city is the moment of its short-lived republican independence. In the
case of Le Mans, as in the case of Exeter, we should be well pleased if
we knew more of the exact form of commonwealth which it was proposed to
establish, and, above all, of the relations which were to be maintained
between the city and the surrounding districts. Most likely nothing of
the kind was ever put into shape. The commonwealth of Le Mans and the
commonwealth of Exeter both sprang into being in a moment of patriotic
enthusiasm, when the city and the surrounding districts were fully
united in a vigorous effort against the common enemy. How the two were
to get on together in more settled times they most likely did not stop
to think. What we do know is that the citizens of Le Mans made a
_commune_, that the people of the country at large zealously supported
them, that the nobles swore to the new commonwealth unwillingly, and, in
some cases, even dishonestly. All that we know about the matter comes
from the historian of the Cenomannian Bishops, who first of all thinks
the _commune_ which the Norman Bishop naturally opposed to be a very
wicked thing, but who afterwards, when it came to actual fighting,
cannot help sympathising with the men of his own city. There was a
_commune_ of Le Mans, a _commune_ in which all Maine shared, a _commune_
which the Bishops and the nobles had to join against their will, and
which one of the nobles betrayed as soon as he could.[66] That is about
all our knowledge; it is just enough to make us wish to know a good deal
more. It is enough to throw over Le Mans and Maine an interest which is
shared by no other city and province of Northern Gaul; and it makes us
feel a kind of disappointment in the inevitable fact that the greatest
moment in the history of the city is exactly the one which has left no
trace in its existing monuments.
Of the times earlier and later than the republican movement of the
eleventh century Le Mans has abundant remains of all kinds. No city is
more distinctly the Gaulish hill-fort which has gradually swelled into
the Roman, the mediaeval, and the modern city. Yet the height of Le Mans
is neither so lofty nor so isolated as those of many of its fellows. It
is not a detached hill at all, nor does the city stand on the highest
ground in its own immediate neighbourhood; and on the eastern, the
inland side, the slope of the rising ground is very gradual. Yet the
site of the hill-fort which grew into the city was happily chosen. It
was pitched on the point where the high ground comes close to the river
Sarthe and rises precipitously above it. From the river side then, the
western side, Le Mans has most distinctly the character of a hill city,
which comes out much less strongly in the approach from the east, while
in the approach from the north, where there is an actual descent into
the ancient city, it is altogether lost. It is from the river side then
that those who wish--while there is yet time--to get a notion of what
the Cenomannian city was, either in Roman or in mediaeval times, must go
to look for it. The city has extended itself on this side as well as on
the others, but it has extended itself in the form of an outlying
suburb beyond the river. To the west, the north, and the south, the
spread of the modern town has done much to wipe out the ancient
landmarks.
The Roman remains of Le Mans show well how the conquering race in their
distant foundations knew how to adapt themselves to every kind of
position. There was one type of city which was preferred wherever the
ground allowed of it; but that type was freely forsaken whenever
practical necessity commanded that it should be forsaken. The hill of
Vindinum, Suindinum, Subdinnum, whichever form we are to choose, therein
differing from the hill of Isca, was not at all suited for the laying
out of a city according to the familiar type of a Roman _chester_. The
high ground immediately overlooking the river formed a long narrow
ridge, and the space included within the Roman walls--_la Cite_, as
distinguished from the more modern parts of the town--shows no approach
to a square, but forms an irregular figure, which only by a stretch of
courtesy can be called even an oblong. Within this again the chief
ecclesiastical street, the _Rue des Chanoines_, running parallel with
the more secular _Grande Rue_, bears in mediaeval documents the strange
title of _Vetus Roma_, which has been held to point to a still earlier
enclosure, that of the primitive Gaulish fort itself. Of the Roman
walls, whose construction, like that of most Roman walls in Gaul and
Britain, shows them to be not earlier than the third century, large
portions still remain; indeed a little time back it might have been said
that the river front of the wall, with its noble range of round
bastions, was all but absolutely perfect. On the other side, towards the
modern town, the wall was less perfect, but even there a great deal
could be made out. But the Roman walls did not take in the whole even of
the mediaeval city. In the thirteenth century an outer range of wall was
raised close to the stream, taking in the suburb of _La Tannerie_; an
extension to the south and south-east took in the quarter of Saint
Ben'et, and another suburb called _L'Eperon_. More remarkably still, at
the north-east corner of the Roman inclosure, the growth of the
cathedral of Saint Julian to the east, exactly as in the case of
Lincoln, overleaped the Roman wall and caused a further enlargement at
this corner. It should be noticed that, contrary to the general Gaulish
rule, the church of Le Mans stood in a corner of the original city, so
as to make somewhat of an ecclesiastical quarter after a fashion English
rather than Gaulish. In the Cenomannian state, the Prince, the Bishop,
and the citizens all held their distinct places, and it was reasonable
that their geographical quarters should be marked also. In fact, in the
great days of Cenomannian history the Bishop was a power independent
alike of Count and city. He owed temporal allegiance to neither, but
held directly of the King at Laon or at Paris. Had the development of
things in Gaul followed the same course as the development of things in
Germany, Maine might have seen, like so many German lands, the
ecclesiastical and the temporal principality and the free city, all side
by side, bound together by no tie beyond such degree of dependence as
any of them might have kept on the common centre. But when county,
bishopric, and city all came under the strong hand of the Norman, all
tendencies of this kind were checked. And they perished for ever when
Normandy and Maine, instead of external fiefs, became incorporated
provinces of the French kingdom.
Within and around the walls of the city there arose in different ages a
series of buildings, ecclesiastical, military, and civil, which might
claim for Le Mans a place among the cities of Gaul and Europe next after
those cities which had been the actual seats of imperial or royal
dominion. Above the river rose the double line of walls and towers,
Roman and mediaeval, and high above them the vast and wondrous pile of
Saint Julian's minster. On the side away from the river, the side
pointing towards the hostile land of Anjou, built on the Roman wall
itself and seemingly out of Roman materials, stood the palace of the
Counts, well placed indeed for Count Herbert, _Evigilans Canem_, to
sally forth on the nightly raids before which black Angers trembled.[67]
And besides the dwellings of the temporal and spiritual chiefs, the
ancient streets of Le Mans were set thick with houses, the dwellings of
priests and citizens, which showed how well both classes throve, and how
each did something for the adornment of the city in every form of art,
from Romanesque to _Renaissance_. But a little time back the traveller
might have seen at Le Mans more houses of the twelfth century than he
would see anywhere north of Venice. And besides the works of her own
princes, bishops, and citizens, Le Mans had also once to show the
grimmer memorials of her conquerors. But, as not uncommonly happens, the
memorials of the earlier time have outlived those of the later. At the
northern end of the city William thought it needful to strengthen his
greatest continental conquest by two distinct fortresses. Close by Saint
Julian's, just outside the eastern line of the Roman wall, and formed,
we may believe, out of its materials, rose the Castle, the _Regia
turris_. Some way to the north-east, at a greater distance from the
river, rose the fortress of _Mons Barbatus_ or _Mont Barbet_, this last
standing on higher ground than the city and the royal tower. But of the
royal tower itself, and of the fortress into which it grew in later
times, a few fragments only have escaped the politic destruction of the
days of Richelieu. Of Mont Barbet nothing is left but the _motte_ or
_agger_, dating doubtless from far earlier days, but which, as so often
happens, has outlived the buildings which were placed upon and around
it. One would have been well pleased to see the whole line of defence,
the double wall of the city, the double fortress of the Conqueror,
grouping, as they must have done, with the endless towers and spires of
the monastic and parochial churches of the city and its suburbs.
For, besides the great cathedral church within its walls, Le Mans was,
as it were, girded with great ecclesiastical buildings. Two noble
monastic churches, those of La Couture, on the south-eastern side of the
city, and of Le Pre, on the other side of the river, still remain; and
we have spoken of their architectural character in past years.[68] There
were also the Abbeys of Beaulieu, beyond the river, and of St. Vincent
opposite to it beyond Mont Barbet, of which the latter survives in the
shape of a _Renaissance_ rebuilding. And far away in a distant suburb to
the east is the hospital founded by the last native prince of Le Mans,
the great Henry, to whom his native city might seem as a central point
of his vast domain, insular and continental. In him the blood of all the
older rulers and enemies of Le Mans was joined together. The stock of
the old Counts and of the Norman conquerors, the blood of Helias and of
his Angevin representatives, all flowed together in the veins of the
King who was born within the walls of Le Mans, and who, if he did not
die within its walls, at least died of grief at seeing them in the hands
of his enemy.
[Illustration: Notre-Dame-du-Pre, Le Mans, N.E.]
But it is painful for one who remembers Le Mans only eight years back to
speak of what it is now. It is hard to believe that within that time Le
Mans has beheld no slight or unimportant warfare beneath its walls, and
that the city of Herbert and Helias bowed but yesterday to the power of
a third conquering William. Le Mans has lost something through the
foreign occupation, but the traveller needs to have it explained to him
what it has lost. When we hear that the Bishop's palace got burned by
the German invaders, it almost sounds as if Germans and Normans had got
confounded. But the damage wrought by the last conquerors is being
speedily made good on another site. It is the damage which is doing to
the city by the merciless hands of its own people that never can be made
good. One would have thought that the Cenomannian city on its height,
the proud line of its Roman bulwarks, the noble works of later days
which those bulwarks shelter, might have moved the heart of the most
ruthless of destroyers. It might have been a good work to clear away the
mean houses which cling to the Roman wall, and to let the mighty
rampart stand forth in all its majesty; but among those who have the
fate of the ancient city in their hands there is no thought of
preservation--destruction is the only object. We know not who are the
guilty ones. Perhaps there is some stuck-up Mayor or Prefect who would
think himself a great man if he could make Le Mans as ugly and
uninteresting as the dreary modern streets of Rouen or of Paris itself.
It is at all events certain that M. Haussmann was not long ago seen in
Le Mans, and such a presence at such a time is frightfully ominous. At
any rate the facts which can be seen by the traveller's own eyes are
beyond doubt. The later walls close by the river have been broken down
to leave fragments here and there as ornaments in a kind of garden, and,
worse still than this, the ancient wall has been broken through, and the
ancient city itself cleft in twain. By an amount of labour which reminds
one of Trajan cutting through the Quirinal, _la Cite_ has been cut into
two halves with a yawning gulf between them; the Roman wall is broken
through, and the very best of the twelfth-century houses has been
ruthlessly swept away. The excuse for this brutal havoc is to make a
road or street of some kind direct from the modern town to the river. If
the savages could have been persuaded to pay a visit to Devizes, they
might there have learned that the claims of past and present may be
reconciled. There the simple device of a tunnel carries the railway
under the ancient mound without doing the least harm; and a tunnel might
in the same way have connected the modern town with the Sarthe without
doing the least damage either to Roman walls or Romanesque houses. But
there are minds to which mere havoc gives a pleasure for its own sake. A
great part of Saint Julian's is more than seven hundred years old, and
in the eyes either of Bishop or of Prefect it may be ugly. The vast
_menhir_ which rests against one of its walls has seen many more than
seven centuries, and the most devoted antiquary can hardly call it
beautiful. When the Roman walls of Le Mans are not spared, nothing can
be safe. All that can be done is for those in whose eyes antiquity is
not a crime to run to and fro over the world as fast as may be, and see
all that they can while anything is left.
MAINE
1876
We have already spoken of the capital of the Cenomanni, and some mention
of the district naturally follows on that of the capital. In no part of
Gaul, in the days at least when Le Mans and Maine stand out most
prominently in general history, are the city and the district more
closely connected. Maine was not, like Normandy, a large territory,
inhabited to a great extent by a distinct people--a territory which, in
all but name, was a kingdom rather than a duchy--a territory which,
though cumbered by the relations of a nominal vassalage, fairly ranked,
according to the standard of those times, among the great powers of
Europe. Maine was simply one of the states which were cut off from the
great duchy of France, and one over which Anjou, another state cut off
in the like sort, always asserted a superiority. Setting aside the great
though momentary incident of the war of the _Commune_, the history of
Maine during its life as a separate state consists almost wholly of its
tossings to and fro between its northern and its southern neighbours,
Normandy and Anjou. The land of Maine, in short, is that of the district
of a single city, forming a single ecclesiastical diocese. In old times
it contained no considerable town but the capital; and even now, when
the old county forms two modern departments, with Le Mans for the
_chef-lieu_ of Sarthe and Laval for the _chef-lieu_ of Mayenne, the more
modern capital is still far from reaching the size and population of the
ancient one. Normandy, with its seven ancient dioceses, its five modern
departments, cuts quite another figure on the map. With so many local
centres, Rouen never was Normandy in the sense in which Le Mans
certainly was Maine; and the strong feeling of municipal life which, as
the history of the _commune_ shows, must have always gone on at Le Mans,
may have tended to make a greater concentration of the being of the
whole district in the capital than was found in other districts of the
same kind. Add to this, that, though the land of Maine contained but a
single diocese, yet that diocese was of much larger and greater extent
than any of the seven dioceses of Normandy. This is shown by the fact
that, while in the modern ecclesiastical arrangements of France, two of
the Norman dioceses have been united with others, the one Cenomannian
diocese has been divided into two.
In another point also Maine shows itself very distinctly as a Northern
district. This is in its architecture. As Anjou is the architectural
borderland between Northern and Southern Gaul, so Maine is again the
architectural borderland between Normandy and Anjou. But it shows its
character as a borderland, not by possessing an intermediate style, as
the Angevin style is distinctly intermediate between the styles of
Normandy and of Aquitaine, but rather by using the Norman and Angevin
styles side by side. In the nave of St. Julian's itself, an Angevin
clerestory and vault is set upon an arcade and triforium which may be
called Norman. At _La Couture_ the nave has wholly given way to an
Angevin rebuilding, while the choir remains Norman, with a touch of
earlier days about it. In the third great church of Le Mans, that of _Le
Pre_, the Angevin influence does not come in at all. In the department
of military architecture, Sir Francis Palgrave says that the familiar
Norman square keep was borrowed from Maine; but he brings no evidence in
support of this theory, nor have we been able to find any. It seems far
more likely that the fashion was originally Norman, and that it then
spread into the borderland, and it is certain that some of the most
historically famous castles in the land of Maine were the work of Norman
invaders.
Maine is, in one point, one of the parts of France in which an
Englishman is most inclined to feel himself at home. It shares, though
perhaps in not so marked a degree, the same English look which runs
through a large part of Normandy and Brittany. It has hedges and green
pastures, a sight pleasing to the eye after the dreary look of so many
districts of France. The land is also fairly wooded, and the vine, of
which we hear so much in our accounts of ancient Cenomannian warfare,
is, to say the least, not so prominent a feature as it was then. And we
need not say that vines, except either on a hill-side or against a
house, do not add to the picturesqueness of a landscape. The land,
without being strictly hilly, much less mountainous, is far from flat,
and it contains some considerable heights, as the ranges culminating in
the peak of Mont Aigu, which forms a prominent object from the theatre
at Jublains, and the high ground at and near Le Mans itself, some points
of which proved of great importance in the last warfare which Maine has
seen. In short, without containing any very striking elevations, there
are many sites in Maine well suited for military positions in ancient
warfare, sites where the castle has not failed to spring up, and where a
town or village has naturally gathered round the fortress. But since the
city of the Diablintes was swept from the earth, Maine has, at least
till quite modern times, contained no place which can at all set itself
up as a rival to the ancient capital. The hill fort which grew into the
city of the Cenomanni still remains the undoubted queen of the land of
Herbert and Helias.
It is well to enter the Cenomannian county by a point which is
Cenomannian no longer, but which not only plays a great part in the
local history, but gives a view of a very large part of the land from
which it was long ago severed. This is from the hill of Domfront, the
fortress and town which the Conqueror wrested from Maine and added to
Normandy; but which till the changes of modern times kept a sign of its
old allegiance in still forming for ecclesiastical purposes part of the
Cenomannian diocese. Domfront, the conquest of William, the cherished
possession of Henry, is indeed an outpost of the Norman land, placed
like a natural watch-tower, from which we may gaze over well nigh the
whole extent of the land which lay between Normandy and the home of the
enemy at Angers. Like Nottingham, town and castle stand on two heights,
with a slight fall between them, and the town itself is strongly
fortified, with a noble range of walls and towers which are largely
preserved. The shattered donjon rises on the height where the Varenne
runs through a narrow dell between the castle hill and a wild rock on
the other side. Castle and town alike equally look out in the direction
of danger; from either height it needs no strong effort of imagination
to fancy ourselves on the look-out against the hosts of Geoffrey of the
Hammer coming from the South. Yet it is at Domfront that the traveller
coming from the land of Coutances and Avranches finds himself in one
important point brought back to the modern world. After going for many
days by such conveyances as he can find, he is there enabled to make his
journey into the land of Maine by the help of the railway which leads
from Caen to Laval. His first stage will take him to a spot which formed
another of William's early conquests, but which was not, like Domfront,
permanently cut off from the Cenomannian state.
This spot is Ambrieres, a town of the smallest class, hardly rising
above a village, but which holds an important place in the wars of
William and Geoffrey. There William built a castle, and the shattered
piece of wall which overhangs the road running on the right bank of the
Varenne may well be a part of his building. The little town climbs up,
as it were, to the castle, and contains more than one house bearing
signs of ancient date. It is clearly one of those towns which grew up
immediately round the fortress. But of the castle itself so little is
left that the most striking object now is the church, which stands apart
on the other side of the river. A large cruciform building of nearly
untouched and rather early Romanesque, it is thoroughly in harmony with
the memories of the place. But the church of Ambrieres is more than
this. It tells us in what direction we are travelling; its aisleless
nave, though it would be narrow in Anjou, would be wide in England or
Normandy; and there is another feature which looks as if the men of
Ambrieres had got on almost too fast in their tendencies towards a
southern type of architecture. The central tower is indeed low and
massive, but so are many others both in Normandy and England; nor would
the wooden spire with which it is crowned suggest that in the inside the
four plain arches of its lantern support as perfect a cupola as if we
were on the other side of the Loire. But both the arches of the lantern
and the barrelled vault of the choir keep the round arch. Maine was far
off from the land of the Saracen, and the pointed arch would here be a
sign that later forms were not far off. From Ambrieres either the
railway or, if the traveller likes it better, a road leading up and down
over a series of low hills, will take him to another scene of William's
victories at Mayenne. Here the town slopes down to the river of its own
name on both sides, and the castle, instead of crowning either height,
rises immediately above the stream. Eight years does much in the way of
building up as well as of pulling down; and we may note that since we
made an almost casual reference to Mayenne in 1868,[69] the eastern
part of the great church, a building remarkable rather for a strange and
picturesque outline than for any strict architectural beauty, has had
its choir rebuilt on a vast scale after the type of a great minster. No
place after the capital has a greater share in the history of the
county.[70] It was the lordship of that Geoffrey of Mayenne who played
so prominent a part in all the wars of William's day, a part which, both
in its good and its bad side, well illustrates the position of the
feudal noble. A faithful vassal to his lord, a patriotic defender of his
country against an external invader, he could stoop to play the part of
a perjured traitor when nobles had been forced to plight oaths against
their will to be faithful to a civic _commune_. To the student of the
twelfth century Mayenne is full of memories; to the student of earlier
times its chief attraction will be that it is the most natural point of
the journey to Jublains.