character to the place, but which has also a history of its own distinct
from the place, has yet to be spoken of. We have kept it for the last,
both because of its special history and because it seems to be the only
thing which is locally recognised as a place of pilgrimage. Tell your
driver to take you to Jublains, and he will at once take you to "le camp
de Jules Cesar." He knows the other objects perfectly well; but, unless
he is specially asked, he assumes that this one point is the object of
the journey. Nor is this wonderful; for the camp, fortress, citadel,
whatever it is to be called, though most assuredly not the work of the
great Dictator, is after all the great object at Jublains, which gives
Jublains its special place among Gaulish and Roman cities. More than
this, it is the one object which stands out before all eyes, and which
must fix on itself the notice of the most careless passer-by. Suddenly,
by the roadside, we come on massive Roman walls, preserved to an unusual
proportion of their height. Their circuit may in everyday speech be
called a square, though strict mathematical accuracy must pronounce it
to be a trapezium. Near the entrance we mark some fragments gathered
together, and the eye is regaled, as it so often is in Italy and so
seldom in Britain and Northern Gaul, with the sight of the Corinthian
acanthus leaf. The wall itself, on the other hand, is of that
construction of which we see so much in Britain and in Northern Gaul,
but which is unknown in Rome itself. Here are the familiar layers of
small stones with the alternate ranges of bricks. We enter where the
eastern gate has been, and find a second line of defence, a wall of
earth, square, or nearly so, but with its angles rounded off, with its
single entrance near the south-east angle carefully kept away from
either of the approaches in the outer wall. Within this again is the
fortress itself, again quadrangular, with projections at the angles. The
more finished parts of its walls, the gateways, and the parts adjoining
them, give us specimens of Roman masonry whose vast stones carry us
back, be it to the wall of _Roma Quadrata_ at one end or to the Black
Gate of Trier at the other, and which specially call back the latter in
the marks of the metal clamps which have been torn away. Details must
be studied on the spot or in the works of M. Barbe, which is nearly the
same thing, as they seem to be had only on the spot. But there are not
many remains of Roman work more striking than this, and it is more
striking still if we try to make out its probable history from the
internal evidence, which is all that we have to guide us.
That this fortress does not belong to any early period of the Roman
occupation is clear from its construction, the alternate layers of brick
and stone, and the bricks with wide joints of masonry between them, as
in all the later Roman work. And again, the fact that among the
materials of the fortress have been found pieces of other buildings used
up again might suggest that it was not built till after some time of
change, perhaps of destruction, had come over the city. But it is the
numismatic evidence which clearly parts off the history of the fortress
from the general history of the city. Jublains has no inscriptions to
show, but its numismatic wealth is great. Among the many coins found,
not many are earlier than the time of Nero, and those which there are
are chiefly coins of Germanicus. From Nero to Constantine coins of all
dates are common. It is M. Barbe's inference that it was in Nero's reign
that the place began to be of importance, and that its great temple was
built. But the numismatic stores of the fortress taken by itself tell
quite another story. There, not a coin has been found earlier than
Domitian, nor one later than Aurelian, saving a chance find of two
Carolingian pieces of Charles the Bald and a modern French piece of
Charles the Sixth. Again, though coins are found from Domitian onwards,
it is only with Valerian and Gallienus that they become at all common,
while the great mass belong to Tetricus and his son. One alone is of
Aurelian. That is to say, of 169 coins found in the fortress, 151 come
in the twenty years from 258 to 273, while 110 belong to the single
reign of the Tetrici. After Aurelian there is nothing earlier than
Charles the Bald. It is clear then that the fortress must have been
deserted in the reign of Aurelian; it is clear that the time of its
chief importance must have been just before, in the time of Tetricus. It
looks as if the fortress had had but a very short life. The conclusion of
the local antiquaries is that it was most likely raised by Postumus, and
that it perished in some revolt or sedition, or merely as the result of
the overthrow of Tetricus by Aurelian. A mere glance at the building
would have tempted us to put it a little later, to have set it down as
part of the defences of Probus, or even of some Emperor much later than
Probus. But the numismatic evidence seems irresistible; it seems
impossible to escape the conclusion that this splendid piece of Roman
military work belongs to the middle of the third century, and that it
was forsaken, most likely slighted, within a very few years after its
first building.
This is as curious and conclusive a piece of internal evidence as we
often light upon; but it must be remembered that all this applies only
to the fortress, and not to the town of Naeodunum. That had a much longer
life. It began long before the fortress, and it went on long after. The
diggings at Jublains have brought to light a great number of Christian
Frankish objects, which shows that the place kept on some measure of
importance long after the Teutonic conquest of Gaul. It seems also to be
looked upon as a kind of secondary seat of the Cenomannian bishopric.
But it must either have died out bit by bit, or else have perished in
some later convulsion. The local inquirers seem to incline to attribute
the final destruction of Naeodunum, the City of the Diablintes in the
nomenclature of the time, to the incursions of the Northmen in the ninth
century. That they did a great deal of mischief in Maine is certain; and
is a likely enough time for the city to have been finally swept away as
a city, and to have left only the insignificant modern village which has
grown up amongst its ruins.
Jublains then, Diablintes, Naeodunum, whatever it is to be called, has a
special place among fallen Roman cities. Aquileia and Salona once ranked
among the great cities of the earth; their destruction is matter of
recorded history. The destruction of Uriconium is so far matter of
recorded history that a reference to it has been detected in the wail of
a British poet. The fall of Anderida was sung by our own gleemen and
recorded by our own chroniclers. But the fall of Calleva and the fall of
Naeodunum are alike matters of inference. Geography shows that Calleva
fell in the northern march of Cerdic, and the most speaking of all Roman
relics, the treasured and hidden eagle, abides as a witness of the day
when our fathers overthrew it.[62] Naeodunum seems to have undergone no
such overthrow as those wrought by the Hun, the Avar, and the Saxon. But
the evidence of buildings and of coins reveals to us a most important
and singular piece of the internal history of the Roman province of
Gaul. The city of the Diablintes itself may have been finally swept away
by Hasting or Rolf; but the greatest thing in Naeodunum, the Roman
fortress, must have been, perhaps broken down, certainly forsaken, by
the hands of men who called themselves Romans, while its bricks and
stones were still in their first freshness. Nowhere is the truth more
strongly brought home to us that there is another kind of evidence
besides chronicles, besides even written documents, the evidence of the
works of the men themselves who did deeds which no one took the trouble
to record with the pen or with the graving tool.
THE CHURCHES OF CHARTRES AND LE MANS
1868
It is sometimes curious to see how far the popular fame of buildings is
from answering either to their architectural merit or to their historic
interest. Take, for instance, the two cathedrals of Chartres and Le
Mans, two cities placed within no very great distance of one another, on
one of the great French lines of railway, that which leads from Paris to
Brest. Chartres is a name which is familiar to every one; its cathedral
is counted among the great churches of Christendom; men speak of it in
the same breath with Amiens and Ely. Le Mans, on the other hand, is
scarcely known; we suspect that many fairly informed persons hardly know
where the city itself is; the cathedral is hardly ever spoken of, and,
we believe, is scarcely at all known, except to professed architectural
students. Yet, except that Chartres is nearer Paris of the two, one is
as accessible as the other; the historical associations of Chartres, as
far at least as Englishmen are concerned, certainly cannot be compared
to those of Le Mans; there is nothing at Chartres to set against the
early military and domestic antiquities of Le Mans; the secondary
churches of Le Mans distinctly surpass those of Chartres; though between
the two cathedral churches the controversy might be more equally waged.
Each has great and diverse merits; but for our own part, we have little
hesitation in preferring Le Mans even as a work of architecture; that it
is a building of higher historic interest there can be no doubt
whatever.
Both cities belong to a class of which we have few or none in England. A
Celtic hill-fort, crowning a height rising steeply from a river-side,
has grown into a Roman city, and the Roman city has remained to our own
times the local capital, alike civil and ecclesiastical. It would be
hardly possible to find a single town in England whose history has run
the same course--a course which is by no means peculiar to Chartres and
Le Mans, but which they share with many other cities in all parts of
Gaul. And Le Mans especially has a local history of unusual interest,
and that history is written with unusual clearness on the site and the
earliest remains of the town. But on that history we shall not at
present enlarge. Our present object is to compare the churches of the
two towns, especially the two great cathedrals, which, as usual, stand
within the earliest enclosure, and therefore upon the highest ground in
their respective cities.
Two or three events connect the cathedral of Chartres with general and
with English history. The first church of which any part survives is
that raised by Fulbert, the famous Bishop of Chartres in the early part
of the eleventh century, and the most diligent letter-writer of the
time. To this work, of which a vast crypt still remains, our great Cnut
was a benefactor. The dignity of the Lord of all Northern Europe has so
deeply impressed the writer of Murray's Handbook that he cuts him into
two, and speaks of the contributions of the Kings of England, France,
and Denmark. In the latter part of the next century, John of Salisbury,
so famous in the great struggle between Henry and Thomas, held the
Bishopric of Chartres. It was the spires of Chartres to which Edward the
Third stretched forth his hands when his heart smote him at the sound of
the thunder, and he vowed to refuse no honourable terms of peace. In was
in this cathedral that Henry of Navarre received the crown of France, a
new holy oil of Marmoutiers being extemporized to supply the place of
the inaccessible holy oil of Rheims. The history of the city and county
in earlier times is closely mixed up with those of France, Normandy,
Anjou, and Champagne. The counts of Chartres and Blois in the tenth,
eleventh, and twelfth centuries were men of importance in their day,
and one of them directly connected himself with England by a memorable
marriage. Chartres was long the dwelling-place of the excellent Adela,
the daughter of the Great William, the mother of King Stephen and of the
famous Bishop Henry of Winchester. But, while Chartres was thus closely,
though indirectly, connected with our history, it never, like Le Mans,
actually formed a part of the dominions of a common sovereign with
England and Normandy.
The cathedrals of Chartres and Le Mans are about as unlike as any two
great mediaeval churches well can be. Well nigh the only point of
likeness is that each possesses a magnificent east end of the thirteenth
century, of the usual French plan, with the apse, the surrounding
chapels, the complicated system of flying buttresses. But at Chartres
this east end is part of a whole. The crypt still witnesses to the days
of Fulbert, the lower stages of the western towers to those of Adela and
to those of John of Salisbury; but all the rest of the church, including
of course all the interior, is of an uniform style and design. The
church throughout follows the usual type of great French churches; the
eye accustomed to the buildings of England or Normandy misses the
central towers of Lincoln or of Saint Ouen's, but Chartres is not in
England or in Normandy, but in France, and its church is built
accordingly. A fairer question of taste is raised by the unequal spires
of the west front--a French feature again, but occasionally extending
into Normandy and England, as at Rouen, Llandaff, Lynn, and Canterbury
as it was. But it is only in so long and varied a front as that of Rouen
Cathedral that it is at all satisfactory. At Chartres the great south
spire is modern and of iron, but we believe it very well reproduces the
outline of the elder one of wood, and it certainly comes down heavily
and awkwardly upon the towers and upon the roof of the church. The upper
part of the north tower is frittered away with work of a later style.
Still, allowing for the diversity of the towers, which of course does
not appear inside, Chartres is a whole--a consistent, harmonious whole,
of great, though we cannot think of first-rate, excellence. How does
such a whole stand as compared with a building of strange, and at first
sight, unintelligible outline, formed by the juxtaposition of two parts,
each of admirable merit in itself, but which startle by their absolute
contrast in every way? Chartres was made, Le Mans eminently grew; and
different minds will be differently inclined in the comparison between a
single harmonious work of art and a union of two buildings widely
differing in date, style, and proportion. But, on the other hand, it
must be said that nothing at Chartres equals the parts of Le Mans
taken separately, and that, in the inside at least, the incongruity of
Le Mans is far from being felt in the unpleasant way that might have
been looked for.
[Illustration: Le Mans Cathedral, N.W.]
The general effect of Le Mans Cathedral, as seen from any point but the
east, is certainly perplexing. From the east indeed, from the open place
below the church and the Roman wall, once a marsh, the apse, with its
flying buttresses and surrounding chapels, rises in a grandeur before
which Chartres is absolutely dwarfed, and which gives Amiens itself a
very formidable rival. We here see the main source of our difficulties,
namely that the church has but a single tower, and that at the end of
the south transept. Viewed from any other point--looking up, for
instance, at the old town from the other side of the river--what one
sees is a lofty body with a tower at one end of it, which one is
inclined rashly to assume to be the nave, with a western tower, and a
lower body joining it at right angles. This last is the real nave of the
church, and a magnificent building it is. The truth is that, at Le Mans,
as in various other churches in France, the Gothic builders, from the
thirteenth century onwards, designed a complete rebuilding. They began
at the east, they rebuilt the choir and transepts, but they never got
any further, so that the ancient nave remains. So it is at Bordeaux and
Toulouse; so it is at Beauvais, where the small but precious fragment
of early work, which looks like an excrescence against the gigantic
transept--the _Basse Oeuvre_, as it is locally called--is really the
ancient nave--.[63] So it is in a certain sense at Limoges, where a gap
intervenes between the finished choir and transept and the western tower
of the original design. But in none of these cases, as far as we can
see, can the elder nave have at all approached the grandeur of the noble
work at Le Mans. It is a Romanesque building of the eleventh century,
reconstructed in the gorgeous style which prevailed towards the end of
the twelfth. The outer walls, except in the clerestory, are of the
former date, and the contrast in the masonry is very striking. Within,
the whole has been recast in the later form of Romanesque, but it has
not been wholly rebuilt. Columns with rich and highly classical
capitals, supporting arches which are just pointed, have been inserted
under the massive round arches of the original church, but the arches
are still there and visible. The triforium and clerestory have been
wholly reconstructed, or so thoroughly disguised that the old work does
not appear. This nave is one of those buildings which, in the infancy of
vaulting, their builders found it convenient to vault with one bay of
vaulting over two bays of arcade, as in the choir of Boxgrove in the
next century. The result is that the piers are alternately columnar and
clustered. Setting aside a few of the very grandest buildings of the
style--as one would hardly compare this nave with Peterborough, Ely, or
Saint Stephen's--this Romanesque nave of Le Mans is one of the finest
works of its kind to be found anywhere. And its juxtaposition with the
superb Gothic choir is less incongruous than might have been looked for.
The only fault is that, as it now stands, the nave ends abruptly to the
east with a mere vaulting rib, without any proper choir-arch. But this
fault is fully balanced by the glorious view of the choir thus given to
the whole church. That any one could compare the inside of Chartres with
the inside of Le Mans, thus seen, seems incredible. The height of Le
Mans is said to be a few feet greater than that of Chartres. It looks
half as high again. At Chartres the height is lost through the great
width, and through the use of a low spring for the vaulting arch. At Le
Mans everything soars as only a Gothic building, and pre-eminently a
French Gothic building, can soar. The pillars, of enormous height,
support the clerestory without a triforium. But the effect of the
triforium is there still. The aisles are double, and the inner
range--itself of the height of the nave of Wells and Exeter--is
furnished with a complete triforium and clerestory, which, seen between
the pillars of the apses, allow the sort of break which the triforium
gives to be combined with the grand effect of the full unbroken columns.
Something of the same kind is found at Bourges, and, on a much smaller
scale, at Coutances. The effect of the arrangement comes out in
perfection at Le Mans. Altogether, little as the building seems to be
known, the thirteenth-century work at Le Mans undoubtedly entitles it to
rank among the noblest churches of the middle ages. One point more on
the Romanesque church of Le Mans. The original design embraced two
towers at the end of the transept, like Exeter, Ottery, and seemingly
Saint Martin's at Tours. These towers were destroyed by order of William
Rufus, who charged the Bishop Hildebert with having used them to shoot
at the neighbouring castle.[64] The north tower has never been rebuilt;
its ruins are there to this day. The southern tower was again rebuilt at
the end of the twelfth century and finished in the fifteenth. This is
surely as speaking a bit of architectural history as one often finds.
[Illustration: Interior of Le Mans Cathedral]
The writer in Murray, in his zeal for the cathedral of Chartres, assumes
that no one will care to visit such inferior buildings as the other
churches of that city. Let no man be thus led astray. In the general
view of the city from the walks to the south-east, one of the most
effective views to be had of any city, two other churches stand out very
strikingly, the cathedral crowning all. Of these Saint Anian, we must
confess, is somewhat of a deceiver. The distant effect is good, but
there is little to repay a nearer examination. It is far otherwise with
the Abbey of Saint Peter, whose apse, though on a far smaller scale, is
distinctly more skilfully managed than that of the cathedral. The
disused collegiate church of Saint Andrew has some good Transitional
work, and Saint Martin-in-the-Vale, just outside the town, is a gem of
bold and simple Romanesque. But the secondary churches of Chartres do
not equal those of Le Mans, while Chartres is still further behind Le
Mans in military and domestic remains. At Le Mans the Abbey of La
Couture (_de cultura Dei_) is a perfect minster with two unfinished
western towers, a nave of Aquitanian width,[65] a fine Romanesque apse,
in which, if later windows have been inserted, some small fragments of
some early work have also been preserved. Beyond the Sarthe is another
fine Romanesque church, also a complete minster, the church of
Notre-Dame-du-Pre. A fine hospital, the work of Henry the Second, is now
perverted to some military purpose, and some military tomfoolery forbids
examination, in marked contrast to the liberal spirit which allows free
access to everything that the antiquary can wish to visit at
Fontevrault and at Saumur. But the ecclesiastical remains of Le Mans are
far from being the whole of its attractions. Its military and civil
antiquities are endless, and they are more characteristic. We have not
the least wish to depreciate Chartres. It is a highly interesting city;
it contains a magnificent cathedral and several other remarkable
buildings. But it cannot compare with Le Mans.
[Illustration: St. Martin-in-the-Vale, Chartres]
[Illustration: Apse of La Couture, Le Mans]
LE MANS
1876
We spoke some years ago of the architectural character of the chief
churches of Le Mans, especially in comparison with those of Chartres.
But the comparison was of a purely architectural kind, and hardly
touched the general history and special position of the Cenomannian city
among the cities of Gaul. That position is one which is almost unique.
The city of the Cenomanni, the modern Le Mans, has never stood in the
first rank of the cities of Europe, or even of Gaul; but there are few
which are the centres of deeper or more varied interests. Le Mans has at
once a princely, an ecclesiastical, and, above all, a municipal history.
It is true that its princely and its ecclesiastical history are spread
over many ages, while its municipal history is a thing of a moment; yet
it is the municipal history which gives Le Mans its special character.
Le Mans, in the course of its long history, has been many things; but it
is before all things the city of the _commune_. Among cities north of
the Loire--it might perhaps be unsafe to say among cities north of the
Alps--Le Mans shares with Exeter the credit of asserting the position of
a civic commonwealth in days when, even in more Southern lands, the
steps taken in that direction were as yet but very imperfect. And it was
against the same enemy that freedom was asserted by the insular and by
the continental city. The freedom of Exeter and the freedom of Le Mans
were alike asserted against the man who appeared in Maine as no less
distinctly the Conqueror than he appeared in England. Exeter, in her
character of commonwealth, checked the progress of William by the most
determined opposition that he met with in the course of his insular
conquest. Le Mans, conquered before William crossed the sea, threw off
his yoke when he was master of the island as well as of the mainland.
Had the men either of the island or of the mainland been capable of any
enlarged political combinations, England and Maine would have done
wisely to unite their forces against the common enemy. And it is just
possible that those obscure dealings of Earl Harold with the powers of
Gaul, which are dimly alluded to by the biographer of Eadward, may have
had some object of this kind. But, if so, nothing practical came of
them. Maine and England did nothing to help one another. In fact, when
Maine was won back to William's obedience, the work was largely done by
English hands, and those the hands of men who, there is some reason to
think, had Hereward himself as their captain. The actual relations
between England and Maine in the eleventh century were thus the exact
opposite of what they ought to have been. Englishmen appeared on the
mainland as the ravagers and conquerors of a district whose people ought
to have been their closest allies. Still even this kind of negative
relation does establish a kind of connexion between Maine and England.
Above all, it establishes a special analogy between the English city
which withstood the Conqueror, and the Gaulish city which revolted
against him, in the name of the same principle which a century later was
to do such great things among the cities of Lombardy.