hardly be said to have even seen the site. The house which represents it
has ceased to be a _chateau_ even in the latter sense. It stands
pleasantly at the end of the town, with fields beyond it, and a good
slope down to the river, if only it could be seen. But the whole way
from the castle to the Rille is blocked with modern buildings. We wish
that the home of Richer was in the same case as the head of the
_Oximenses_, where the gardens in the ditch do comparatively little
harm. Or rather we cherish a hope that the _vieux chateau_ may not be
the true _castrum de Aquila_. We cannot say that we saw any other castle
anywhere else at Laigle; but we saw one or two sites higher up the hill
where a castle might have stood very fittingly.
But the main object at Laigle is not Laigle. The place may be used, like
Argentan, as a centre for seeing several objects, and in the case of
Laigle the objects to be seen from the centre are certainly of higher
interest than the centre itself. There are the famous border castles of
Verneuil and Tillieres, easily to be reached by railway, and there is an
ecclesiastical spot of still higher fame which can in a rather
complicated way be reached by railway, but which it is pleasanter and
certainly more appropriate to take by road. Yet as a means of
approaching Ouche, Aticum, Saint-Evroul, even the road seems too modern.
It is essentially a place of pilgrimage, not a Canterbury pilgrimage,
but a pilgrimage to the cell of a hermit, to the _scriptorium_ of a
chronicler of whom we get more personally fond than of any other.
At Saint-Evroul we ought to think first of all of Saint Evroul; we do
think first of all of Orderic the Englishman, called in religion
Vital.[55] We called him just now a chronicler; but that is assuredly
not his right description. If he were more of a chronicler, that is, if
he told his story in a more orderly way, without so many repetitions and
runnings to and fro, that is, if he were other than the kindly,
gossiping, rambling old monk who has made Saint-Evroul a household word
for all students of English and Norman history in his own day we ought
not to feel so warmly drawn to him as we are. It was the home of Orderic
that we wished to see. But it was very hard to find out whether his home
had anything left to show us. Not a word could we find in any guidebook
to say whether the abbey was living or ruined or desecrated or wholly
swept away. It might be as unlucky as Avranches or as lucky as Saint
Peter-on-Dives. And a monastic site from which everything monastic has
been swept away is not so instructive as a fortified site from which the
fortifications are gone. We should be best pleased to find at
Saint-Evroul a church in which Orderic may have worshipped, but it would
be better to find a later church--we had almost said one with
discontinuous imposts to its pillars--rather than no church at all. We
set forth in faith, not knowing what we are to find, but determined that
we will at least see the place where the Ecclesiastical History of
Normandy was written. One little incident of the journey may be
mentioned. We reached Saint-Evroul; we saw more of Saint-Evroul's Abbey
than we had ventured to hope that we should find there. But before we
reached it our driver stopped near a house and buildings which seemed in
no way attractive. Asked why he stopped there, he said that was where
the landlady at Laigle had told him to stop. There were the great
glass-works for which Saint-Evroul is now best known. And it was the
Saint-Evroul of the glass-work that we were thought to have set forth to
see, not the Saint-Evroul of Orderic or of Saint Evroul himself.
Orderic, son of a French father and an English mother, born by the
banks of the Severn ten years after King William came into England, in
the year of the martyrdom of Waltheof, was before all things Orderic the
Englishman. If we are to take his words literally, English must have
been the only language of his childhood. He was sent in his childhood to
be a monk of Saint-Evroul;[56] one wonders why, as his father might
surely have found him a cell either in the Orleans of his birth or the
Shrewsbury of his adoption. Himself more truly the founder of Shrewsbury
Abbey than his patron, Earl Roger, Odelerius of Ettingsham, the married
priest, preferred Saint-Evroul to any other house of religion as the
home of his son. The Abbey had lately been set up again, after a time of
decay, by the bounty of several members of the houses of Geroy and
Grantmesnil, one of whom, Abbot Robert, who plays also a part in
Calabria and Sicily, was at least as turbulent as bountiful. But nothing
would have more deeply grieved the monastic soul of Orderic than the
thought that any one could think more of him than of the local saint and
first founder. "Father Evroul," "Pater Ebrulfus," the man of the world
who turned hermit in the days of Chlotocher, and around whose cell the
monastery first grew up, lived in the devout memory of his spiritual
children. One asks whether Orderic, "tenellus exsul" in his Norman
monastery, like Joseph in Egypt hearing a strange language, ever
stopped to think of the true meaning of his patron's name, how the
softened _Ebrulfus_ and _Evroul_ disguised the two fierce beasts which
went to make up the name of _Eoforwulf_. Perhaps, indeed, Orderic the
Englishman, and all other Englishmen, had some right to see a kinsman,
however distant, in the saint who bore so terrible a name. For Ebrulfus
came of the city or land of Bayeux, and in Chlotocher's day, and long
after, the land of Bayeux was still the _Otlingua Saxonica_, an abiding
trace of those harryings and settlements of Sidonius's times, which
planted the Saxon on both sides of the Channel. Still, to us Orderic is
more than Evroul, even in the form of Eoforwulf. It is for his sake that
we take our journey through the wood of Ouche till we come to the little
stream of the Charenton, where the hermit chose out his solitary cell,
where the monastery twice arose in his honour, and where now the
glass-works are thought to be a greater attraction than the monastery.
The remains of the abbey soon catch our eye, as we draw near from the
east side, the side of Laigle. They are not placed quite at the bottom
of the valley; they gently climb up the hill to the west, the hill up
which the small low street of Saint-Evroul leads to the highest point,
where we find another sign of our own day in the railway station. The
church of the monastery is a mere ruin; but it at least stands open to
the sky; it is not desecrated and disfigured by being put to any profane
use. Quite enough is left to put together the whole plan of the
building. There is perhaps a slight feeling of disappointment at finding
that here at Saint-Evroul there is nothing directly to remind us of the
man for whose sake we have come thither. We would fain see something
that had met the eyes of the island-born child in the first years of his
coming to his foreign home. We would fain see even the church of Robert
of Grantmesnil, much more the elder church from which the High
Chancellor of Duke Hugh the Great carried away the body of Saint Evroul
himself, as a piece of holy spoil which Normandy had to yield to
France.[57] We would fain see the cloister where in Orderic's day, King
Henry of England, victor of Tinchebray, sat a long time in thought, and
the chapter-house where the Lion of Justice conferred with the brethren,
where he praised their good order and devotion, and was, at his earnest
request, admitted to their spiritual fellowship. And truly nowhere in
kingdom or duchy had he a more loyal subject than the chronicler who
knew so well what a work it was to bring some approach to peace and
order into a land torn in pieces by noble brigands. Hopes of this kind,
hopes of any immediate memory of the days of Orderic or of days before
Orderic are not fated to be gratified; but we have done well to come to
Saint-Evroul none the less.
The ruined church offers us much to see and study. The only thing that
suggests itself as a possible memorial of Orderic's day is the
foundation of the apse. But as it is only a foundation and not a crypt,
there is no need to think that he ever saw it. The apse itself has
fallen; but traces enough are left to show that inside at least it was
polygonal. But it was an apse of the old simple pattern, without
surrounding aisles and chapels. It could not have been there when the
young novice from Shropshire came to Saint-Evroul. It may have been
built in the latter part of his long sojourn. And the stumps of the
great round pillars of the choir are most likely of the same date. The
use of such pillars is a fashion English rather than Norman; but it is
hard to believe that the "tenellus exsul" from Ettingsham brought with
him any architectural tastes. The choir was of some length, and its
length was broken by an apsidal chapel on each side, pointing north and
south, so as to form a kind of small eastern transept. But the greater
part of what is left is very fine work of the thirteenth century,
finished at the west end in the fourteenth. The pillars and arches of
the nave are broken down, leaving only stumps; but enough is left at the
west end and at the crossing to show the design. Clustering shafts
surrounded a central pillar; the mouldings of the arches are, as often
happens in Normandy, as well and deeply cut as they would be in England.
Above the arcade was a tall clerestory, seemingly without any triforium
or with the triforium thrown into the clerestory. Altogether there is
about enough left to suggest the memory of Glastonbury, though
Saint-Evroul is certainly not on the scale of Glastonbury, even without
the western church. The west front must have been very remarkable. The
first impression on approaching from outside is that two western towers
stood out in front of the nave, as at Holyrood, or as the single towers
at Dunkeld and Brechin. A second glance shows that what seemed to be the
lower part of a south-western tower is really a building in advance of
such a tower. That is to say, a large porch, or rather portico, with
three tall arches, stood out in front of the western towers and of the
end of the nave. It must have looked just enough like Peterborough to
suggest Peterborough, but also to suggest the contrast between
Peterborough and itself. At Peterborough the great portico stands
indeed, as here, in advance of a west front with two towers. But it may
be said to have supplanted that front. One tower was never finished; the
other was thrown into insignificance. The portico is of the full height,
and became the real west front. Here at Saint-Evroul the portico was not
the whole of the west front, but only part; the towers must have risen a
long way above it. One would like to be able to judge of the effect of
such a design.
There is little or nothing left of the other buildings of the abbey,
except the gateway by which we enter, with a larger and a smaller
pointed arch. The field to the south of the church, where cloister,
chapter-house, refectory, and the rest must have stood, had a locked
gateway, and the owner had gone off with the key. But there seemed to be
nothing, at least nothing standing up. Yet we should have liked to see
at least the traces of the cloister on the southern wall. But Saint
Evroul is not forgotten in his own place, or even within the walls of
his own abbey. For a little chapel has been made within the buildings of
the gate-house. He has also a cross and fountain, of which the cross, a
modern one, is more visible than the fountain. And in the parish church
on the opposite hill some relics of the abbey, indeed of the saint
himself, are still preserved. There is specially a good fragment of an
ancient triptych. The surviving small church looks down on the relics of
the great one below. And the thought comes, so different from any
suggested by the monastic ruins of England, how short a time it after
all is since the great church of Saint-Evroul was a living thing as well
as the small one. A visitor of no wonderful age could do a sum and find
that his own father was at least able to walk and talk while Robert of
Grantmesnil had still a less famous, but perhaps less unquiet successor.
TILLIERES AND VERNEUIL
1892
Our second excursion from Laigle has quite another kind of interest from
that of Saint-Evroul. We go more strictly to see places, and not as it
were to commune with a single man. And the places that we go to see are
primarily military, and not ecclesiastical. We do not go for a great
church, not knowing whether we shall find it perfect or ruined, or
wholly swept away. We go to see two castles or sites of castles, knowing
that we shall find something more than their sites, and with a notion
that we shall also get something ecclesiastical thrown into the balance.
Our object is to see the two border castles of Tillieres and Verneuil,
both easily reached by railway from our central point at Laigle, and
which by a more roundabout way, may be reached from Evreux also.
Tillieres is famous in the early wars of Normandy and France. Verneuil
is best known in the days when Normandy had become the battle ground of
England and France, and when Scotland threw herself on the French side.
As a matter of fact, we saw Verneuil first; we then went on to
Tillieres, and thence back to Laigle, getting of course a second clear
view of Verneuil by the way. But it will be more convenient to speak
first of the place of more ancient fame.
Tillieres, Tillieres on the Arve, if it were left in its ancient state,
would be an almost ideal border-fortress. It is close indeed on the
border. When Wace describes Alencon, he tells us that one side of the
water was Norman and the other side was Mansel. So here at Tillieres one
side of the water was Norman and the other side was French. But the
stream of Arve at Tillieres is so much narrower than the stream of
Sarthe at Alencon that French and Norman stood much nearer together at
Tillieres than Mansel and Norman stood at Alencon. Alencon again, as far
as its history goes back, has always been a considerable town. Tillieres
is now a mere village, except so far as so many of these villages put on
the character of very small towns. But town or village, Tillieres is
simply something which has grown up at the foot of the castle, while at
Alencon one might say that one object at least of the castle was to
defend the town. There is high ground on each side of the stream; that
on the north side is Norman soil, that on the south is French. A
projecting point of the Norman height was seized for the building of the
great border-fortress of Normandy. A few dwellings of men, dependants
doubtless of the castle and its lords, arose under its shadow, just
within the Norman border. That this was done while France and Normandy
were still foreign and hostile lands is shown by the western doorway of
the church of Tillieres, a piece of plain Romanesque, of late eleventh
or early twelfth century. Meanwhile, it does not appear that the
opposite height was crowned by any French fortress. Tillieres must have
been a standing menace to France, without there being any standing
menace to Normandy back again. Here are our topographical facts, very
clear and simple, quite enough to account for the part which Tillieres
plays in the history of the Norman duchy.
That part may be told in a few sentences, but it is a striking story
none the less. Tillieres, _Tegulense castrum_, bears a name cognate with
the Kerameikos of Athens and with the Tuilleries of Paris. It was first
fortified by Duke Richard the Good, the Duke who would have none but
gentlemen about him, and in whose days the peasants arose against their
masters. He gave his sister Matilda in marriage to Odo, Count of
Chartres; he gave her lands by the Arve as her dowry; but when she died
childless, he held that he had a right to take them back again. To this
doctrine the widower naturally did not agree; disputes arose between the
two princes, and the fortress of Tillieres--one would like to know its
exact shape in those days--arose as a bulwark of Normandy, beneath
whose walls the Count of Chartres underwent a defeat at the hands of
Duke Richard's lieutenants. They were Neal of Coutances and Ralph of
Toesny, speaking names in Norman history. We next hear of Tillieres in
the young days of William the Great, when King Henry could no longer
endure such a standing menace to France as the castle above the Arve. It
is the Norman writers who tell us, and we have no French tale to set
against this, how the King of the French demanded the castle of
Tillieres--how the young duke's guardians found it prudent to yield to
his demand--how its valiant governor, Gilbert Crispin, refused to give
it up--how the united forces of France and Normandy constrained him--how
the border-fortress was burned before all men, while the King swore that
it should not be set again for four years. But they go on to tell us how
the faithless King went on into the land of Exmes, how he burned
Argentan, and came back to fortify Tillieres again as a bulwark of
France against Normandy.[58] Time passed on. King Henry fought with Duke
William at Val-es-dunes, and fled before him at Varaville; and, as a
fruit of the last Norman victory, Tillieres passed back again to its old
use as the border defence of Normandy.
With such a history as this, and with a site so well suited to the
history, one could wish that there was more at Tillieres to describe
than there actually is. We should be best pleased of all if the castle
hill of Tillieres was still crowned with an ancient donjon; next to that
we should like to see it in the same case as Exmes or rather as
Almeneches. But the height is taken possession of by a house of much
more pretension than the harmless farm at Almeneches, and the passing
wayfarer can do little more than follow the outer wall of the castle--a
wall with work of endless dates--round a good part of its compass.
Looking down from the height, looking up from the village, best of all
perhaps from a point of the railway just west of the Tillieres station,
the general relations of castle, village, stream, and the once hostile
hills beyond, can be well taken in; but not much more than the general
relations. And the village has little to show beyond its church; and
there the Romanesque doorway is the choicest thing, as being part of our
chain of evidence. But it seems not to be on this ground that the church
of Tillieres is counted among "historic monuments," that is, forbidden
to be pulled about by any one else, but destined sooner or later, to be
pulled about by the national powers. Its qualification for admission
into this class seems to be the _Renaissance_ choir. On the outside this
is about as poor a jumble of bad Gothic and bad Italian as can well be
thought of; within it has a somewhat better effect with a vault and rich
pendants. Still they are nothing like so striking as those in Saint
Gervase at Falaise, which do really make us wonder how they are kept up.
More really interesting, perhaps, is the wooden roof of the nave,
evidently as great a feat as a French artist was capable of in the way
of wooden roofs. And an eye from Somerset looks kindly at this
outlandish attempt to make a kind of coved roof, and to paint it withal.
Such a one hopes that the French Republic will not turn diocesan
architect, and try to get rid of it. But he thinks that he could show
better coved roofs at home, and he wonders why, if the coved shaped was
chosen, a system of South-Saxon tie-beams and king-posts was thrust in
as well.
We turn to the other famous border-fortress of Verneuil. Here the
position, as a position, is in no way to be compared to that of
Tillieres; but we have one grand military tower; we have a much larger
town, containing several important churches and houses, and one
ecclesiastical tower which may claim a place in the very first rank of
its own class. Verneuil is a border-fortress; but it is not so ideal a
border-fortress as Tillieres. It is not so close on the border; for here
Normandy has a small _Peraia_, a certain amount of territory beyond the
river. And, as Verneuil presented no such commanding point for a castle
site as Tillieres did, the fortress was not placed on a height at all,
but in the lower part of the town, to guard the stream. There is a
distinct ascent in Verneuil; but nothing like the slope at Tillieres
from the Norman castle down to the border-stream and from the
border-stream up again to the French hills. But there is enough rise to
make the grand ecclesiastical tower on the high ground stand out as the
most prominent object in the approach, while the grand military tower
down below makes no show at all. We were a little puzzled by Joanne's
account of Verneuil, in which he said that the castle had been
completely demolished, but that the donjon existed still. It seems that
at Verneuil, as at Argentan, castle and donjon are distinguished; but at
Verneuil castle and donjon are not, as at Argentan, separate buildings
joined only by a long wall; they stand close together and formed part of
one work. Nor is the castle as distinguished from the donjon, completely
demolished; there is a considerable fragment standing very near. The
donjon, called locally _Tourgrise_ from the colour of its stone, is a
round tower, not quite a rival of Coucy, but tall enough and big enough
to have a very striking effect. It has been lately restored or set up
again in some way, perhaps cleared out and roofed in. Anyhow Verneuil is
not a little proud of the fact, and marks its thankfulness by a great
number of rather foolish inscriptions. The tower is proclaimed to be the
work of Henry I., our Henry of Tinchebray, not the developed rebuilder
of Tillieres; but this seems out of the question, as the small
doorways--we cannot guarantee the windows--have pointed arches, which
seem to be original. But the ruined fragment of the castle hard by, with
its ruder masonry and a shattered round-headed window seemed certainly
to be as early as Henry's day and very likely a good bit earlier. Hard
by the donjon seems to be a small piece of town walls; otherwise the
walls have vanished, and are, as usual, marked by boulevards. That on
the north side still keeps the character of a rampart, and is a good
place for studying the most visible ornaments of the town.
Verneuil has much to show both in churches and houses. Of the latter,
besides a good many of timber and brick, which are always pleasant to
see, there are two which are more remarkable. One is a singularly good
bit of late Gothic with windows and a graceful _tourelle_. The other has
a _tourelle_ of the same kind, but it runs off into _Renaissance_. Both
have a curious kind of masonry, squares alternately of brick and stone.
The greatest church is that of Saint Mary Magdalen, in the great open
place in the upper part of the town. Here is the grand tower, built
between 1506 and 1530, a noble design, and carried out without any
infection of foreign detail. It is practically detached, standing at the
south-west corner of a low nave. If the nave had ever been rebuilt, as
was doubtless designed, to match the later and loftier choir, the
effect of the tower would have suffered a good deal. As it is, from some
points, where the nave is not seen at all, it reminded one a little of
Limoges Cathedral, as it stood before the rebuilding of the nave was
begun. It rises by two tall stages above the church; then the square
tower changes to an octagon, a very small octagon supporting one still
smaller. It would have been far better to have given the octagon more
importance, as in most of the other great examples, French and English,
starting with Boston stump. It is further complained, and the complaint
is true, that the upper part of the square tower looks top-heavy. It was
just the same with the other Magdalen tower at Taunton till its
rebuilding. Since then, strange to say, though no difference of detail
can be seen in the rebuilt tower, the effect of top-heaviness is gone.
In both cases that effect was, doubtless, due to the piling of stage
upon stage, without making them gradually increase in lightness and
richness towards the top, as at Bishops Lydeard. But it is not a case to
find fault; the vast height, the grandeur of design, the purity of
detail at so late a time, all mark this tower as one of the noblest
works of the late French Gothic. A little way to the west is another
tower, attached to a now desecrated church, we believe of Saint John,
which was clearly built as a rival to the Magdalen tower. It is rather
smaller, and in its lower stages plainer--no fault in that; but a
little higher it begins to Italianise, and then stops altogether. An
ugly modern top is all that answers to the upper stages and octagon of
the Magdalen. The people of the Magdalen parish must have been strongly
tempted to say of their nearest neighbours, "These men began to build,
and were not able to finish."