity to men, is scented with mint, marjoram and juniper, where with little trouble a salmon might be harpooned, must have multiplied enormously—for every overhanging rock, every cavern, even every fallen block of stone, has been utilised as a habitation. Where a block has fallen, the prehistoric men scratched the earth away from beneath it, and couched in the trench. The ground by the river when turned up is black with the charcoal from their fires. A very little research will reward the visitor with a pocketful of flint knives and scrapers. And this is what is found not only on the main artery, but on all the lateral veins of water—wherever the cretaceous rocks project and invite to take shelter under them. Since the researches of Lartet and Christy, it has been known as an established fact that these savages were indued with rare artistic skill. Their delineations with a flint point on ivory and bone, of the mammoth, reindeer, and horse, are so masterly that these men stand forth as the spiritual ancestors of Landseer and Rosa Bonheur. And what is also remarkable is that the race which succeeded, that which discovered the use of metal, was devoid of the artistic sense, and their attempts at delineation are like the scribbling of an infant.
Of late years fresh discoveries have been made, revealing the fact that the Paleolithic men were able to paint as well as to engrave. In Les Combarelles and at Font-de-Gaume, far in the depths, where no light reaches, the walls have been found turned into a veritable picture- gallery. In the latter are twenty-four paintings; in the former forty- two.
Doctor Capitan and the Abbé Breuil were the first to discover the paintings in Les Combarelles. In an account read before the Academy of Sciences, they say: "Most frequently, the animals whose contours are indicated by a black outline, have all the surface thus circumscribed, entirely covered with red ochre. In some cases certain parts, such as the head of the urochs, seems to have been painted over with black and red together, so as to produce a brown tint. In other cases the head of the beast is black, and the rest of the body brown. This is veritable fresco painting, and the colour was usually applied after the outline had been graven in the stone. At other times some shading is added by hatching supplied after the outline had been drawn. Finally, the contours are occasionally thrown into prominence by scraping away the surface of the rock around, so as to give to the figures the appearance of being in low relief."
These wall paintings are by no means unique. They have been found as well at Pair-sur-Pair in Gironde, and in the grotto of Altamira at Santillana del Mar, in the north of Spain.
Still more recently an additional revelation as to the artistic skill of primeval man has been made; in a cave hitherto unexplored has been discovered actual sculpture with rounded forms, of extinct beasts.
These discoveries appeared incredible, first, because it was not considered possible that paintings of such a vastly remote antiquity could remain fresh and distinguishable, and secondly, because it was not thought that paintings and sculpture could be executed in the depths of a rayless cavern, and artificial light have left no traces in a deposit of soot on the roof.
But it must be remembered that these subterranean passages have been sealed up from time immemorial, and subjected to no invasion by man or beast, or to any change of air or temperature. And secondly, that the artists obtained light from melted fat in stone bowls on the floor, in which was a wick of pith; and such lamps would hardly discolour ceiling or walls. Of the genuineness of these paintings and sculptures there can be no question, from the fact that some are partly glazed over and some half obliterated by stalagmitic deposits.
Another discovery made in the Mas d'Azil in Arriege, is of painted pebbles and fan-shells that had served as paint-pots. [Footnote: Piette (E.), Les Galets colorrés du Mas d'Azil. Paris, 1896.] The pebbles had been decorated with spots, stripes, zig-zags, crosses, and various rude figures; and these were associated with paleolithic tools. In the chalk of Champagne, where there are no cliffs, whole villages of underground habitations have been discovered, but none of these go back to the earliest age of all; they belong to various epochs; but the first to excavate them was the Neolithic man, he who raised the rude stone monuments elsewhere. He had learned to domesticate the ox and the sheep, had made of the dog the friend of man. His wife span and he delved; he dug the clay, and she formed it with her fingers into vessels, on which to this day her finger-prints may be found.
These caves are hollowed out in a thick bed of cretaceous rock. The habitations are divided into two unequal parts by a wall cut in the living chalk. To penetrate into the innermost portion of the cave, one has to descend by steps cut in the stone, and these steps bear indications of long usage. The entrance is hewn out of a massive screen of rock, left for the purpose, and on each side of the doorway the edges show the rebate which served to receive a wooden door-frame. Two small holes on the right and left were used for fixing bars across to hold the door fast. A good many of these caves are provided with a ventilating shaft, and some skilful contrivances were had recourse to for keeping out water. Inside are shelves, recesses cut in the chalk, for lamps, and to serve as cupboards. But probably these are due to later occupants. The Baron de Baye, who explored these caves, picked up worked flints, showing that their primitive occupants had been men of the prehistoric age, and other caves associated with them that were sepulchral were indisputably of the Neolithic age. [Footnote: De Baye (J.), L'Archéologie préhistorique. Paris, 1888.]
Mankind progresses not smoothly, as by a sliding carpet ascent, but by rugged steps broken by gaps. He halts long on one stage before taking the next. Often he remains stationary, unable to form resolution to step forward; sometimes even has turned round and retrograded.
The stream of civilisation flows on like a river, it is rapid in mid- current, slow at the sides, and has its backwaters. At best, civilisation advances by spirals. The native of New Guinea still employs stone tools; whilst an Englishman can get a nest of matches for twopence, an Indian laboriously kindles a fire with a couple of sticks. The prehistoric hunter of Solutré devoured the horse. In the time of Horace so did the Concanni of Spain. In the reign of Hakon, Athelstan's foster son, horseflesh formed the sacrificial meal of the Norseman. At the present day, as Mr. Lloyd George assures us, the haggard, ill-paid German mechanic breaks his long fast on black bread with rare meals of horseflesh.
At La Laugerie Basse, on the right bank of the Vézère, is a vast accumulation of fallen rocks, encumbering the ground for at least thirty-five feet in height under the overhanging cornice. The fallen matter consists of the disintegration of the projecting lip. Against the cliff, under the shelter of the rock, as already said, are cottages with lean-to roofs, internally with the back and with at least half the ceiling composed of the rock. In one of these Lartet and Christy began to sink a pit, beside the owner's bed, and the work was carried on to conclusion by the late Dr. Massenat. The well was driven down through successive stages of Man; deposits from the sous dropped and trampled into the earth floor by the children of the cottagers till the virgin soil was reached; and there, lying on his side, with his hands to his head for protection, and with a block of fallen rock crushing his thigh, lay the first prehistoric occupant of this shelter.
On the Causse de Larzac is Navacelles, in Gard; you walk over the arid plain with nothing in sight; and all at once are brought to a standstill. You find yourself at the edge of a crater 965 feet deep, the sides in most places precipitous, and the bottom is reached only by a zig-zag path. In the face of one of the cliffs is the grotto of Blandas, that has been occupied since remote ages. A methodical exploration has revealed a spearhead of silex, a bronze axe, bone bracelets, a coin of the Hundred Years' War, and lastly a little pin- cushion of cloth in the shape of a heart, ornamented with metal crosses, the relic of some refugee in the Reign of Terror, hiding to escape the guillotine.
At Conduché, where the Célé slides into the Lot, high up in the yellow and grey limestone precipice is a cave, now accessible only by a ladder. Hither ascended a cantonnier when the new road was made up the valley, and here he found chipped flints of primeval man, a polished celt, a scrap of Samian ware, and in a niche at the side sealed up with stalactite, a tiny earthenware pitcher 2-1/2 inches high, a leaden spindle-whorl, some shells, and a toy sheep-bell. Here a little shepherdess during the stormy times, when the Routiers ravaged the country, had her refuge while she watched her flock of goats, and here made her doll's house.
The stalactite cavern of Han in the Ardennes is visited yearly by crowds. You may see highly coloured illustrations of its interior illumined by Bengal lights in all the Belgian and many of the French railway stations. What is now a peepshow was in past ages a habitation and a home. In it the soil in successive layers has revealed objects belonging to successive periods in the history of mankind. Its floor has been in fact a Book of the Revelation of the Past, whose seals have been opened, and it has disclosed page by page the history of humanity, from the present, read backwards to the beginning.
At the bottom of all the deposits were discovered the remains of the very earliest inhabitants, with their hearths about which they sat in nudity and split bones to extract the marrow, trimmed flints, worked horn, necklaces of pierced wolf and bears' teeth; then potsherds formed by hand long before the invention of the wheel; higher up were the arms and utensils of the bronze age, and the weights of nets. Above these came the remains of the iron age and wheel-turned crocks. A still higher stratum surrendered a weight of a scale stamped with an effigy of the crusading king, S. Louis (1226-1270), and finally francs bearing the profile of a king, the reverse in every moral characteristic of Louis the Saint—that of Leopold of Congo notoriety.
CHAPTER II
MODERN TROGLODYTES
Herodotus, speaking of the Ligurians, says that they spent the night in the open air, rarely in huts, but that they usually inhabited caverns. Every traveller who goes to the Riviera, the old Ligurian shore, knows, but knows only by a passing glance, the Etang de Berre, that inland sea, blue as a sapphire, waveless, girt about by white hills, and perhaps he wonders that Toulon should have been selected as a naval port, when there was this one, deeper, and excavated by Nature to serve as a harbour. The rocks of S. Chamas that look down on this peaceful sheet of water, rarely traversed by a sail, are riddled with caves, still inhabited, as they were when Herodotus wrote 450 years before the Christian era.
The following account of an underground town in Palestine is from the pen of Consul Wetzstein, and describes one in the Hauran. "I visited old Edrei—the subterranean labyrinthic residence of King Og—on the east side of the Zanite hills. Two sons of the sheikh of the village— one fourteen and the other sixteen years of age—accompanied me. We took with us a box of matches and two candles. After we had gone down the slope for some time, we came to a dozen rooms which, at present, are used as goat stalls and storerooms for straw. The passage became gradually smaller, until at last we were compelled to lie down flat and creep along. This extremely difficult and uncomfortable progress lasted for about eight minutes, when we were obliged to jump down a steep well, several feet in depth. Here I noticed that the younger of my two attendants had remained behind, being afraid to follow us; but probably it was more from fear of the unknown European than of the dark and winding passages before us.
"We now found ourselves in a broad street, which had dwellings on both sides, whose height and width left nothing to be desired. The temperature was mild, the air free from unpleasant odours, and I felt not the smallest difficulty in breathing. Further along there were several cross-streets, and my guide called my attention to a hole in the ceiling for air, like three others which I afterwards saw, now closed from above. Soon after we came to a market-place, where, for a long distance, on both sides of the pretty broad street, were numerous shops in the walls, exactly in the style of the shops seen in Syrian cities. After a while we turned into a side street, where a great hall, whose roof was supported by four pillars, attracted my attention. The roof, or ceiling, was formed of a single slab of jasper, perfectly smooth and of immense size, in which I was unable to perceive the slightest crack.
"The rooms, for the most part, had no supports. The doors were often made of a single square stone, and here and there I also noticed fallen columns. After we had passed several cross-alleys or streets, and before we had reached the middle of the subterranean city, my attendant's light went out. As he was lighting again by mine, it occurred to me that possibly both our lights might be extinguished, and I asked the boy if he had any matches. 'No,' he replied, 'my brother has them.' 'Could you find your way back if the lights were put out?' 'Impossible,' he replied. For a moment I began to be alarmed at this underworld, and urged an immediate return. Without much difficulty we got back to the marketplace and from hence the youngster knew the way well enough. Thus, after a sojourn of more than an hour and a half in this labyrinth, I again greeted the light of day." [Footnote: Reisebericht in Hauran, ii., pp. 47-48.]
I have quoted this somewhat lengthy account because, as we shall see in the sequel, the subterranean dwellings and above all refuges in Europe, bear to this town of King Og of Bashan a marked resemblance.
Within four hours of Paris by Chartres and Sargé is the town of Montoire with a clean inn, Le Cheval Rouge, and next station down the Loir is Trôo. The Loir, male, is the river, not La Loire of the feminine gender. Le Loir is a river that rises in the north-east, traverses the fertile upland plain of Beauce, and falls into and is lost in La Loire at Angers. It is a river rarely visited by English tourists, but it does not deserve to be overlooked. It has cut for itself a furrow in the chalk tufa, and the hospitable cliffs on each side offer a home to any vagrant who cares to scratch for himself a hole in the friable face, wherein to shelter his head.
Trôo bears a certain resemblance to the city of Og. Originally it was all underground, but in process of time it effervesced, bubbled out of its holes, and is now but half troglodyte. The heights that form the Northern declivity of the valley of the Loir come to an abrupt end here, and have been sawn through by a small stream creating a natural fosse, isolating the hill of Trôo that is attached to the plateau only on the North. The hill rises steeply from the river to a crest occupied by a Romanesque church recently scoured to the whiteness of flour, and beside it is a mighty tumulus, planted with trees.
Formerly on this same height stood a castle, but this has been so completely broken down that nothing remains of it but a few substructures and its well.
Trôo was at one time a walled town, and as it was the key to the valley of the Loir, was hotly contested between the English and French during three hundred years, and later, between Catholics and Huguenots. The place was besieged by Mercader, the captain under Richard Coeur-de Lion, who had flayed alive the slayer of his master under the walls of Caylus, although Richard had promised him immunity. Here Mercader met his death, and was buried under a mound that is still shown.
But what makes Trôo especially interesting is that the whole height is like a sponge, perforated with passages giving access to halls, some of which are circular, and into store-chambers; and most of the houses are wholly or in part underground. The caves that are inhabited are staged one above another, some reached by stairs that are little better than ladders, and the subterranean passages leading from them form a labyrinth within the bowels of the hill, and run in superposed storeys. In one that I entered was an oven, with a well at its side. A little further, in a large hall, a circular hole in the floor unfenced gave access by rope or ladder to a lower range of galleries. Any one exploring by the feeble light of a single candle, without a guide, might be precipitated down this abyss without knowing that there was a gaping opening before him. A long ascending passage, with niches in the sides for lamps, leads to where the fibres of the roots of the trees on the mound above have penetrated and are hanging down. It is said that the gallery led on to the castle, but since this latter has been ruined it has been blocked. In the holes whence flints have dropped spiders harbour, that feed on ghostly moths which flit in the pitch darkness, and when caught between the fingers resolve themselves into a trace of silver dust. But on what did these spectral moths feed? A pallid boy of sixteen who guided me about the town told me that he had been born in a cave; that he slept in one every night, and worked underground all day. His large brown eyes could see objects in the dark where all was of inky blackness to me. It is astonishing with what unconcern mites of children romp and ramble through these corridors, where there is danger not only on account of pitfalls, but also of the roof falling in. Where I went, guided by a child of ten, every now and then I was warned— "Prenez garde, c'est écroulé."
The town—it was a town once, but now contains 783 inhabitants only—is partly built at the foot of the bluff, but very few houses are without excavated chambers, store-places or stables. The café looks ordinary enough, but enter, and you find yourself in a dungeon. There is but one street—La Grande Rue—and that has space and landscape on one side, and houses built against and into the rock on the other. A notice at the entrance to the street warns that no heavy traffic, not much above the weight of a perambulator, is permitted to pass along it, for the roadway runs over the tops of houses. A waggon might crash through into the chamber of a bedridden beldame, and a motor be precipitated downwards to salt the soup of a wife stirring it for her husband's supper. At Trôo chimneys bristle everywhere, making the hill resemble a pin-cushion or a piece of larded veal. There are in the depth of the hill wells, and to these mothers fearlessly despatch their children to fill a pitcher, as often as not without a light.
Many of the cave-dwellings have but a ledge a few feet wide, and perhaps only a dozen or twenty feet long before their doors, and at the extreme edge one may see the children standing, unaffected with giddiness, like a row of swallows, contemplating the visitor. I cannot say how it may be with the lower houses, but those high up are pronouncedly odoriferous; for the inhabitants have no means of disposing of their garbage save by exposing it on their little shelves to be dried up by the sun, or washed down by the rain over the windows and doors of their neighbours beneath.
I wonder how a sanitary officer would tackle the problem of sweetening Trôo. If he attempted to envelop it in a cobweb of socketed drainpipes he would get into a tangle with the chimneys; to carry them underground would not be feasible, as he would have to run them through kitchens, bedrooms and salles-à-manger. But even did he make this cobweb, he could not flush his pipes, as the water is at the bottom of the hill. The ancient Gauls and Britons had a practical and ingenious method of disposing of their refuse. They dug shafts in the chalk, shaped like bottles, and all the rubbish they desired to get rid of was consigned to these, till they were full, when they planted a tree on the top and opened another. Great numbers of these puticuli have been found in France. They have been likewise unearthed on the chalk downs of England. They were used as well for the graves of slaves. Now the good citizens of Trôo cannot employ the pitfalls in their caves for this purpose, or the wells would be contaminated. As it is, those wells are supplied from the rain-water falling on the hill of Trôo and filtering down, ingeniously avoiding the passages and halls. There are, however, some dripping caverns incrusted with stalagmitic deposit. But conceive of the sponge of Trôo acting as a filter through two thousand years and never renovated. Not the most impressive teetotal orator would make me a water drinker were I a citizen of Trôo.
At the summit of the hill is Le Puit qui parle, the Talking Well. It is 140 feet deep, and is shaped like a bottle. If any one speaks near the mouth, it soon after repeats in an extraordinary articulate manner the last two syllables uttered, a veritable "Jocosa Imago." Drop in a pin, and after eight seconds its click is heard as it touches the water. A stone produces a veritable detonation.
There is another Troglodyte town, also formerly walled, Les Roches, above Montoire. It is occupied by six hundred souls, and most of the houses are dug out of the rock. There is hardly space for the road to run between the Loir and the crags, and the church has to curl itself like a dog going to sleep to fit the area allowed it. This rock forms perpendicular bluffs of chalk tufa, and masses of fallen stone lie at their feet. Some rocks overhang, and the whole of this cliff and the fallen blocks have been drilled with openings and converted into habitations for man and for beast. Doors and windows have been cut in the stone, which has been hollowed out as maggots clear out the kernel of a nut. Rooms, kitchens, cellars, stables have been thus contrived. The chimneys run up the rocks, and through them; and on the plateau above open as wells, but are surrounded by a breastwork of bricks to protect them against the rain, which might form a rill that would decant playfully down the opening in a waterfall. In winter, when all hearths are lighted, the smoke issuing from all these little structures has the effect of a series of steaming saucepans.
A little way up the river outside the walls is the Château de Boydan, half scooped out of the cliff, with pretty sixteenth century mullioned and transomed windows. At right angles to the rock a wing was thrown out to contain the state apartments with their fireplaces and chimneys. But unfortunately it was tacking on of new cloth to the old garment, and the face of the rock slid down carrying with it the side walls and windows, and has left the gable containing the handsome stone chimney- pieces and the chimneys as an isolated fragment. Just beyond, excavated in the bluff, is the chapel of S. Gervais, consisting of two portions, an outer and an inner chamber. But the cliff face had been cut for the windows too thin, and the whole slid away at the same time probably as the disaster happened to the castle, and has exposed the interior of this monolithic church. There are remains of frescoes on the wall painted with considerable spirit; a king on horseback blowing a horn, and behind him a huntsman armed with a boar-spear. Benches cut in the rock surround the sanctuary. Externally a niche contains a rude image of the saint.
Still nearer to Montoire, on the left bank of the Loir is Lavardin; high up on the side of the hill, completely screened by a dense wood, is a hamlet of Troglodytes. The principal excavation served originally as a hermitage, and is called La Grotte des Vierges. There is a range of rock-dwellings in connection with it, some inhabited and some abandoned. The Grotte des Vierges is entered by steps descending into the principal chamber that is lighted by a window and is furnished with a fireplace. At one of the angles is a circular pit, six feet deep, with a groove at top for the reception of a cover. This was a silo for grain. From the first chamber entrance is obtained to a second much larger, that has in it a fireplace as well, and a staircase leading into a little oratory in which is an altar. The same staircase communicates with a lower chamber, probably intended as a cellar, for though the hermit might be frugal in meat there was no ban on the drink. The rock-dwelling nearest to the Grotte des Vierges on the left hand was of considerable proportions and pretence. It consisted of large halls, and was in several stages. The windows are broken away, the floors are gone, and it is reduced to a wreck. Below this series of cave-dwellings is the Fountain of Anduée of crystal water, supposed to be endowed with miraculous properties. The whole hill is moreover pierced with galleries and store-chambers, and served as a refuge in time of war, in which the villagers of Lavardin concealed their goods. The noble ruin of the castle shows that it was once of great majesty. It was battered down by the Huguenots, who for the purpose dragged a cannon to the top of the church tower.
Nearer to Vendôme is the Château of Rochambeau. The present mansion that has replaced the ancient castle is a very insignificant and tasteless structure. All the interest it possesses consists in its dependencies that are rock-hewn. The bass-court is reached through a long and lofty gallery bored athwart the rock, and issuing from it we find ourselves in a sort of open well, probably originally natural but appropriated and adapted by man to his needs. This vast depression, the walls of which are seventy-five feet high, is circular, and measures eighty feet in diameter. Round it are cellars and chambers for domestic purposes. Others are accessible from the gallery that leads to the court. One of them, the Cave-Noire, possesses a chimney bored upwards through the rock to the level of the surface. Another peculiarity of this cavern is that along one side, throughout its length, 120 feet, are rings cut in the rock showing tokens of having been fretted by usage. They are at the height of four feet above the soil, and are on an average four feet ten inches apart. A second range is three feet or four feet higher up. In an adjoining cavern are similar ranges of rings. A third is cut almost at the level of the soil. Precisely the same arrangement is to be found at Varennes hard by in artificial caves still employed as stables, and some as dwellings for families.
In the park is shown the cave in which the Duke of Beaufort, the Roi des Halles, was concealed when he escaped from the prison of Vincennes. François de Vendôme, Duke of Beaufort, was a grandson of Henri Quatre, a man of inordinate conceit and of very limited intelligence. During the regency that began in 1643, he obtained the confidence of Anne of Austria, but his vanity rendered him insupportable, and he went out of his way to insult the regent, so that she sent him to Vincennes. Voltaire passes a severe judgment on him. He says of the Duke: "He was the idol of the people, and the instrument employed by able men for stirring them up into revolt; he was the object of the raillery of the Court, and of the Fronde as well. He was always spoken of as the Roi des Halles, the Market-King." One day he asked the President Bellevue whether he did not think that he—Beaufort—would change the face of affairs if he boxed the ears of the Duke of Elbeuf. "I do not think such an act would change anything but the face of the Duke of Elbeuf," gravely replied the magistrate.
There are in the Quartier S. Lubin at Vendôme chambers still occupied in the face of the cliff, high up and reached by structural galleries.
At Lisle, on the river above Vendôme, are many caves, one of which was the hospital or Maladerie.
Above Tours and Marmoutier, on the road to Vouvray, is La Roche Corbon. The cliff is pierced with windows and doors, and niches for a pigeonry. This, till comparatively recently, was a truly Troglodyte village. But well-to-do inhabitants of Tours have taken a fancy to the site and have reared pretentious villas that mask the face of the cliff, and with the advent of these rich people the humble cave-dwellers have "flitted." One singular feature remains, however, unspoiled. A mass of the cretaceous tufa has slipped bodily down to the foot of the crag, against which it leans in an inclined position. This was eviscerated and converted into two cottages, but the cottagers have been ejected, and it is now a villa residence. An acquaintance at Tours has rented it for his family as a summer seat.
Some fifty or sixty years ago La Roche Corbon was "a village sculptured up the broken face of the rocks, with considerable skill, and what with creeping vines, snatches of hanging gardens, an attempt here and there at a division of tenements, by way of slight partitions cut from the surface, wreaths of blue smoke issuing out of apertures and curling up the front, and the old feudal tower, called Lanterne de la Roche Corbon, crowning the summit, the superincumbent pinnacle of excavated rock on which it stands looking as if it were ready to fall and crush the whole population beneath, this lithographed village has altogether a curiously picturesque look." But at Beaumont-la-Ronce, north of Tours, may be seen a whole street of cave habitations still occupied, wreathed with vines and traveller's joy.
In the department of Maine et Loire, and in a portion of Vienne, whole villages are underground.
There is often very valuable vineyard land that has to be walled round and every portion economised. What is done is this: the owner digs a quarry in the surface; this forms a sort of pit accessible on one side, the stone taken from this being employed to fence round his property. Then, for his own dwelling, he cuts out chambers in the rock under his vineyard, looking through windows and a door into the quarry hole. For a chimney he bores upwards, and then builds round the opening a square block of masonry, out of which the smoke escapes.
A whole village, or rather hamlet, may therefore consist of—as far as one can see—nothing but a series of chimneys standing on the ground among the vines. Those who desire to discover the inhabitants must descend into the quarries to these rabbit warrens.
In some villages the people live half above ground and half below. At St. Leger, near Loudun, is a fine mediaeval castle, with a fosse round it cut out of the rock: and this fosse is alive with people who have grubbed out houses for themselves in the rock through which the moat (which is dry) has been excavated.
A very singular settlement is that of Ezy in the valley of the Eure, at the extreme limit of the department of that name. About a kilometre from the village, along the side of the railway, are numerous subterranean habitations in three storeys, with platforms before them which are horizontal. These were the dwellings of the owners of the vines which at one time covered the hill overhead. But these vineyards failed, and the dwellings were abandoned. However, after their abandonment, it was customary at times for the villagers to resort to them for drinking and dancing bouts. This tradition continues still in force, and on Easter Tuesday these cave dwellings are visited, and there is merrymaking in them. Between the caves at one time some little taverns had been erected, but these also fell into ruin some forty or fifty years ago.
Since then a range of these caverns has become the refuge of a special population of social and moral outcasts. There they live in the utmost misery. The population consists of about eighty persons, male and female and children.
The history of the adults will hardly bear looking into. None of these people have any fixed occupation, and it is difficult to discover how they subsist. In fact, the life of every one of them is a problem. One might have supposed that they maintained a precarious existence by thieving or by begging, as they are far below the ordinary tramp; for with the exception of perhaps two or three of them, these cave-dwellers possess absolutely nothing, and know no trade whatever. They sleep on dry leaves kept together by four pieces of wood, and their sole covering consists of scraps of packing cloth. Sometimes they have not even the framework for their beds, which they manufacture for the most part out of old broken chairs discarded from the churches. A visitor says: "In one of the caverns I entered there was but one of these squalid and rude beds to accommodate five persons, of whom one was a girl of seventeen, and two were boys of fourteen and fifteen. Their kitchen battery consists exclusively of old metal cases of preserved fruit or meats that they have picked up from the ashpits. The majority, but by no means all, have got hold, somehow, of some old stoves or the scraps of a stove that they have put together as best they could. They have a well in common at the bottom of the hill, whence they draw water in such utensils as they possess, and which they let down into the water on a wooden crook. Every one has his crook as his own property, and preserves it near him in the cavern. The majority of these underground people have no clothes to speak of. Girls of fifteen and big boys go about absolutely without any linen. The rest—perhaps three or four—have only a few linen rags upon them. In the stifling atmosphere of these cave-dwellings it is by no means rare to see big children almost, if not absolutely, naked. I saw a great girl with a wild shock of uncombed hair, wearing nothing but a very scanty shift.
"These cave-dwellers live with utter improvidence, although deprived of sufficient food. Three or four couples there have some four or five children to each.
"These families have for the most part formed in the cave-dwellings. A young mother whom I saw there with four children, the only one dressed with an approach to decency, when interrogated by me told me that she had been brought there by her mother at the age of eight. That was twenty-four years ago. She was fair, with tawny hair, and of the Normandy type. She had been born in a village of the neighbourhood, and her mother took refuge in the caverns, apparently in consequence of the loss of her husband.
"I heard of an individual who had been on the parish on account of his incurable laziness, till the mayor losing all patience with him, had him transported to these cave-dwellings and left there. There he settled down, picked up a wife, and had a family.
"These people live quite outside the law, and are quit of all taxes and obligations. As to their marriages they are preceded and followed by no formalities. No attempt is made on the part of the authorities to get the children to school. One gentleman resident in the neighbourhood, a M. Frederic Passy, did take pains to ameliorate their condition. He collected the children and laboured to infuse into their hearts and heads some sort of moral principle. But his efforts were ineffectual, and left not a trace behind. They recollect him and his son well enough, but confuse the one with the other. And two of those who were under instruction for a while, when I questioned them about it, allowed that they had submitted to be bored by them for the sake of profiting by their charity.
"I interrogated an old but still robust woman, who had lived in the caverns for three years. She had been consigned to them by her own children, who had sought by this means to rid themselves of the responsibility of maintaining her.
"The elements of this population belong accordingly to all sorts. I noticed only one woman of an olive tint and with very black hair, who may have come from a distance. But I was told she was a recent accession to the colony, and I might be sure of this, as her clothing was still fairly sound and clean. As she is still young and can work, her case is curious; one wonders what can have induced her to go there.
"I saw there also a couple without children; the man had the slouch and hang-dog look of an habitual criminal.
"I may give an instance which will show the degradation to which this population has fallen. An old beggar I visited, who has lived in a cavern belonging to his brother for forty-seven years, and who has had a wife, allowed a billiard ball to be rammed into his mouth for two sous (a penny) by some young fellows who were making sport of him. He was nearly killed by it, for they had the greatest difficulty in extracting the billiard ball." [Footnote: Zaborowski, "Aux Caves d'Ezy," in Revue Monsuelle de l'école d'Anthropologie, Paris, 1897, i. p. 27, et seq.]
At Duclair also, on the Seine, are rock dwellings precisely like those on the Loire, and still inhabited.
Along the banks of the Loire from Tours to Saumur are numerous cave habitations still in occupation. Bell, in his "Wayside Pictures," says of those at Saumur: "Close to the town are residences, literally sculptured in the face of the naked rock. They are cut in the stone, which is the tufa, or soft gravel stone, and easily admits of any workmanship demanded by taste or necessity. There is no little care displayed in the formation of these strange habitations, some of which have scraps of gardens or miniature terraces before them; hanging from the doorways are green creeping things, with other graceful adjuncts, which help to give a touch of beauty to their aspect. In some cases, where the shelving of the rock will admit of it, there are chimneys, in nearly all windows; and it not unfrequently happens, especially higher up the road near Tours, where art has condescended to embellish the façades still more elaborately, that these house-caves present an appearance of elegance which is almost impossible to reconcile with the absolute penury of their inhabitants. The interiors, too, although generally speaking naked enough, are sometimes tolerably well furnished, having an air of comfort in them which, certainly, no one could dream of discovering in such places.
"These habitations are, of course, held only by the poor and outcast, yet, in spite of circumstances, they live merrily from hand to mouth how they can, and by means, perhaps, not always of the most legitimate description. I have a strong suspicion that the denizens of these rocks are not a whit better than they should be; that their intimate neighbourhood is not the safest promenade after dark: and that, being regarded and treated as Pariahs, they are born and baptized in the resentments which are contingent upon such a condition of existence. You might as well attempt to chase an eagle to his eyrie among the clouds, as to make your way to some of these perilous chambers, which are cut in the blank face of the rock, and can be reached only by a sinuous track which requires the fibres of a goat to clamber. There are often long lines of these sculptured houses piled in successive tiers above each other; sometimes with a view to architectural regularity, but in almost all cases they are equally hazardous to the unpractised foot of a stranger.
"Stroll down the spacious quay of Saumur in the dusk of the evening, when the flickering tapers of the temperate town are going out one by one. Roars of merriment greet you as you approach the cavernous city of the suburb. There the entertainments of the inhabitants are only about to begin. You see moving lights in the distance twinkling along the grey surface of the rock, and flitting amongst the trees that lie between its base and the margin of the river. Some bacchanalian orgie is going forward." [Footnote: Bell (R.), "Wayside Pictures," Lond. 1850, pp. 292-3.]
[Illustration: CAVE DWELLERS AT DUCLAIR. These are typical of countless others on the Seine, the Loir, the Loire, and its tributaries, as also on the Dronne and Dordogne.]
There was a curious statement made in a work by E. Bosc and L. Bonnemère in 1882, [Footnote: Hist. des Gaulois sous Vercingetorix. Paris, 1882.] reproduced by M. Louis Bousrez in 1894, [Footnote: Les monu- ments Mégalithiques de la Touraine. Tours, 1894.] which, if true, would show that a lingering paganism is to be found among these people. It is to this effect: "What is unknown to most is that at the present day there exist adepts of the worship (of the Celts) as practised before the Roman invasion, with the sole exception of human sacrifices, which they have been forcibly obliged to renounce. They are to be found on the two banks of the Loire, on the confines of the departments of Allier and Saone-et-Loire, where they are still tolerably numerous, especially in the latter department. They are designated in the country as Les Blancs, because that in their ceremonies they cover their heads with a white hood, and their priests are vested like the Druids in a long robe of the same colour.
"They surround their proceedings with profound mystery; their gatherings take place at night in the heart of large forests, about an old oak, and as they are dispersed through the country over a great extent of land, they have to start for the assembly from different points at close of day so as to be able to reach home again before daybreak. They have four meetings in the year, but one, the most solemn, is held near the town of La Clayette under the presidence of the high priest. Those who come from the greatest distance do not reach their homes till the second night, and their absence during the intervening day alone reveals to the neighbours that they have attended an assembly of the Whites. Their priests are known, and are vulgarly designated as the bishops or archbishops of the Whites; they are actually druids and archdruids…. We have been able to verify these interesting facts brought to our notice by M. Parent, and our personal investigations into the matter enable us to affirm the exactitude of what has been advanced."
If there be any truth in this strange story, we are much more disposed to consider the Whites as relics of a Manichæan or Albigensian sect than as a survival of Druidism. More probable still is it that they are or were a political confederation. But I suspect that the account is due to a heated imagination.
At Bourré (Loir et Cher) are extensive quarries in the face of the hill. Here the chalk is hard and of beautiful texture. The stone has been derived hence for the erection of several of the castles in the Touraine, as also for buildings in the towns of Tours, Blois, Montrichard, &c. Most of the habitations of the villagers, who are nearly all quarrymen, are excavated in the rock, occupy old disused workings, or have been specially dug out to suit the convenience and dispositions of the occupants. In some of these old underground quarries, that are not open to the light of day, dances and revelries take place, when they are brilliantly illuminated. At Sainte Maure, on the road from Tours to Chatelherault, in a deep cleft of the Cande that is covered with the falun, an extensive deposit of marine and freshwater shells, marking the beach of an old estuary of the sea, is the village of Courtineau, wholly made up of Troglodyte habita- tions, and with its chapel also excavated in the rock.
[ILLUSTRATION: SAULIAC. A village in the valley of the Célé Lot, built partly into the rocks, with chambers excavated out of the cliff.]
At Villaines (Indre et Loire) the cliffs are pierced with caves that are inhabited by basket-makers, and the watercourses below are planted with willow, or else have cut osiers lying in them soaking to preserve their suppleness. In the caves, on the roads, in every house, one sees little else but baskets in process of making or cut osiers lying handy for use. The women split and peel the green rods, men and children with nimble fingers plait the white canes. All the basket-makers are themselves plaited into one co-operative association. From time immemorial Villaines had made baskets, the osier of the valley being of excellent quality. But the products could not be disposed of satisfactorily; they were bought by regraders, who beat down the prices of the wares, and the workmen had no means of seeking out the markets, in which to sell with full advantage to themselves. In 1845 an old curé, whose name is remembered with affection, the Abbé Chicogne, conceived the idea of creating a co-operative society; and aided by the Count de Villemois, he grouped the workers, and drew up the statutes of the Association, that remain in force to the present day. All the products are brought together into a common store, and sold for the benefit of the associates. No member is permitted to dispose of a single piece of his workmanship to a purchaser; he may not sell in gross any more than he may in detail. The cave-houses are comfortably and neatly furnished, and their appearance and that of their inhabitants proclaims well-being, content and cheerfulness.
On the Beune, a tributary of the Vézère, is the hamlet of Grioteaux, planted on a terrace in a cave, the rock overhangs the houses. Above the cluster, inaccessible without a ladder, in the face of the cliff, is a chamber hewn out of the rock, and joist holes proclaiming that at one time a wooden gallery preceded it. This cavern, that is wholly artificial, served in times of trouble as a place in which the community concealed their valuables.
The river Célé that flows into the Lot passes under noble cliffs of fawn and orange-tinted limestone, and the road here is called Le Défilé des Anglais, as the whole valley during the Hundred Years' War was in the possession of the Companies that pretended to fight for the Leopards. And it was down this defile that the cutthroats rode on their plundering expeditions. In this valley is the village of Sauliac, in an amphitheatre of rocks, where road and river describe a semicircle. The cliff runs up to a height of 300 feet. Houses are perched on every available ledge, grappling the rock, where not simply consisting of faced caverns. In the midst of this cirque stands the castle, buried in stately oaks. It was not built till 1460, when the long agony of the war was over, and nothing remained of the English save their empty nests in the rock, and their hated name.
A modern chapel, very white and not congruous with its surroundings, is perched above the road on a terrace under Le Roc Percé, so named from a natural cavern, very round, drilled through it, as though wrought by a giant's boring tool.
At Cuzorn, on the line from Perigueux to Agen, are very fine rocks in a meander of the Lemance, starting out of woods, and these contain caverns that have been, and some still are, inhabited. In this region are many quarries, not open to the sky, but forming halls and galleries under the hill, and some of these have been taken possession of and turned into habitations.
At Brantôme on the Dronne a good many of the houses are against the rock, the caves built up in front with the usual window and door to each. More have their workshops in grottoes, in them blacksmiths have their forges, carpenters their planing benches, tinkers, tailors, cobblers carry on their business in comparative obscurity. The superior stratum of rock is of so hard and tenacious a quality that it holds together with very few piers to support it. When a citizen wants to enlarge his premises, he merely digs deeper into the hill; he has no ground-rent to pay. Some caves open a hundred feet wide without a support.
[Illustration: GRIOTEAUX. A hamlet under overhanging rocks and with chambers excavated in the rock. Above is a cave used as a place of refuge, and notches that indicate where was a gallery reached by a rope or ladder.]
[Illustration: LA ROCHEBRUNE. The upper chamber with eight holes in the floor, six for stabbing at those who had invaded the lower chamber, and two providing the means of escape.]
Any one motoring or going by rail from Angoulême to Périgueux should halt half-way at La Roche Beaucourt, where the rock l'Argentine contains a nest of cave-dwellings, with silos in the floors and cupboards in the walls.
That the savage is not extinct in these out-of-the-way parts may be judged from this—that at Hautefaye near by, the peasants in 1870 laid hold of M. de Moneis, who objected to the prosecution of the war with the Prussians after Sedan, cruelly maltreated him, and threw him alive on a bonfire in which he expired among the flames.
The whole south-east angle of the Isle of Sicily is full of underground cities, of which that of the Val d'Ispica is the most famous. These excavations are vulgarly called Ddieri, but they are not in most cases tombs, but dwelling-places for the living, as is shown by the handmills for oil and corn that are found in them.
The Val d'Ispica is a narrow valley situated between Modica and Spaicaforno; and throughout its entire length of about eight miles, the rock walls are pierced on both sides with countless grottoes, all artificial, and showing the marks of tools on their walls. They are scooped in the calcareous rock. Some consist of as many as ten or twelve chambers in succession, and are seldom more than 20 feet deep by 6 feet high, and they are of the same breadth. At the bottom of the valley flows a little stream that supplied the inhabitants with water, and irrigates wild fig-trees and pink-flowered oleanders. On a higher level grow broad-leaved acanthi and wild artichokes, and thick festoons of cactus hang down from the top of the rock and shade the entrances to the grottoes. A portion of the rock wall on the right bank of the stream has fallen, and exposed to sight the internal arrangement of the dwellings. But previous to this, ascent could only have been made by ladders or by notches in the rock for the insertion of toes and fingers, as among the cliff-dwellers in Arizona. There are ranges of these habitations on several stages, and steps cut in the rock allowed communication between them; but above all is a ledge or gallery open to the sky and commanding a magnificent prospect. This could be reached only by a ladder, and probably formed the rendezvous of the women of the Troglodyte town in an evening to enjoy the cool air, and exercise their tongues. It may also have served as the last refuge of the inmates of the caverns, who, after escaping to it could withdraw the ladder.
One dwelling of three storeys, with flights of steps in good preservation, is called the Castle by the peasants. Parthey, a German traveller, who investigated these dwellings, reckoned their number to be over 1500. He saw nowhere any trace of ornament about them. Doors and windows were mere rough holes cut through the limestone. Rings hewn in the stone which are found in the chambers probably served some purpose of domestic economy. Fragments of Samian ware and carved marble have been found in them, but are probably later than the construction of these habitations. Some contain graves, and these also may be later, but actually we know from history nothing about them. Rock tombs may have been utilised as dwellings or abandoned dwellings as tombs. To the present day some of them are still occupied, mainly by shepherds and poor peasants. The range in the Crimea from Cape Kersonese to the Bay of Ratla is formed of layers of limestone alternating with clay and argilaceous schist, a disposition of the strata that tends greatly to accelerate the disintegration of the cliffs. The clay gradually washed out by springs or eaten away by the weather forms great caverns in the sides, and these are liable to fall in when deprived of support. They have, however, been utilised as habitations. The Rock of Inkermann, the ancient Celamita, runs east of the town beyond the marshy valley of the Chernaya; it has been converted into a vast quarry which menaces with destruction the old Troglodyte town that occupied the cliffs. The galleries of this underground town form a rabbit warren in which it is dangerous to penetrate without a guide or a clue. Some of the chambers are large enough to contain five hundred people.
The rocks of Djonfont-kaleharri are also honeycombed, with still inhabited caves; some are completely cavernous, but others have the openings walled up so as to form a screen. Beneath an overhanging rock is a domed church used by this Troglodyte community.
If we cross the Mediterranean to Egypt, we see there whole villages of cave-dwellers. The district between Mansa-Sura and Cyrene is full of grottoes in the very heart of the mountains, into which whole families get by means of ropes, and many are born, live and die in these dens, without ever going out of them.
The volcanic breccia as well as chalk and limestone has been utilised for the habitation of man. There is a very interesting collection of cave-dwellings all artificial, the Balmes du Montbrun, a volcanic crater of the Coiron, near S. Jean le Centenier in the Vivarais. The crater is 300 feet in diameter and 480 feet deep; and man has burrowed into the sides of porous lava or pumice to form a series of habitations, a chapel, and one that is traditionally said to have served as a prison. This rock settlement was occupied till the close of the eighteenth century.
The Grottoes de Boissière are twelve in number, on the side of the Puy de Châteauneuf, commanding the road from Saint Nectaire to Marols, Puy de Dôme. They are excavated in the volcanic tufa, and are all much of the same dimensions; one, however, measures 28 feet by 12 feet, and is 7 feet high. Below the grottoes the slope of the hill is parcelled out into small fields or gardens by means of walls of stones laid one on another without mortar, showing that the inhabitants of these caves lived there permanently and cultivated the ground below their dwellings. [Footnote: There are others, Les Grottes de Rajah, in the same mass of rock, with near them an isolated rock carved about and supposed to have been an idol.] More curious still are the Grottoes de Jonas on the Couze, also in Puy de Dôme, near Cheix. They are in stages one range above another to the height of from 90 to 120 feet. The face of the mountain is precipitous, and is of a porous tufa full of holes. As many as sixty of these artificial caves remain; but there were at one time many more, that have been destroyed by the fall of the very friable volcanic rock. It is impossible to determine the period at which these caves were excavated; they were probably prehistoric to begin with, but were tenanted during the Middle Ages when—if not later—the tracks leading to them were cut in the tufa and stairs to connect the several stages. Then paths were bordered by walls as a protection, and fragments of the parapet remain. Probably it was during the English occupation of Guienne which extended into Auvergne, that a castle and a chapel were sculptured out of the living rock. At the same time a remarkable spiral staircase was contrived in like manner. Numerous relics of all periods—flint tools, bronze weapons, statuettes, and coins—have been found among the rubbish thrown out from these dens. [Footnote: G. Tournier, Les Mégalithes et les Grottes des environs de S. Nectaire. Paris, 1910.]
On the Borne, in Haute Loire, dug out of the volcanic rock are several cave-dwellings. The caves at Conteaux are fourteen in number, the largest is divided into three compartments; each is 45 feet deep and 11 feet wide, but the usual dimension is from 28 to 36 feet. In all, the vault is rather over 6 feet high. An opening in the roof of one gave vent to smoke.
The rock of Ceyssac is curious. Formerly a barrier of volcanic tufa stretched across the valley of the Borne; this barrier had been ejected from the volcano of La Denise. The river, arrested in its onward course, was ponded back and formed a lake that overflowed the dam in two places, leaving between them a fang of harder rock. When the water had spilled for a considerable time over the left-hand lip, and had worn this down to a depth of about 70 feet, it all at once abandoned this mode of outlet and concentrated its efforts on the right-hand portion of the dam where it found the tufa less compact. It eventually sawed its way completely through till it reached its present level, leaving the prong of rock in the middle rising precipitously out of the valley with the river gliding peacefully below it, but attached to the mountain side by the neck it had abandoned. The fang was laid hold of, burrowed into, and converted into a village of Troglodytes. In it are cave-dwellings in five superposed storeys, stables with their mangers, with rings for tying up cattle, a vast hall, that is circular, and chambers with lockers and seats graven out of the sides of the walls. There is also a subterranean chapel, with the entrance blocked by a wall that contains an early Romanesque doorway. The Polignacs seized on the spike of rock and built on the summit a castle that could be reached only by a flight of steps cut in the face of the rock. By degrees the inhabitants have migrated from their caves to the neck of land connecting the prong with the hill, and have built themselves houses thereon. They have even abandoned their monolithic church and erected in its place an unsightly modern building.
There are other cave-dwellings in the volcanic rocks of the Cevennes and Auvergne, but the above account must suffice.
I will now say something about the Troglodyte dwellings in the sandstone in Corrèze, in the neighbourhood of Brive, caves that have been inhabited from the time of the man who was contemporary with the mammoth, to this day. Some have, however, been abandoned comparatively recently.
They do not run deep into the rock; usually they face the south or south-west, and are sometimes in a series at the same level; sometimes they form several storeys, which communicated with each other by ladders that passed through holes cut in the floor of the upper storey, or else by a narrow cornice, wide enough for one to walk on. Sometimes this cornice has been abraded by the weather, and fallen away; in which case these cave-dwellings can be reached only by a ladder. There are caves in which notches cut in the rock show where beams had been inserted, and struts to maintain them, so as to form a wooden balcony for communication between the chambers, or between the dwellings of neighbours.
The doorways into these habitations are usually cut so as to admit a wooden frame to which a door might be attached; and there are deep holes bored in the rock, very much as in our old churches and towers, for the cross-piece of timber that effectually fastened the door.
The grottoes are cut square, the ceilings are always sensibly horizontal, and the walls always vertical. But where a natural hollow has been artificially deepened, there the opening is usually irregular. Moreover, in such case, the gaping mouth of the cave was in part walled up. The traces of the tool employed are everywhere observable, they indicate that the rock was cut by a pick having a triangular point. Small square holes in the sides, and long horizontal grooves indicate the position of shelves. Square hollows of considerable size served as cupboards, and oblong rectangular recesses, 18 inches above the floor, and from 3 feet 9 inches to 4 feet 6 inches high and a foot deep were benches. Bedplaces were also cut in the rock.
There are also indications of a floor having been carried across in some of the loftier caves, and there are openings in the roofs through which ascent was made to the series of chambers on the upper storey. Holes pierced in the ceiling served for the suspension of articles liable to be injured by proximity to a damp rock. A string was attached to the middle of a short stick, that was thrust into the hole. The string was then pulled and it was fast. Another plan was that of boring holes at an angle into the rock at the side. Into these holes rods were thrust and what was required to be kept dry was suspended from them.
[Illustration: Sketch Plan of Rock Stable, Commarques.]
Some of the grottoes served at once for man and beast and fowl. Not only are there chambers for the former, but also mangers for cattle, and silos to contain the fodder; and there are nooks for pigeons in an adjoining cave. In many cases there are cisterns; in one is a well. The cisterns had to be filled laboriously. They are provided with bungholes for the purpose of occasional cleaning out. The walls are scored with concave grooves slanting downwards, uniting and leading into small basins. The moisture condensing on the sides trickled into these runnels and supplied the basins with drinking water. The mangers have holes bored in the stone through which passed the halters. There are indications that the cattle were hauled up by means of a windlass.
That these were not places of refuge in times of danger, but were permanent habitations, would appear from the fact that those of Lamouroux contain mural paintings, and that in them, in addition to stables, there is a pigeonry. In one or two instances the piers that support the roof have sculptured capitals, of the twelfth or thirteenth century. In the cave-dwelling still tenanted at Siourat is cut the date, I.D. 1585, surmounted by a cross. [Footnote: Lalande (Ph.), Les Grottes artificielles des environs de Brive. In Mémoires de la Soc. de Spéliologie. Paris, 1897.]
I have given the plan of the caves of Lamouroux in my "Deserts of
Southern France."
How general rock habitations were at one time in Perigord may be judged by the prevalence of the place-name Cluseau, which always meant a cave that was dwelt in, with the opening walled up, window and door inserted; roffi is applied to any ordinary grotto, whether inhabited or not.
It would be quite impossible for me to give a list of the cave- dwellings in France still inhabited, or occupied till comparatively recent times, they are so numerous and are to be found in every department where is the chalk or the limestone, sandstone or volcanic tufa.
They are to be met with not only in those parts of France from which the above specimens have been taken and described, but also in Var, Bouches du Rhone, Aveyron, Gard, Lozère, Cantal, Charente, Vienne, &c.
There is a good deal of sameness in the appearance of those still inhabited—a walled face, a mask, with window and door, and above a chimney of brick rising out of the rock.
[Illustration: Plan of the Rock Holes in Nottingham Park. Total length of excavation on South Front 110 yards.]
In England, Nottingham drew its ancient British name of Tigguocobauc (House of Caves) from its troglodyte habitations; at Mansfield in that county such caves exist, and were associated with a class of inhabitants somewhat nomadic, who obtained their living by making besoms from the heather of the adjoining forest and moorland. They established a colony on the roadside waste, and sank wells in the rock for water. Nottingham enjoyed possibly the largest brewing and malting business in the country, and those trades were nearly wholly carried on in chambers and cellars and kilns cut out of the living rock. Mr. W. Stevenson, author of "Bygone Nottinghamshire," writes to me: "Last week I was with an antiquarian friend exploring an ancient passage in the castle rock, originally made as a sally-port to the castle, but at some later period when bricks came on the scene, converted or enlarged into a set of malt offices with malt kilns complete. Their original use and locality have been lost for a century, and their recovery is just being brought about. Their situation, high over the adjoining meadow, and their presence in the very heart of the rock that rises abrupt to the height of 133 feet is truly romantic. The foot of the range of cliffs, with a south aspect, was a favoured site. Here we find communities of monks dwelling for centuries, hermits spotted about, and a great part of the town-dwellers, tanners, dyers, and other trades where water was largely required. A peculiarity of these houses was their fresh-water supply. The denizens sank holes in their living apartments with steps cut in the rock until they got down to the water level, where they had little pools of fresh water. The system was known as Scoop- wells, and must have been very ancient. Those who lived on higher levels burrowed into the sides of sunken roads, and the track-lines of ancient military defences. In deeds of transfer of property it was customary to describe tenements as below or above ground. Old writers have said that they doubted if the erections above ground would fill the space excavated below ground; and to-day, when erecting new buildings, it is necessary to drill down into the rock a yard or more to ascertain that the foundations are not to be laid above the crowns of hidden vaults, chapels, or unknown habitations."
Thoroton, in his history of Nottinghamshire, 1797, gives an illustration of rock-dwellings at Sneynton, adjoining Nottingham, but they have recently been cleared away for railway extension.
The sanitary authorities have done their best to sweep the tenants out of the Nottingham cave habitations, but in Staffordshire at Kinver there are still troglodytes.
Holy Austin's Rock is a mass of red sandstone, a spur of the bluff of Kinver Edge, that is crowned by the earthworks of what is supposed to have been a camp of Penda. But it has been broken through by wind and rain and perhaps sea, and now stands out unattached. It is honeycombed with habitations. I have been into several. They are neat and dry, and the occupants are loud in praise of them, as warm in winter and cool in summer. They are in two stages. At Drakelow also there are several, also occupied, somewhat disfigured by hideous chimneys recently erected in yellow and red bricks. One chimney is peculiarly quaint as being twisted, like a writhing worm, to accommodate itself to the shape of the overhanging rock. Another series of these habitations is now abandoned, but was occupied till a comparatively recent period, and other houses have their stables and storerooms excavated out of the rock.
Although Derbyshire abounds with caverns, some natural, some the work of miners, from Roman times, they do not appear to have been inhabited, at least since prehistoric times, except as occasional refuges. But there is a rock hermitage at Dale Abbey that has been lived in till recently, and when Mr. St. John Hope was excavating the Abbey ruins, one of his workmen informed him that he had been born and bred in it.
A writer in The Cornish Magazine gives the following account of some Cornish cave-dwellers.
"People in the habit of frequenting the shore of Whitsand Bay, between Lore and Dowderry, are familiar with the sight of a couple of women moving about among the rocks exposed at low tide. They are shell-fish gatherers, who live in a small cave a little to the west of Seaton. The illustration shows almost the extent of this cleft in the shady cliff, and any one who examines the place must wonder how two human beings can exist there. Along one side is a strip of sand, and from that the floor slopes upwards at an angle of about sixty degrees. Whether by years of practice the women have attained such perfection in the art of balancing their bodies that they go to sleep on the slanting rock without fear of falling, or whether they rest on the sand (wet when I saw it from a late storm), I was not informed; but it is evident that they know no comfort at any time. When I came suddenly upon the cave one morning in October, the smouldering ashes of a drift-wood fire, a kettle, a teapot, and two cups were dotted about just inside. Further up the floor their 'cupboards'—a couple of iron boilers—were standing, and in a niche near the fire was a pipe—short, dark, and odorous. The women who have made this their dwelling are Irish widows, 'born in Ireland and married in Ireland,' as one of them said. They are between fifty and sixty years of age, and for the last thirty years have managed to gain a subsistence by gathering limpets week after week and taking them to Plymouth. When the sea is rough they obtain few or no fish, but under favourable circumstances the two sometimes get fourteen shillings a week between them. In fine weather, when from Rame Head to Looe Island the sea lies calm and glistening under a summer sky, this smoke-blackened cave is an uninviting hovel; and in the winter, especially when there is a gale from the south-east, the women must be almost blown out of the hollow or frozen to death. On such occasions they are forced to leave the cave, and then they go to a disused pigsty near by. In talking with them while they dexterously chipped limpets from the weed-mantled rocks, I mildly remarked that workhouses were now very comfortable. Immediately the younger woman stood erect, and with something akin to pride and determination, exclaimed in a voice more than tinctured by the Irish patois, 'Never, sir, will us go to the workhouse while us can get as much as an crust in twenty-four hours.' Hitherto I had seen her only in a stooping attitude, and I was surprised to see how tall a woman she was, and what strength of character was indicated by her features. As she stood there amongst the sea-weed, with feet and legs bare, and her hair confined by a handkerchief, beating the palm of one hand with the knuckles of the other to emphasise her words, it dawned upon me that I had named the thing against which these two women had fought grimly for more than a quarter of a century." [Footnote: The Cornish Magazine, i. (1878), pp. 394-5.]
[Illustration: DRAKELOW IN KINVER, SHROPSHIRE]
[Illustration: AUBETERRE. One of the subterranean excavations at Aubeterre on the Dronne, serving as stables, storehouses, etc. At the side on the right may be seen an oven for bread, scooped out of the rock.]
Sir Arthur Mitchell describes some troglodytes in Scotland.[Footnote: "The Past in the Present," Edin. 1880, pp. 73-7.] "In August 1866, along with two friends, I visited the great cave at the south side of Wick Bay. It was nine at night, and getting dark when we reached it. It is situated in a cliff, and its mouth is close to the sea. Very high tides, especially with north-east winds, reach the entrance and force the occupants to seek safety in the back part of the cave, which is at a somewhat higher level than its mouth.
"We found twenty-four inmates—men, women, and children—belonging to four families, the heads of which were all there. They had retired to rest for the night a short time before our arrival, but their fires were still smouldering. They received us civilly, perhaps with more than mere civility, after a judicious distribution of pence and tobacco. To our great relief, the dogs, which were numerous and vicious, seemed to understand that we were welcome.
"The beds on which we found these people lying consisted of straw, grass and bracken, spread upon the rock or shingle, and each was supplied with one or two dirty, ragged blankets or pieces of matting. Two of the beds were near the peat-fires, which were still burning, but the others were further back in the cave where they were better sheltered.
"On the bed nearest the entrance lay a man and his wife, both absolutely naked, and two little children in the same state. On the next bed lay another couple, an infant, and one or two elder children. Then came a bed with a bundle of children, whom I did not count. A youngish man and his wife, not quite naked, and some children, occupied the fourth bed, while the fifth from the mouth of the cave was in possession of the remaining couple and two of their children, one of whom was on the spot of its birth. Far back in the cave—upstairs in the garret, as they facetiously called it—were three or four biggish boys, who were undressed, but had not lain down. One of them, moving about with a flickering light in his hand, contributed greatly to the weirdness of the scene. Beside the child spoken of, we were told of another birth in the cave, and we heard also of a recent death there, that of a little child from typhus. The Procurator-Fiscal saw this dead child lying naked on a large flat stone. Its father lay beside it in the delirium of typhus, when death paid this visit to an abode with no door to knock at.
"Both men and women, naked to their waists, sat up in their lairs and talked to us, and showed no sense of shame. One of the men summoned the candle-boy from the garret, in order that we might see better, and his wife trimmed the dying fire, and then, after lighting her pipe, proceeded to suckle her child.
"In the afternoon of the next day, with another friend, I paid a second visit to this cave, when we found eighteen inmates, most of whom were at an early supper, consisting of porridge and treacle, apparently well cooked and clean. One of the women was busy baking. She mixed the oatmeal and water in a tin dish, spread the cake out on a flat stone which served her for a table, and placing the cake against another stone, toasted it at the open fire of turf and wood. This was one of three fires, all situated about the centre of the wider part or mouth of the cave, each with a group about it of women and ragged children.
"There was no table, or chair, or stool to be seen, stones being so arranged as to serve all these purposes. There was no sort of building about the entrance of the cave to give shelter from the winds, which must often blow fiercely into it. Yet this cave is occupied both in summer and winter by a varying number of families, one or two of them being almost constant tenants.
"I believe I am correct in saying that there is no parallel illustration of modern cave life in Scotland. The nearest approach to it, perhaps, is the cave on the opposite or north side of the same bay. Both of these caves I have had frequent opportunities of visiting, and I have always found them peopled. Only occasional use is made of the other caves on the Caithness and Sutherland coasts. Of these, perhaps the cave of Ham, in Dunnet parish, is the most frequented. It is the nearness to a large town which gives to the Wick caves their steady tenants. The neighbouring population is large enough to afford room for trading, begging, and stealing—all the year round.
"The occupants of the Wick caves are the people commonly known by the name of Tinkers. They are so called chiefly because they work in tinned iron. The men cut, shape, hammer, while the women do the soldering.
"The Tinkers of the Wick caves are a mixed breed. There is no Gipsy blood in them. Some of them claim a West Island origin. Others say they are true Caithness men, and others again look for their ancestors among the Southern Scotch. They were not strongly built, nor had they a look of vigorous bodily health. Their heads and faces were usually bad in form. Broken noses and scars were a common disfigurement, and a revelation at the same time of the brutality of their lives. One girl might have been painted for a rustic beauty of the Norse type, and there was a boy among them with an excellent head. It is possible that one or both of these may yet leave their parents, from dissatisfaction with the life they lead."
These cave-dwellers of Wick were the offscourings of society, such as might be found in any town slum. "Virtue and chastity exist feebly among them, and honour and truth more feebly still; they neither read nor write; they go to no church, and have scarcely any sort of religious belief or worship. They know little or nothing of their history beyond what can be referred to personal recollection."
These, like the slum dwellers of a town, are recruited from outside, they do not constitute a race; they are the dregs of a race—persons who have dropped out of the line of march.
An amusing story was told by Mr. Grant Allen. A missionary society had captured, converted, and educated a black man. He was such a promising pupil, and looked so respectable in black clothes and a white tie, that he was advanced to the ministry, and in due course consecrated bishop, and sent out shovel-hat, lawn sleeves, rochet, and all complete, to the Gold Coast, to found a church there among the natives.
Now Bishop Black got on for a little while decorously; but one day the old wild blood in him boiled up—away went shovel-hat and boots, he peeled off his gaiters and knee-breeches, tore his lawn sleeves to rags, and dashed off a howling savage, stark naked, to take to himself a dozen wives, and to go head-hunting. What was born in the bone would come out in the flesh.
Probably there is an underlying vein of the savage in all of us, but it is kept in control by the restraints of habit accumulated through generations of civilisation. Yet there it is. A quiet, well-conducted dog will sometimes disappear for a few days and nights. It has gone off on a spree, to poach on its own account. Then, when it has had its fling, it returns, and is meek, docile, and orderly as before.
There is something of this in man. He becomes impatient of the trammels of ordinary life, its routine and matter-of-fact, and a hunger comes over him for a complete change, to shake off the bonds of conventionality, escape the drudgery of work, and live a free, wild life. Among many this takes the form of going to the Colonies or to Wild Africa or Western Canada, to shoot game, to camp out, and be a savage for a while. Among the artisan class it takes another form—the great army of tramps is recruited thus. The struggle to maintain a family, the dry uninteresting toil, drives the man into a fit of impatience, and he leaves his work, his wife and bairns, and becomes a wanderer; idle, moving on from place to place, never starving, never very comfortable—in dirt and idleness, and often in drink—but with no ties, and going here, there, and everywhere as he lists.
Not many years ago there was a man who lived by the Devil's Dyke, on the South Downs of Sussex, in a shelter under a hedge, picking up coppers from visitors to the Dyke, dressed like Ally Sloper, but living in a manner more squalid and under a worse shelter than would be endured by most savages in the darkest parts of Africa. What his history was no one knew.
It is now somewhat longer since a medical man, in an excess of impatience against civilisation, constructed for himself a hovel out of hurdles thatched with reeds, in South Devon. He lived in it, solitary, speaking to no one. Occasionally he bought a sheep and killed it, and ate it as the appetite prompted, and before it was done the meat had become putrid. At length the police interfered, the stench became intolerable in the neighbourhood, as the hovel was by the roadside. The doctor was ordered to remove, and he went no one seems to know whither.
In Charles the First's time there were men living in the caves and dens of the ravines about Lydford in South Devon. They had a king over them named Richard Rowle, and they went by the name of the Gubbins. William Browne, a poet of the time, wrote in 1644:—
"The town's enclosed with desert moors,
But where no bear nor lion roars,
And naught can live but hogs;
For all o'erturned by Noah's flood,
Of fourscore miles scarce one foot's good,
And hills are wholly bogs.
And near hereto's the Gubbins' cave;
A people that no knowledge have
Of law, of God, or men;
Whom Caesar never yet subdued,
Who've lawless liv'd; of manners rude;
All savage in their den.
By whom, if any pass that way,
He dares not the least time to stay,
For presently they howl;
Upon which signal they do muster
Their naked forces in a cluster
Led forth by Roger Rowle."
I extract the following from the Daily Express of May 10, 1910: —
"It was stated at an inquest held on Richard Manford at Market Drayton yesterday, that he was over eighty years of age, and had for the greater part of his life dwelt in a cave near Hawkstone. He was found dying by the roadside."
Elsewhere [Footnote: "An Old English Home," Methuen, 1898.] I have given an account of the North Devon savages, to whom Mr. Greenwood first drew attention. Till a very few years ago there lived on the Cornish moors a quarryman—he may be living still for aught I have heard to the contrary—-in a solitary hut piled up of granite. He would allow no one to approach, threatening visitors with a gun. His old mother lived with him. By some means the rumour got about that she was dead, but as the man said nothing, it was not till this rumour became persistent that the authorities took cognisance of it, and visited the hovel. They found that the old woman's bed had been a hole scooped out of the bank that formed part of the wall; that she had been dead some considerable time, and that her face was eaten away by rats. Daniel Gumb was a stone-cutter who lived near the Cheese Wring on the Cornish moors in the eighteenth century. He inhabited a cave composed of masses of granite. It is an artificial cell about twelve feet deep and not quite that breadth. The roof consists of one flat stone of many tons weight. On the right hand of the entrance is cut "D. Gumb," with a date 1783 (or 5). On the upper part of the covering stone channels are cut to carry off the rain. Here he dwelt for several years with his wife and children, several of whom were born and died there.
How instinctively the man of the present day will revert to primitive usages and to the ground as his natural refuge may be illustrated by a couple of instances. Mr. Hamerton, in "A Painter's Camp," says that near Sens on a height is a little pleasure-house and the remnant of a forgotten chapel dedicated to S. Bondus. This belonged of late years to a gentleman of Sens who was passionately attached to the spot. "Near my tent there is a hole in the chalk leading to the very bowels of the earth. A long passage, connecting cells far apart, winds till it arrives under the house, and it is said that the late owner intended to cut other passages and cells, but wherefore no man knows. One thing is certain, he loved the place, and spent money there for the love of it. Night and day he came up here from his little city on the plain, sat in his pleasant octagon room, and descended into his winding subterranean passages, and hermit-like visited the hollow cells." On his death he bequeathed it to the Archbishop of Sens. [Footnote: "A Painter's Camp," Lond. 1862, Bk. iii. c. 1.]
Another instance is from our own country. Mr. L.P. Jacks' very remarkable book, "Mad Shepherds," gives an account of one Toller of Clun Downs, who went deranged, took to the moors and lived for a considerable time, stealing sheep and poultry. "Beyond the furthest outpost of the Perryman farm lie extensive wolds rising rapidly into desolate regions where sheep can scarcely find pasture. In this region Toller concealed himself. About two miles beyond the old quarry, on a slaty hillside, he found a deep pit; and here he built himself a hut. He made the walls out of stones of a ruined sheepfold; he roofed them with a sheet of corrugated iron, stolen from the outbuildings of a neighbouring farm, and covered the iron with sods; he built a fireplace with a flue, but no chimney; he caused water from a spring to flow into a hollow beside the door. Then he collected slates, loose stones and casks; and by heaping these against the walls of the hut, he gave the whole structure the appearance of a mound of rubbish. Human eyes rarely came within sight of the spot; but even a keen observer of casual objects would not have suspected that the mound represented any sort of human dwelling. It was a masterpiece of protective imitation…. His implements were all of flint, neatly bound in their handles with strips of hide. There was an axe for slaughter, a dagger for cutting meat, a hammer for breaking bones, a saw and scrapers of various size—the plunder of some barrow on Clun Downs." There Toller lived for several months, and there he died, his hiding-place being known to one other shepherd, and to him alone; and there after his death he was buried. "My 'usband dug his grave wi' his own hands," said the widow of this shepherd, "close beside the hut, and buried him next day. He put the axe and slings just as he told him, wi' the stones and all the bits of flint things as he found 'em in the hut." [Footnote: "Mad Shepherds, and other Human Studies," Lond. 1910, p. 137 et seq.]
CHAPTER III
SOUTERRAINS
In the year 1866 the Prussian Army of the Elbe broke into Bohemia, when it was found that the inhabitants of a certain district had vanished along with their cattle and goods, leaving behind empty houses and stables. It had been the same during the Thirty Years' War, and again in the Seven Years' War, when the invaders found not a living soul, and contented themselves with destroying the crops and burning the villages and farms. Even the Government officials had disappeared. Whither had they gone? Into the rock labyrinths of Adersbach and Wickelsdorf, each accessible only through a single gap closed by a door. The mountain of what the Germans call Quadersandstein is four miles long by two broad, and was at one time an elevated plateau, but is now torn into gullies, forming a tangled skein of ravines, wherein a visitor without a guide might easily lose himself. The existence of this labyrinth was unknown save to the peasants till the year 1824, when a forest fire revealed it, but for some time it remained unexplored. [Footnote: It had indeed been mentioned by Dr. Kausch in his Nachrichten über Böhmen, 1794; but he lamented its inaccessibility.]
As Adersbach and Wickelsdorf lie on the frontier of Bohemia and Silesia, the existence of this region of cliffs and natural refuges had been kept secret by the natives, who looked upon it as a secure hiding- place for themselves and their chattels when the storm of war swept over the Riesen Gebirge. But the fatal fire of 1824 betrayed their secret to the world, and after a little hesitation, thinking to make profit out of it as a show-place, paths were cut through it, and it was advertised in 1847. When, in 1866, the Prussians passed by, they incurred neither the risk nor the trouble of hunting out the refugees from their place of concealment.
The rocks run up to 200 feet, the loftiest being 280 feet. They assume the most fantastic shapes. The passage through the fissures is so narrow that in some places it can be threaded by one man alone at a time, the others following in single file. A rivulet, clear as crystal, traverses the network of gullies, and in one place forms a tiny cascade. One nook is called the Southern Siberia, because in it the snow lies unmelted throughout the summer.
At intervals the rocks fall back and form open spaces, and at one describe an amphitheatre upon a vista of rolling forest.
But if this "petrified forest," as it has been called, served as a refuge for the peasants in troublous times, it has also been employed by brigands as their fastness whence to ravage the country and render the roads perilous. But of their exploits I shall have more to say in the chapter on robber-dens.
Caverns, as well as chasms, have always served this same purpose.
There is something remarkably human and significant in the prophecy of Isaiah relative to the coming of the Judge of all the earth: "They shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty." And in the Book of Revelation: "And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men, and the chief captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman, and every free man, hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains."
As the first men found their refuges and homes in caves and rock shelters, so the last men, with the instinct implanted in them from the first and never eradicated, will fly to the earth as a hiding-place, just as a frightened child flies to the lap of its mother.
When Ahab persecuted the prophets, Obadiah hid them by fifties in a cave. After the battle of Bethhoron the five kings of the Amorites hid themselves in the cave of Makkedah. When the Midianites oppressed Israel, the latter "made them the dens which are in the mountains, and caves and strongholds." From the Philistines "the people did hide themselves in caves and in thickets and in high places, and in pits." Twice did Elijah take refuge in a cave.
What took place in Palestine, took place in every part of the world wherever there are limestone and chalk and volcanic breccia and sandstone. It would seem as though a merciful Providence had not only provided the first shelters for man against the inclemency of the weather, but had also furnished him with places of secure refuge against the violence of his fellow-man. As sure as the rabbit runs to its hole on the sight of the sportsman, so did the oppressed and timorous when the slayer and the marauder appeared.
In the South of France, where caves abound, the unhappy Gauls fled from Cæsar and concealed themselves in them. He bade his lieutenant Crassus wall up the entrances. When the Armenians fled before Corbulo—"fuere qui se speluncis et carissima secum abderent"—he filled the mouths of the caverns with faggots and burned them out. [Footnote: Tacit., "Annals," xvi. 23.]
When Civilis rose in insurrection against Vespasian, he was joined by a young native, Julius Sabinus from Langres, who boasted that, in the great war with the Gauls, his great-grandmother had taken the fancy of Julius Caesar, and that to him he owed his name.
After the death of Nero, the Druids had come forth from the retreats where they had remained concealed since their proscription by Claudius, and proclaimed that "the Roman Empire was at an end, and that the Gallic Empire was come to its birth." Insurgents rose on every side, and Julius Sabinus assumed the title of Caesar. War broke out; confusion, hesitation, and actual desertion extended through the Colonies, and reached the legions. Several towns submitted to the insurgents. Some legions yielding to persuasion, bribery, or discontent, killed their officers and went over to the rebels. The gravity of the situation was perceived in Rome, and Petilius Cerealis was despatched to crush the revolt. The struggle that ensued was fierce but brief, and Civilis was constrained to surrender. Vespasian being disinclined to drive men or matters to an extremity, pardoned him; but no mercy was to be extended to Julius Sabinus. After the ruin of his cause, Sabinus took refuge underground in one of those retreats excavated in the chalk beneath his villa, and two of his freedmen were alone privy to the secret. The further to conceal him, they set fire to his house, and gave out that he had poisoned himself and that his dead body had been consumed in the flames. His young wife, named Eponia, was in frantic despair at the news; but one of the freedmen informed her of the place of his retreat, and advised her to assume the habit and exhibit the desolation of widowhood, so as to confirm the report they had disseminated. "Well did she play her part," says Plutarch, "in this tragedy of woe." She visited her husband in his cave at night, and left him at daybreak, but at last refused to leave him at all. At the end of seven months, hearing talk of the clemency of Vespasian, she set out for Rome taking her husband with her, disguised as a slave, with shaven head and a dress that rendered him unrecognisable. But friends who were in her confidence dissuaded her from prosecuting the journey. The imperial clemency was not a quality to be calculated upon with confidence. They accordingly returned to their subterranean abode. There they lived for nine years, during which, "as a lioness in her den," says Plutarch, "Eponia gave birth to two young whelps, and suckled them at her own breast." At length they were discovered, and Sabinus and his wife were brought before Vespasian.
"Caesar," said Eponia, showing him her children, "I conceived and suckled them in a tomb, that there might be more of us to entreat thy mercy." But the Emperor was not disposed to be clement to one who pretended to inherit the sacred Julian blood, and he ordered Sabinus to be led to the block. Eponia asked that she might die with her husband, saying: "Caesar, do me this grace, for I have lived more happily underground and in darkness than thou hast done in the splendour of thy palace."
Vespasian fulfilled her desire by sending her also to execution; and Plutarch, their contemporary, expressed the general feeling in Rome, when he adds: "In all the long reign of this Emperor there was no deed done so cruel, and so piteous to look upon; and he was afterwards punished for it, for in a brief time all his posterity was cut off."
In 731 the Saracens, masters of the peninsula, poured over the Pyrenees, and entered the Septimania. They had come not to conquer and pillage, but to conquer and occupy. They had brought with them accordingly their wives and children. They took Narbonne, Carcassone and Nimes, besieged Toulouse, and almost totally destroyed Bordeaux. Thrusting up further, they reached Burgundy on one side and Poitou on the other. Autun was sacked, and the church of S. Hilary in Poitiers given to the flames. The Christians, wherever met with, were hewn down with their curved scimitars; they passed on like a swarm of locusts leaving desolation in their wake. Those of the natives who escaped did so by taking advantage of the subterranean refuges either natural or artificial that abounded. And that they did so is shown by the relics of Merovingian times that have been found in them.
The Mussulmans were routed at Poitiers by Charles Martel. Three hundred thousand Saracens, say the old chroniclers, with their usual exaggeration, fell before the swords of the Christians. The rest fled under the walls of Narbonne.
Between 752 and 759 Pepin the Short resolved on the conquest of Septimania, i.e. Lower Languedoc. The Goths there had risen against the Arabs and appealed for his aid. Nimes, Agde, Beziers, Carcassonne opened their gates, but Narbonne resisted for seven years. When it surrendered in 759, the Empire of the Franks for the first time touched the Eastern Pyrenees. Pepin now picked a quarrel with Waifre, Duke of Aquitaine, and crossing the Loire made of the unhappy country a hunting-ground for the Franks. He delivered the land over to a systematic devastation. From the Loire to the Garonne the houses were burnt, and the trees cut down. "The churches, the monasteries, and secular buildings were reduced to ashes. Vineyards and fields were ravaged, and the inhabitants put to the edge of the sword. Only a few strong places escaped the fury of the soldiers…. The city of Cahors fell into the power of the conqueror and was reduced to the same pitiable condition into which it had been brought by the Saracens. The inhabitants of Quercy who survived owed this to the subterranean retreats which they had made and to the caverns in the rocks that had served them as refuges during the incursion of the infidels. The principal caves are situated on the Banks of the Lot at Cami, Luzech, Vers, Bouzier, S. Cirq, La Toulsanie, Larnagol, Calvignac, S. Jean de Laur, Cajarc and Laroque-Toirac, to above Capdenac; on the banks of the Célé, at Roquefort, Espagnac, Brengues, S. Sulpice, Marcillac, Liauzun, Sauliac, Cabrerets; on the banks of the Dordogne at Belcastel, La Cave, Le Bon Sairon, Mayronne, Blansaguet, Montvalent, Gluges, Saint Denis, &c., and between the rivers, Autoire, Gramat, S. Cirq d'Alzou, Rocamadour, S. Martin de Vers, Crass Guillot, to Vers among the high cliffs athwart which runs the Roman aqueduct, which in certain places, behind its high walls, could shelter a great number of the inhabitants. These caverns are still called Gouffios, Gouffieros, or Waiffers, from the name of Duke Waifre. [Footnote: Lacoste's derivation is absurd; Gouffieros comes from Gouffre, a chasm.] They were closed by a wall, of which there are remains at Canis, at Brengues, and at S. Jean de Laur, on the rock that commands the abyss of Lantoui. This last cavern is the most remarkable of all, as it is at but a little distance from the castle of Cénevières, which was one of the principal strongholds of the Duke of Aquitaine in Quercy." [Footnote: Lacoste, Histoire de Quercy, Cahors, 1883, i. pp. 267-8.]
The wretched country had to suffer next from the expedition of the Northmen, who pushed up every river, destroying, pillaging, and showing no mercy to man or beast. The most redoutable of these pirates was Hastings, who ravaged the banks of the Loire between 843 and 850, sacked Bordeaux and Saintes and menaced Tarbes. In 866 he was again in the Loire, and penetrated as far as Clermont Ferrand. There seemed to be no other means of appeasing him than by granting him the country of Chartres. But this did not content his turbulent spirit, and at the age of nearly seventy he abandoned his county to resume his piracies.
An Icelandic Saga relating the adventures of a Viking, Orvar Odd in Aquitaine, describes how he saw some of the natives taking refuge in an underground retreat, and how he pursued and killed them all. [Footnote: Fornmanna Sögwr, Copenhagen, 1829, ii. p. 229.]
In the persecution of the Albigenses at the instigation of Pope Innocent III. the unfortunate heretics fled to the caves, but were hunted, or smoked out and massacred by the Papal emissaries. Nevertheless, a good many escaped, and in 1325, when John XXII. was reigning in Avignon, he ordered a fresh battu of heretics. A great number fled to the cave of Lombrive near Ussat in Ariège. It consists of an immense hall, and runs to the length of nearly four miles. In 1328 the papal troops, to save themselves the trouble or risk of penetrating into these recesses after their prey, built up the entrance, and left from four to five hundred Albigenses along with their bishops to perish therein of starvation. Of late years the bones have been collected, removed, and buried. From 1152, the Bordelois, Saintonge, Agenois, Perigord, and the Limousin were nominally under the English crown. But the people did not bear their subjection with patience, and often rose in revolt, and their revolts were put down with ferocity. As to the Barons and Seigneurs of Guyenne, they took which side suited their momentary convenience, and shifted their allegiance as seemed most profitable to them. But the worst season was after the Treaty of Bretigny in 1360, when a vast part of France, from the Loire to the Pyrenees was made over to the English. The Hundred Years' War was the consequence, of which more shall be said in the fifth chapter. Froissart describes the condition of the country: "Matters were so woven together there and the lords and knights were so divided, that the strong trampled down the weak, and neither law nor reason was measured out to any man. Towns and castles were intermixed inextricably; some were English, others French, and they attacked one another and ransomed and pillaged one another incessantly."
Under these circumstances it may well be understood that if Nature herself had not of her own accord furnished the miserable, harassed people with refuges, they would themselves have contrived some. As we shall see they did this, as well as make use of the natural provision supplied for their safety.
Of refuges there are two kinds, those patiently and laboriously excavated under the surface of the soil, and those either natural or contrived high up in the face of inaccessible cliffs.
Each shall be dealt with; they are different in character. The town of Saint Macaire on the Garonne is walled about. But the walls did not give to the citizens all the security they desired; the ramparts might be battered down, escaladed, or the gates burst open. Accordingly they excavated, beneath the town, a complete labyrinth of passages, chambers, halls, and store-rooms into which they might either retreat themselves or where they might secure their valuables in the event of the town being sacked.
At Alban in Tarn there are retreats of like nature under the houses, refuges at one time of the persecuted Albigenses, at another of the inhabitants secreting themselves and their goods from the Routiers. At Molières in Lot they are beneath the church, and the approximate date can be fixed when these were excavated, as Molières was founded in 1260.
Bourg-sur-Garonne is likewise honeycombed with such retreats, so is Aubeterre, of which more hereafter. The network of underground galleries and chambers is now closed, because the soft chalk rock has fallen in in several places. At Ingrandes-sur-Vienne there are three groups of these refuges, extending to a considerable distance. At Chateau Robin in the Touraine is a chalk cliff that rises above the road to the height of sixty feet and is crowned by a tumulus. In its face are two sets of caves, one superposed over the other. This upper cave or shelter is the most ancient, and dates from prehistoric times, but has been utilised much later. The lower cave is exposed by the widening of the road which has obliterated the original face of the cliff and the original entrance, having made three openings by cutting into a chamber to which formerly there was but a single entrance. The plan of the excavation was made by M. Antoine and communicated to the "Bulletin de la Société Archéologique de Touraine," in 1858, but I will give a description from the pen of a later visitor.
"The upper rock-shelter has been dug out or enlarged with a pick. The stone is a tender tufa, containing a quantity of little cores of black silex, giving it a spotty appearance. It was quite impossible to cut the stone so as to give a smooth surface.
"The most mysterious portion, however, of the whole is certainly the lower range of vaults, a subject of terror to the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, who believe them to be the abode of the devil. Some persons have visited them, but very few have explored them. Having calculated on the assistance of a poacher of some repute as a fearless fellow, he pointblank refused to accompany me when I proposed an expedition into the cave. I applied to a man of more resolution, a landowner at Arzay-le-Rideau, who readily volunteered his assistance; but when we arrived on the spot, contented himself with showing me the entrance, but declined to adventure himself within, though he assured me he had visited the interior some five-and-twenty or thirty years ago.
"These excavations have now several openings upon the road; the two principal are accessible enough, if one is suitably dressed, for beyond the entrance one has to crawl on hands and knees, and this is but the initiation of other discomforts.
"The entrances are, so to speak, in the ditch of the road to Azay. The most practicable of them, and that by which M. Antoine and I penetrated, is the easternmost of the three, and is marked A on the plan, and it gives access to a small triangular chamber C; but the entrance is so low that one can only enter on one's knees or in a doubled position. Further on it is loftier. On advancing to the end one leaves on the right a sort of staircase B cut in the rock, but very worn, which formerly ascended spirally to the upper cave, but is now without issue.
[Illustration: Plan of the Refuge of Château Robin (Indre et Loire).]
"At the bottom of the chamber C a very narrow passage turns at a right angle and gives access to a large hall E that is sustained by a pillar F. This pillar is three feet square and the vaulted chamber may be 15 to 18 feet square and 5 feet high. On the left a great pier G allows of two passages I I which lead to the other openings that gape upon the road, and turning to the right give access to the further depths of the underground retreat. A passage H is, however, the most direct means of communication between the cavern E and the larger hall J to which also access is obtained through the openings I I separated by the pillar S.
"The cavern J, the largest of all, is 25 feet long by 15 feet wide at the one end and 24 feet at the other. It is supported by the pillar K, shaped to suit the widening of the hall. At the bottom of this chamber is a staircase L descending from the floor and without any breastwork to protect it, and therefore dangerous, as it goes down 6 feet, and is but about a foot and a half wide. This staircase is 12 feet long, and the passage M that is a continuation of it is hardly more than 4 feet high at the entrance, and is nearly 20 feet long, so that one has to creep along it, bent double, assisted by one's hands.
"In this position it is absolutely impossible for one to turn round, so narrow is the passage. At this point a difficulty that is not anticipated arrests many a visitor. Water rises through the stones that form the floor and contributes to reduce the height of the gallery. If one elects to continue, there is no choice but to take a bath that reaches to one's middle. At a distance of nearly 7 feet comes a right angle, and the passage goes on for 6 feet, then turns to the left by an obtuse angle and pursues its course for 12 feet, then again turns to the right by another obtuse angle, and for 15 feet more one is still half under water, till N is reached, after which the level of the floor rises, as does also the ceiling; one is able to stand erect alongside of another person. In face of one, the wall is cut perpendicularly and seems abruptly to close the passage. However, at a few inches above the soil is a little opening D, formed like the mouth of an oven, and giving indications of a space beyond. In diameter it is about 1 foot 6 inches; by crawling through this hole, an achievement difficult to accomplish, as one cannot even use the elbows to work one's way forward, the explorer descends into a semicircular hall P whose vault is arched and is supported by two oval pillars, 7 feet high. The hall is 24 feet deep and 18 feet wide at the entrance, and is rounded at the further extremity. The soil in this chamber is encumbered with stones and rubbish thrown in from an opening at R, which seems to communicate with other subterranean excavations." Nothing was found in these chambers and passages that could give an approximate date, but in the upper "abris" was some Gaulish pottery. The water that had half filled the lower passage is due to the river having been dammed up for a mill, and so having raised the level considerably. Originally the passage was certainly dry.
Although this souterrain réfuge is curious, yet it does not present some of the peculiarities noticeable in others—that is to say, elaborate preparations for defence, by contriving pitfalls for the enemy and means of assailing him in flank and rear.
The usual artifice for protection was this. The entrance from without led by a gallery or vestibule to an inner doorway that opened into the actual refuge. The passage to this interior doorway was made to descend at a rapid incline, and as it descended it became lower, so that an enemy entering would probably advance at a run, and doubled, and would pitch head foremost into a well, from 20 to 30 feet deep, bottle- shaped, sunk in the floor immediately before the closed and barred door, and which was gaping to receive him. Such a well-mouth would usually have a plank crossing it, but in time of danger this plank would be removed. To make doubly sure of precipitating the assailant into it, a side-chamber was contrived with slots commanding the doorway, through which slots pikes, spears and swords could be thrust.
Beside these contrivances there were also lateral recesses in which the defenders might lurk in ambush, to rush forth to hew at the enemy, or at least to extinguish his torch. Almost invariably these hypogees have two exits or entrances, so that those within could escape by one should the enemy force the other, or endeavour to smoke them out. Moreover, to keep up a circulation of air, and to obviate the contingency of being smoked out, these underground retreats are almost invariably supplied with ventilating shafts. The marks made by the implements employed in hewing the rock are always distinctly recognisable. Moreover within, sunk in the floor, are silos for the storage of grain, the soil often somewhat higher about their orifices than elsewhere, and sometimes provided with covers. Niches for lamps may be seen, also cupboards for provisions, in which have been found collections of acorns, walnuts, hazel-nuts and chestnuts carbonized by age.
[Illustration: Sections.
Château of Fayrolle (Dordogne).
A. Entrance.
B. Continuation, unexplored.
C. Shaft.
DD. Doorways.
E. Modern entrance.
FF. Store chambers.
G. Large chamber.
H. Slot for stabbing assailants.
K. Ventilating shaft.]
A typical souterrain réfuge is that of the Château de Fayrolle, not far from Riberac on the Dordogne.
It was accidentally discovered when the proprietor was levelling for terraces and gardens. A glance at the plan will save a description.
A refuge at S. Gauderic has been explored. The region is one of lacustrine deposits called the Sandstone of Carcassonne; it is friable, argilaceous marl. The opening into the hypogee is in the middle of a field, and there are no indications around of the deposition of the material extracted in the formation of the retreat, so as to betray its presence. The visitor descends by a dozen steps into a long corridor, sinuous, and inclining downwards, about 1 foot 8 inches wide, and 4 feet 6 inches high. The passage exhibits rebates in several places, into which door-frames had been fitted, as well as square holes into which the beams were run that fastened the doors. It leads past several side-chambers into which the defenders might retire, so as to burst forth suddenly and unexpectedly on the foe, smite him and extinguish any torch he bore. The corridor leads to a rectangular hall 22 feet long and 7 feet high, vaulted and ventilated by three circular airholes, 6 inches in diameter. There are numerous silos in the floor, and fragments of coarse grey pottery turned on the wheel have been found there. [Footnote: Révue de l'Art Chretienne, Paris, 1868, p. 498 et seq.]
M. L. Druyn, in his La Guyenne Militaire, Bordeaux, 1865, gives the following account of a refuge he explored. "Ascending the valley that separates the castle of Roquefort from the church of Lugasson, after having passed the village of Fauroux, one reaches, on the left side of the road, a splendid quarry of hard stone, but a few paces further on, upon the same side, the stone becomes soft. Here on the right, in a little coppice beside the road, is found a place of refuge of which I give the plan as accurately as it was possible for me to take it where one had to crawl on hands and knees, and sometimes wriggle forward lying on one's stomach, over earth that was damp and rubble fallen from above, and in corridors completely filled by one human body.
"The entrance is at A on a level with the soil outside against the rock, but this cannot have been the original place of admission. It is a round hole and very narrow. The real entrance was at K, where one can distinguish a circular opening like the orifice of a silo, but which is now in the open and is choked with stones; or else at the end of the gallery H B. The chamber Y containing silos for preservation of grain must have been the furthest extremity. It is 6 feet 3 inches high, and the floor is higher above the mouth of the silos than elsewhere. The cavern is hewn out of the rock. All the chambers are circular. They are vaulted for the most part in the form of low cupolas. The domes of some are so low that one cannot stand upright in them. The corridors are still lower than the chambers, and one can only get along them by creeping. The extremities of the corridors and the entrances to the chambers had doors originally. One can see the notches for the reception of the closing beams. I saw no trace of hinges. The passages are all arched over in semicircle."
[Illustration: Cluseau de Fauroux.]
Lacoste, speaking of the Saracen invasion and devastation of Quercy, says that "in Lower Quercy, where caverns are not common as they are in Upper Quercy, the inhabitants dug souterrains with a labour that only love of life could prompt. Three of vast extent have been discovered at Fontanes, Mondoumerc, and Olmie. That of Mondoumerc is cut in the tufa, and is about 20 feet deep. It consists of an infinity of cells, or small chambers, united by a corridor. But the vastest and most remarkable for its extent and the labour devoted on it, is that of Olmie. The chambers are scooped out of a very hard sandstone. In some of them are little wells or reservoirs that were filled with water as a precaution against thirst, if refugees were obliged to remain long in this asylum. The passages, with their turns, constitute a veritable labyrinth whence it would be hard to find one's way out without the assistance of a guide."
The entrance to these hiding-places was either under a ledger stone in a church, or through a cellar, or half-way down a well, or in a thicket.
It must be remembered that it was the duty of every feudal seigneur to provide for the safety of his vassels, and the security of their goods. Consequently a great number of such souterrains are under castles or in the grounds of a feudal lord. The rock on which his towers stood was often drilled through and through with galleries, chambers, and store places, for this purpose. On the alarm being given of the approach of an army marching through the land, of a raid by a marauding neighbour, or the hovering of a band of brigands over the spot, within a few hours all this underground world was filled with ploughs, looms, bedding, garments, household stuff of every description, and rang with the bleating of sheep, the lowing of oxen, the neighing of horses, and the whimpering of women and children. At Vendôme, the rock on which stands the castle is riddled with passages and halls, access to which is obtained not from the castle, but from the town. At Lavardin by Montoire it is the same. At Paulin in Tarn is a noble castle standing on a rock 300 feet high, and in this rock are storerooms, halls, a kitchen, a winding staircase. At Montvalon- Tauriac, in the same department, under the castle are refuges and granaries. At Murat in Cantal is the castle of Anterroche, and the rocks about it are traversed with galleries leading to chambers containing silos. At Salles-la-Source in Aveyron, in a cleft of the plateau, is the castle of the Count of Armagnac, and here also there is the same provision. At S. Sulpice in Tarn are the remains of a castle built in 1247, with its chapel over crypts and galleries carved out of the living stone. At Contigne, in Maine-et-Loire, is the manor of Gâtines, underneath which are souterrains that extend for a mile, with store-chambers and chapels, hewn out of the tufa. I might mention a hundred more. But all these pertain to a period before the feudal system had sunk into one of oppression, and when the vassals had confidence in their seigneur. In process of time the conditions altered, and then they contrived their own private hiding-places from their lords and masters.
The stories everywhere prevalent where there are castles, that there are under them passages connecting them with a church, a river, or another castle, are probably due to the fact of there having been these subterranean retreats intended for the use of the vassals. But when these latter ceased to look to their lords to protect them, and cast about instead to shelter themselves from their lords, the original purport of these souterrains was forgotten and misinterpreted.
One has but to look through the brief notices of towns and villages in Joanne's Departmental Geographies to see what a number of these refuges are already known to exist in France. And he records, be it remembered, only the most interesting. There are thousands more that have either not yet been discovered or remain unexplored. Some are revealed by accident; a peasant is ploughing, when his oxen are suddenly engulfed, and he finds that they have broken through the roof of one of these hiding-places. A gentleman is building his chateau, when in sinking his foundations he finds the rock like a petrified sponge—but not like a sponge in this, that the galleries are artificial. A paysan lets himself down his well to clean it out, as the water is foul. He finds that in the side of the shaft is the opening of a passage; he enters, follows it, and finds a labyrinth of galleries.
As an instance of the abundance of the souterrains in France, I will take the department of Vienne and give in a note below a list of the communes where they are known to be, from De Longuemar, Géographie du dep. de la Vienne, Poitiers, 1882, and also from several editions of Joanne's Geography. [Footnote: Natural grottoes that may have served as refuges are not included. Availles, Bellefonds, Béthines, Béruges, Bonnes, Bussières, Château Gamier, Champniers, Curzay, Civeaux, Gouex, Ingrandes, S. Julien Lars, Jazneuil, Leugny- sur-Creuse, Loudun, Lautiers, Lusignan, Marnay, Mairé-le-Gautier, S. Martin-Lars, S. Martin-la-Rivière, Maslou Montmorillon, Mazerolles, Mondion, Maulay, Montreuil-Bonnin, Naintré, Prinçai, Romagne, S. Remy- sur-Creuse, Saulgé, Nouvaille, Persac, S. Savin, Sossais, Thuré, Usson, Varennes, Le Vigean, Vénièrs, Vellèches, Verrières, Venneuil-sur-Biard. Several of these are under churches, others under castles. At some of these places are three or more distinct souterrains.]
Victor Hugo, in his Quatrevingt Treise, speaking of the war in La Vendée, says: "It is difficult to picture to oneself what these Breton forests really were. They were towns. Nothing could be more secret, more silent, and more savage. There were wells round and small, masked by coverings of stones or by branches. The interiors at first vertical, then carried horizontally, spread out underground like tunnels, and ended in dark chambers." These excavations, he states, had been there from time immemorial. He continues: "One of the wildest glades of the wood at Misdon, perforated by galleries and cells, out of which came and went a mysterious society, was called 'The Great City.' The gloomy Breton forests were servants and accomplices of rebellion. The subsoil of every forest was a sort of sponge, pierced and traversed in all directions by a secret highway of mines, cells and galleries. Each of these blind cells could shelter five or six men. Usually the cover, made of moss and branches, was so artistically fashioned that, although impossible on the outside to distinguish it from the surrounding turf, it was very easy to open and close from the inside. In several of these forests and woods there were not only subterranean villages grouped about the burrow of the chief, but also actual hamlets of low huts hidden under the trees. These underground belligerents were kept perfectly informed of what was going on. Nothing could be more rapid, nothing more mysterious, than their means of communication. Sometimes they raised the cover of their hiding-places and listened to hear if there was fighting in the distance." He mentions the ability of the ambushed men to spring up, as it were, under the feet of the armies sent against them. And to show the numbers of the concealed forces, he continues: "There are in existence lists which enable one to understand the powerful organisation of that vast peasant rebellion. In Isle-et- Villaine, in the forest of Pertre, not a human trace was to be found, yet there were collected 6000 men under Focard. In the forest of Meullac, in Morhiban, not a soul was to be seen, yet it held 8000 men. These deceptive copses were filled with fighters, lurking in an underground labyrinth."
On March 26, 1807, Napoleon demanded a fresh conscription of 80,000 men. This was the third levy that had been called for since the Prussian War began. The three conscriptions supplied no less than 240,000 men in seven months, and the call for the third produced consternation throughout France. The number of young men who reached the age of eighteen annually in half a year, more than the entire annual generation, had been swept off to lay their bones in the East of Europe. Great numbers of young fellows fled to the woods, caves, and secret refuges, and concealed themselves; and the gendarmes were employed in hunting them out, but not often with success unless aided by a traitor. Again in 1812, when Napoleon meditated an invasion of Russia, fresh calls were made on the male population. Every male capable of bearing arms was forced to assume them, and again, as in 1807, the young men disappeared as rabbits underground. It is quite possible that the peasants, who have found these refuges so convenient in the past, should know more about them and where they are situated than they pretend, thinking that at some future time, another revolution or another German invasion, the knowledge may prove serviceable.
And now let us turn to Picardy, perhaps the one of the ancient provinces of France most undermined. On the night of February 13, 1834, after heavy rains, a portion of the wall of the apse of the parish church of Gapennes, half-way between Aussy-le-Château and S. Ricquier, collapsed, and in the morning the inhabitants of the commune were stupefied to see the desolation of the holy place. Not only was a large breach gaping in the sanctuary, but all the walls of the chancel were fissured, and the pavement of the nave was upheaved in places and in others rent.
At first it was supposed that this was the result of an earthquake, but after a while the true cause was discovered. The church had been erected over a vast network of subterranean passages and chambers, and the roofs of some of these had given way. This led to an exploration, and the plan of this subterranean refuge—for such it had been—was traced as far as possible.
But Gapennes is not the only place where such retreats exist throughout the province. Something like a hundred have been found, and more are every now and then coming to light. Indeed, it may safely be said that there is scarcely a village between Arras and Amiens and between Roye and the sea, betwixt the courses of the Somme and Authie, that was not provided with these underground refuges. The character of all is very much the same. They consist of passages communicating with square or circular chambers that served as stores. They have been described at length by M. Bouthers in Mémoires de la Société d'Archéologie du département de la Somme, Amiens, 1834, t. i.
To what date, or period rather, do they belong?
Some doubtless are of extreme antiquity, but the majority are comparatively modern. It is a significant fact that the entrance to perhaps the majority is in the sacristy of the parish church, and in that at Gapennes care was taken not to undermine the tower of the church. M. de Carpentin, who explored and reported on the excavation at Gapennes, remarks on the care taken to so distribute the chalk brought up from these passages and vaults that no heaps were anywhere visible.
"The motive that can have induced the undertaking of such an extensive work can only have been that necessity drove the inhabitants to create for themselves a refuge in time of war." In it he found two pieces of common pottery, a lock and a hinge of iron, some straw and leather soles of women's shoes. He adds: "At the entrance of several of the chambers the stone is worked to receive doors, and here portions of decayed wood were found. And many of the chambers had their walls blackened by smoke as of lamps."
At Naours in Somme, the underground galleries have been explored thoroughly; there are several circular chambers for stores, and corn has been found in them, also fourteen gold coins of Charles VI or Louis XIV. In all there are 201 galleries and 300 chambers and the labyrinth extends to the distance of 6000 feet. At Santerre, which possesses three of these refuges, that portion of its territory was called Territorium Sanctæ Libertatis.
The north-east of France, Picardy and Artois, were always exposed to attack from pirates by sea, Northmen and Saxon, and from invaders over the border. But none of these can have exceeded in barbarity that of 1635 to 1641, when Spanish armies—the first under John de Werth and Piccolomini, 40,000 in number, and made up of Germans, Hungarians, Croats as well as Spaniards—poured over the provinces committing the most frightful atrocities. And precisely to this period some of the refuges may be referred.
A MS. account of this invasion, by a priest of Hiermont, named Claude Goddé, leaves this in no manner of doubt. He says: "The Spaniards committed great outrages in Picardy, as they did later in 1658. These wars compelled the inhabitants of Hiermont in 1647 to construct the quarry which we now see. This quarry or cavern, which is a great masterpiece, was first undertaken by five or six of the inhabitants "— he gave their names. "They first of all dug out the entrance in 1647, but owing to its having given way several times, had to be repaired, and was not completed till 1648. The other inhabitants, seeing its great utility, wanted also to have their chambers, but they were not admitted unless they contributed to the cost of the undertaking, and to this they willingly agreed. This quarry was of great service to the inhabitants in the Wars of Louis XIV. against England, Holland, and the Empire during the years 1708, 1709, 1710 and 1711, which were the days of Marlborough. It was accordingly made by the inhabitants of Hiermont, to hide themselves, their cattle, their grain and their furniture, to preserve them from pillage by the soldiers, whether of the enemy or French. Each family had its own chamber."
In a procès of 1638, one of those interrogated, a nun named Martha Tondu, stated that at Reneval and the neighbouring villages "the peasants are on the look out, and if alarmed, retire and conceal their cattle in ditches and quarries, without abandoning their houses or neglecting their agricultural work."
Some, accordingly, of these subterranean refuges are of comparatively late date; but this does not apply to all. At every period of danger, instinctively the peasants would take advantage of the nature of the chalk to form in it suitable hiding-places, and although some of the finds in these labyrinths are of recent date, others go back to the Gallo-Roman period. In the Arras and Cambrai Chronicle of Balderic (1051), we are told that in the fifth century in those parts a persecution of the Christians occurred, on the invasion of the barbarians, and that the priests celebrated the Divine Mysteries in secret hiding-places. "Many," he adds, "were suffocated in caves and in subterranean passages."
There is, in fact, evidence both from archaeology and from history that these refuges were taken advantage of, and doubtless extended from a remote antiquity down to the eighteenth century.
It was not against the foreign foe only that the peasants excavated their underground retreats. Froissart paints the chivalry of his time in the brightest colours, and only here and there by a few touches lets us see what dark shadows set them off. Who paid for the gay accoutrements of the knights? Who were the real victims of the incessant wars? From whom came the ransom of King John and of the nobles taken at Creçy and Poitiers? From the peasant. The prisoners allowed to return on parole came to their territories to collect the sums demanded for their release, and the peasant had to find them. He had his cattle, his plough and tumbril. They were taken from him; no more corn was left him than enough to sow his field. He knew how he would be exploited, and he hid his precious grain that was to make bread for his wife and children. The seigneur endeavoured to extort from him the secret as to where it was concealed. He exposed the man's bare feet before the fire; he loaded him with chains. But the peasant bore fire and iron rather than reveal the hiding-place. Here is Michelet's account of the seigneur in the first half of the fifteenth century. "The seigneur only revisited his lands at the head of his soldiery to extort money by violence. He came down on them as a storm of hail. All hid at his approach. Throughout his lands alarm resounded —it was a sauve-qui-peut. The seigneur is no longer a true seigneur; he is a rude captain, a barbarian, hardly even a Christian. Écorcheur is the true name for such, ruining what was already ruined, snatching the shirt off the back of him who had one; if he had but his skin, of that he was flayed. It would be a mistake to suppose that it was only the captains of the écorcheurs—the bastards, the seigneurs without a seigneurie, who showed themselves so ferocious. The grandees, the princes in these hideous wars, had acquired a strange taste for blood. What can one say when one sees Jean de Ligny, of the house of Luxembourg, exercise his nephew, the Count of Saint-Pol, a child of fifteen, in massacring those who fled? They treated their kinsfolk in the same manner as their enemies. For safety—better be a foe than a relation. The Count d'Harcourt kept his father prisoner all his life. The Countess of Foix poisoned her sister; the Sire de Gial his wife. The Duke of Brittany made his brother die of starvation, and that publicly; passers-by heard with a shudder the lamentable voice pleading piteously for a little bread. One evening, the 10th of January, the Count Adolphus of Gueldres dragged his old father out of bed, drew him on foot, unshod, through the snow for five leagues to cast him finally into a moat. It was the same in all the great families of the period—in those of the Low Countries, in those of Bar, Verdun, Armagnac, &c. The English had gone, but France was exterminating herself. The terrible miseries of the time find expression, feeble as yet, in the 'Complaint of the poor Commoner; and of the poor Labourers.' It comprises a mixture of lamentations and threats; the starving wretches warn the Church, the King, the Burgesses, the Merchants, the Seigneurs above all, that 'fire is drawing nigh to their hostels.' They appeal to the king for help. But what could Charles VII. do? How impose respect and obedience on so many daring men? Where could he find the means to repress these flayers of the country, these terrible little kings of castles? They were his own captains. It was with their aid that he made war against the English." [Footnote: Mist, de France, v. p. 184 et seq.]
Thus, the subterranean refuges that had served at one time as hiding- places against Saracens, Normans, English, became places of retreat for the wretched people against their own masters. They no longer carried their goods into the souterrains under the castles, but into refuges contrived by themselves in the depths of forests, known only to themselves; hidden, above all, from their seigneurs.
The peasantry might have said then, what was said long after by Voltaire: "Il faut être dans ce monde enclume ou marteau; j'étais né enclume." Voltaire, however, speedily became a hammer, and after 1789 the Tiers État also became a hammer, and the Noblesse the anvil.
In Iceland there were underground retreats, as we learn from the same Saga that tells us of those in Aquitaine. Orvar Odd found a king's daughter concealed in one. So, also, a very large one in Ireland is spoken of in the Landnama Bok. In England we have, both in Essex and in Kent, subterranean passages and chambers very similar to those described in Picardy and in Aquitaine. These also are excavated in the chalk. They are the so-called Dene Holes, of which there are many in Darenth Wood and near Chislehurst, and they have given occasion to a lively controversy. Some have supposed them to be retreats of the Druids, some that they were places of refuge during the invasions of the Saxons first, and then of the Danes, and others again contend that they were merely quarries for the excavation of chalk to burn into lime.
Here is an account of the Dene Hole at Chislehurst by Mr. W. J. Nichols. [Footnote: Nichols (W. J.), "The Chislehurst Caves," Journal of the Archaeological Association, Dec. 1903.] "At the foot of the hill is a gap, which is the present entrance to the caves. A guide meets us here, who, unlocking a door, and switching on the electric light, introduces the visitor to a gallery or tunnel, about 150 feet long, 10 feet to 12 feet high, and with a width of 12 feet to 15 feet, narrowing to about 7 feet at the roof. This, and the galleries so far explored, have been cut through the chalk bed, at a depth of about 6 feet below the Thanet sand which covers it. At the end of the gallery, extending both right and left, are passages of like character. These again open into others so numerous that the visitor is fairly bewildered, and loses all idea of the direction in which he is travelling. The effect of the coloured electric lamps on the old chalk walling is remarkably beautiful. Proceeding on our way we get beyond the range of the electric lamps. Here candles or hand-lamps are lighted; and we pass, in Cimmerian gloom, through a succession of galleries of various dimensions, some of which, being only 4 feet wide and 5 feet high, are possibly of earlier construction than those already described. There is one gallery of the last-mentioned height and width 63 feet long, with several sharp turns which formerly terminated in a chamber about 12 feet high and 10 feet wide, and a like length, and near it is a seat cut into an angle of the walling. At no great distance from this chamber and near a Dene-hole shaft is a short gallery, at the end of which is a shaft originally level with the flooring, but now bricked round and further protected by an iron cover. On removing the cover and lowering a lamp, a well of excellent workmanship is discovered. Owing to the quantity of material thrown down from time to time by explorers, its present depth is no more than 43 feet. Further progress is made, and presently we notice a streak of daylight some distance ahead; here we find that we have reached the foot of a shaft 85 feet deep, which, though now partly covered in, had its mouth in what is at the present time the garden of a modern villa."
There are numerous other Dene Holes or Danes' Pits at East Tilbury, Crayford, and Little Thurrock. As to the theory that they were places of Druidical worship, we may dismiss it as not deserving serious consideration.
At East Tilbury the entrance to the Danes' pit is from above, by narrow passages that widen and communicate with several apartments, all of regular forms. One of these pits consists of a shaft descending to chambers arranged like a sixfoiled flower. The shaft is 3 feet in diameter and 85 feet deep. This may be likened to one at Doué-la- Fontaine (Maine et Loire), where a descent is made under a private house into an area from which radiate on all sides chambers, some of which contain tombs.
That these Dene Holes were used as hiding-places when the sails of the Danish Vikings appeared on the horizon is probable enough, but originally they were chalk quarries—some very ancient—for British coins have been found in them. The existence of old lime-kilns near the Chislehurst caves places their origin beyond a doubt. Chalk was largely exported in early times from the Thames to Zealand, whence it was passed through the Low Countries and used in dressing the fields. Altars to Nethalennia, the patroness of the chalk quarries, have been found in the sand on the coast of Zealand; some bear votive inscriptions from dealers in British chalk, and Pliny, writing of the finer quality of chalk (argentaria) employed by silversmiths, obtained from pits sunk like wells, with narrow mouths, to the depth of a hundred feet, whence they branch out like the adits of mines, adds, "Hoc maxime Britannia utitur." [Footnote: Roach Smith, Collectanea Antiqua, vi. p. 243, "British Archæological Assoc. Journal," N.S., ix.-x. (1903 and 1904).]
In Cornwall, moreover, there are what are locally called fogous. These are either excavated in the rock with passages leading to the sea or to houses, or else they are built of stone slabs standing erect, parallel and covered with other slabs leading to chambers similarly constructed, and all buried under turf or sand. Of the former description there is a very interesting example at Porthcothan in S. Ervan; of the latter the most remarkable is at Trelowaren. The former may have been excavated by smugglers. An interesting account of the excavation of two caves at Archerfield, in Haddingtonshire, is given in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland for 1909. Both caves are natural, but one had been walled up in front, with a doorway and window and with oven; both had paved hearths in the centre, and there was evidence that they had been tenanted some time after the Roman occupation of Britain, as among the fragments of pottery found was some Samian ware. It would appear that both had been inhabited simultaneously, but not consecutively, for a lengthy period, and no doubt can exist that they were mere rock refuges. In a note to the article we read: "On the coast of Island Magee (Ireland) there is a cave, south of the Gobbins, which has been frequently used as a place of refuge. So late as 1798 it was inhabited by outlaws, who constructed a kind of fortification at the entrance, the remains of which still exist." [Footnote: Cree (J. R.), "Excavation of Two Caves," in "Proceedings of the Soc. of Arch. of Scotland," Edin., 1909, vol. xliii.]
A cave in the Isle of Egg, one of the Hebrides, has a very narrow entrance, through which one can creep only upon hands and knees, but it rises steeply within and soon becomes lofty, and runs into the bowels of the rock for 225 feet. The stony, pebbly bottom of this cavern was for long strewn with the bones of men, women and children, the relics of the ancient inhabitants of, the island, two hundred in number, of whose destruction the following account is given. "The Macdonalds, of the Isle of Egg, a people dependent on Clanranald, had done some injury to the Lord of Macleod. The tradition of the isle says that it was by a personal attack on the chieftain, in which his back was broken; but that of the two other isles bears that the injury was offered by two or three of the Macleods, who, landing upon Egg and behaving insolently towards the islanders, were bound hand and foot, and turned adrift in a boat, which the winds safely conducted to Skye. To avenge the offence given, Macleod sailed with such a body of men as rendered resistance hopeless. The natives, fearing his vengeance, concealed themselves in the cavern; and, after strict search, the Macleods went on board their galleys after doing what mischief they could, concluding the inhabitants had left the isle. But next morning they espied from their vessels a man upon the island, and immediately landing again, they traced his retreat by means of a light snow on the ground to the cavern. Macleod then summoned the subterranean garrison, and demanded that the inhabitants who had offended him should be delivered up. This was peremptorily refused. The chieftain thereupon caused his people to divert the course of a rill of water, which, falling over the mouth of the cave, would have prevented his purposed vengeance. He then kindled at the entrance of the cavern a large fire, and maintained it until all within were destroyed by suffocation." [Footnote: Lockhart's "Life of Sir Walter Scott," Edin., 1844, p.285.]
A no less horrible deed was committed during the campaign of Essex against the Irish rebels in 1575. This shall be given in the words of Froude. [Footnote: "Hist. of England," 1870, x. p. 527 et seq.]
"On the coast of Antrim, not far from the Giant's Causeway, lies the singular island of Rathlin. It is formed of basaltic rock, encircled with precipices, and is accessible only at a single spot. It contains an area of about 4000 acres, of which a thousand are sheltered and capable of cultivation, the rest being heather and rock. The approach is at all times dangerous; the tide sets fiercely through the strait which divides the island from the mainland, and when the wind is from the west, the Atlantic swell renders it impossible to land. The situation and the difficulty of access had thus long marked Rathlin as a place of refuge for Scotch or Irish fugitives, and besides its natural strength it was respected as a sanctuary, having been the abode at one time of Saint Columba. A mass of broken masonry on a cliff overhanging the sea is a remnant of the castle, in which Robert Bruce watched the leap of the legendary spider. To this island, when Essex entered Antrim, Macconnell and the other Scots had sent their wives and children, their aged, and their sick, for safety. On his way through Carrickfergus, when returning from Dublin, the Earl ascertained that they had not yet been brought back to their homes. The officer in command of the English garrison was John Norris, Lord Norris's second son. Three small frigates were in the harbour. The sea was smooth; there was a light and favourable air from the east; and Essex directed Norris to take a company of soldiers with him, cross over, and kill whatever he could find. The run up the Antrim coast was rapidly and quietly accomplished. Before an alarm could be given the English had landed, close to the ruins of the church that bears Saint Columba's name. Bruce's castle was then standing, and was occupied by a detachment of Scots, who were in charge of the women. But Norris had brought cannon with him. The weak defences were speedily destroyed, and after a fierce assault, in which several of the garrison were killed, the chief who was in command offered to surrender if he and his people were allowed to return to Scotland. The conditions were rejected; the Scots yielded at discretion, and every living creature in the place, except the chief and his family, who were probably reserved for ransom, were immediately put to the sword. Two hundred were killed in the castle. It was then discovered that several hundred more, chiefly mothers and their little ones, were hidden in the caves about the shore. There was no remorse—not even the faintest perception that the occasion called for it. They were hunted out as if they had been seals or otters, and all destroyed. Surleyboy and the other chiefs, Essex coolly wrote, 'stood upon the mainland of Glynnes and saw the taking of the island, and was likely to have run mad for sorrow, tearing and tormenting himself, and saying that he had there lost all that ever he had.' According to Essex's own account, six hundred were thus massacred. He described the incident as one of the exploits with which he was most satisfied; and Queen Elizabeth in answer to his letters bade him tell John Norris, 'the executioner of his well-designed enterprise, that she would not be unmindful of his services.'" The neighbourhood of Gortyna in Crete has a mountain labyrinth, and during the revolt of the Cretans against the Turks in 1822-28, the Christian inhabitants of the adjacent villages, for months together, lived in these caves, sallying forth by day to till their farms or gather in their crops, when it was safe so to do. None could approach within range of the muskets pointed from the loopholes at the entrance without being immediately shot down; nor could either fire or smoke suffocate or dislodge the inmates, as the caves have many openings.
Less happy were the Christian refugees in the cave of Melidoni. In 1822, when Hussein Bey marched against the neighbouring village, the inhabitants, to the number of three hundred, fled to the cave, taking their valuables with them. Hussein ordered a quantity of combustibles to be piled at the entrance and set on fire. The poor wretches within were all smothered. The Turks waited a few days, and then entered and rifled the bodies. A week later, three natives of the village crept into the cavern to see what had become of their relatives. It is said that they were so overcome by the horror of what they witnessed, that two of them died within a few days. Years after, the Archbishop of Crete blessed the cavern, and the bones of the victims of Turkish barbarity were collected and buried in the outer hall, which has in its centre a lofty stalagmite reaching to the summit, and the walls on all sides are draped with stalactites.
We must not pass over without a word the treatment of the Arabs in Algeria by the French troops, when General Lamorcière suffocated the unfortunate refugees in the caves whither they had fled, in the same way as Caesar's general had suffocated the Gauls.
CHAPTER IV
CLIFF REFUGES
I have divided Refuges into two classes—those that have been burrowed under the soil, and those that open in the face of a cliff. Occasionally they run one into another, and yet they materially differ. The first have their entrances elaborately concealed, whereas the latter are bare to the face of day, and no concealment is possible or attempted. Those who had recourse to the first trusted in being able, should the entrance be discovered or betrayed, to defend themselves by various devices, whereas those who resorted to the latter relied on their inaccessibility.