GOTHIC

ARCHITECTURE

BY

ÉDOUARD CORROYER

ARCHITECT TO THE FRENCH GOVERNMENT AND INSPECTOR
OF DIOCESAN EDIFICES

EDITED BY

WALTER ARMSTRONG

DIRECTOR OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND

With Two Hundred and Thirty-Six Illustrations

New York

MACMILLAN AND CO.

1893

The following pages, which have been translated under my supervision by Miss Florence Simmonds, give such an account of the birth and evolution of Gothic Architecture as may be considered sufficient for a handbook. Mons. Corroyer writes, indeed, from a thoroughly French standpoint. He is apt to believe that everything admirable in Gothic architecture had a Gallic origin. Vexed questions of priority, such as that attaching to the choir of Lincoln, he dismisses with a phrase, while the larger question of French influence generally in these islands of ours, he solves by the simple process of referring every creation which takes his fancy either to a French master or a French example, here coming, be it said, into occasional collision with his own stock authority, the late Mons. Viollet-le-duc. The Chauvinistic tone thus given to his pages may be regretted, but, when all is said, it does not greatly affect their value as a picture of Gothic development. Mons. Corroyer confines himself in the main to broad[vi] principles. He travels along the line of evolution, pointing out how material conditions and discoveries, and their consequent social changes, brought about one development after another in the forms and methods of the architect. In a treatise so conceived, the fact that the field of observation is practically restricted to France, the few excursions beyond her frontier being made rather with a view to displaying the extent of her influence than with any desire for catholicity of grasp, is of no great moment. The English reader for whom this translation is intended, will get as clear a notion of how Gothic, as he knows it, came into being, as he would from a more universal survey, while he has the advantage of some echo, at least, of the vivacity, which inspires a Frenchman when his theme is "one of the Glories of France."

W. A.

The term Gothic, as applied to the architectural period dating from the middle of the twelfth to the end of the fifteenth century, is purely conventional.

The expression is clearly misleading as indicating the architecture of the Goths or Visigoths; for these tribes were vanquished by Clovis in the sixth century, and left no monumental trace of their invasion. Hence, their influence upon art was nil. The term is radically false both from the historical and the archæological point of view, and originates in an error which demands the strenuous opposition due to persistent fallacies. By a strange irony of fate the term Gothic, used in the last century merely as the opprobrious synonym of barbaric, has been specialised within the last sixty years in connection with that polished epoch of the Middle Ages which sheds most lustre upon our national art. And this, in spite of its Germanic origin.

Romanesque architecture, or to be exact, that[2] architecture which, by virtue of the archæologic convention of 1825, we agree to label Romanesque, undoubtedly borrowed its essential elements from the Romans and Byzantines, modifying and perfecting them by the genius of Western Europe; but the architectural period which began in the middle of the twelfth century, and is so unjustly dubbed Gothic, was of purely French birth; its cradle was the nucleus of modern France. Aquitaine, Anjou, and Maine were the provinces in which it first took root. The royal domain, and notably the Ile-de-France, witnessed its most marvellous developments, and it was from the very heart of France that its splendour radiated throughout Europe.

But the tyranny of usage leaves us no choice as to the title of this volume. We are compelled to style it Gothic Architecture, though we would gladly have registered our protest by naming it French Mediæval Architecture.[1]

The term Gothic is, however, purely arbitrary, as is also that of pointed, which has been introduced by writers who admit the principle of the broken arch as the characteristic of so-called Gothic architecture.

The broken or pointed arch, which is formed by the intersection of two opposite curves at an angle more or less acute, was known to architects long before its systematic application. It occurs in buildings of the ninth century in Cairo, and was used prior to this in Armenia, and still earlier in Persia, where indeed it superseded all other forms of span from the times of the last of the Sassanides onwards. It is an expedient which gives increased power of resistance to the arch by diminishing its lateral thrusts.

The pointed arch is a form which admits of infinite variations. The one law which governs its construction is expediency. It frankly abandons those rules of classic proportion which are the canons, so to speak, of the round-headed arch. Thus we shall find the pointed approximating to the round-headed form in the twelfth century, only to diverge from it more widely than before, till, towards the close of the thirteenth and throughout the fourteenth century, it took on the acute proportions necessitated by a perilous disposition to prefer loftiness to solidity.

Fundamentally, it is of little moment whether the architecture of the twelfth to the sixteenth century be termed Gothic or pointed, when we recognise these terms as equally inexact. The point to be really insisted upon is that the filiation we have already demonstrated in our book on Romanesque Architecture continued slowly, but surely, in the[4] wake of civilisation, of which architecture is ever one of the most striking manifestations.

So-called Gothic architecture was not the product of a single generation; it was the continuous logical development of the Romanesque movement, just as the latter in its time had been the outcome of a gradual adaptation of old traditions to new-born exigencies. Thus our Aquitainian forbears, by their successful translation into stone of the eastern cupola, prepared the way for the groined vault, the embryo of which is clearly traceable in the pendentives of the dome at St. Front.

The great churches which, towards the middle of the twelfth century, rose throughout the rich Western provinces that cluster about Aquitaine, were all constructed with groined vaults. In these examples we can discern no halting, tentative application of newly adopted principles. The work is that of consummate architects, who brought to their labours the assurance born of experienced skill, and in the later part of the twelfth century, the new system had replaced all others for the construction of vaults throughout Western Europe.

The architects of the royal domain, and notably those of the Ile-de-France, had been the first to adopt the groined vault. Towards the close of the twelfth century their assimilation of the new principles, their native ingenuity, and professional hardihood alike urged them to its further development. They became the inventors of the flying buttress.

The substitution of the groined vault for its parent, the cupola, was the direct consequence of the old tradition. The development was merely a stage in[5] the march of ideas, a consummation logically arrived at in the track which the Romans, constructors not less bold though more prudent than their artistic progeny, had marked out for them. The groined vault, in short, is simply the growth of Roman principles perfected by continuous experiment. But the flying buttress, or rather the system of construction based on its use, caused a radical change in the art of building of the twelfth century. Stability, which in the ancient buildings was ensured by solid masses at the impost of vaults and arches, was replaced by the balance of parts. From this daring system some of the most marvellous of architectural effects have been won; but the innovation had a dangerous inherent weakness, inasmuch as it involved the exterior position of those essential vital organs for whose preservation the ancients had wisely provided, by keeping them within the building.

It is therefore not surprising that though fifty years after its introduction the groined vault was generally adopted throughout Western Europe, and even in the East, the success of the flying buttress was infinitely more gradual and restricted. Thus, in the North, the multiplication of great religious monuments built, or even rebuilt on the new lines, was simultaneous with the construction in the South of vast churches on the old principles. The adventurous builders of the North had eagerly adopted the new division of churches into several aisles, all with groined vaults, the vault of the great central nave relying upon exterior flying buttresses for resistance to its thrust.

In the South, on the other hand, architects were prudent, either through instinctive resistance to, or[6] deliberate reaction from, the innovating influence, or by way of fidelity to an ancient tradition. They built with a single aisle, wide and lofty; the vaults were indeed supported by ribs, but their thrusts were received by powerful buttresses inside the walls, the projections thus formed being further utilised for the construction of chapels in the intervals.

This latter system, which has the incontestable merit of perfect solidity, recalls the construction of the Basilica of Constantine, or of the tepidarium in the Baths of Caracalla. The stability of the edifice was ensured by the resistance of masses at the imposts, and the whole principle of construction formed, as it were, a protest against the miracles of equilibrium so much in favour among the Northerners.

The new system of vaults supported by flying buttresses made very slight way in the South. It appears but rarely, and in the few instances where it is used has entirely the air of a foreign importation. Even in the cradle of its origin, it took root slowly and with difficulty, for its first applications were not without disaster. Lacking that mathematical knowledge which is the mainstay of the modern architect, the experimental skill shown by the thirteenth-century builder in constructing his vaults, and then in neutralising their thrusts by flying buttresses reduced to the legitimate function of permanent struts, was little short of miraculous. For it must be borne in mind that the thrust of these vaults, and the strength of the flying buttresses, varied of necessity according to their span, and the resisting powers of their materials. It was only by dint of long gropings in the dark that the necessarily empirical formulæ[7] of the innovators were gradually transformed into recognised rules, and this knotty problem of construction received no positive solution till the last years of the thirteenth, or more emphatically, the first years of the fourteenth century. While even then the solution could claim no universal acceptance, for what was comparatively easy in countries where stone abounds became difficult, if not impossible, in districts where such a material as brick was the sole resource of builders.

Nevertheless, the growth of Gothic architecture was rapid, so rapid that even in the fourteenth century it began to show symptoms of that swift decadence which is the Nemesis of facile success. The abuse of equilibrium, the excessive diminution of points of support—defects often aggravated by insecurity of foundation and exaggerated loftiness of structure—the poor quality of materials, and the faulty setting thereof due to empirical methods, the over-rapidity of execution caused by mistaken emulation, the dearth of funds consequent on social and political convulsions complicated by the miseries of war,—all these things joined hands for the extinction of a once resplendent art. But the initial cause of its ruin must be sought in its abandonment of antique traditions. These traditions had persisted uninterruptedly throughout the so-called Romanesque period, only to pave the way for a seductive art in novel form, which, casting aside the trammels of the past in obedience to the dictates of the moment, fell on decay as rapidly as it had risen to eminence. Dawning in the France of Louis the Fat, it reached its apogee under St.[8] Louis, and was in full decadence before the close of the fifteenth century.

The narrow limits assigned to us forbid not only detailed discussion of our great monuments, but even a summary of the most famous. We must be content to work out that theory of evolution already put forward by us in L'Architecture Romane. We propose merely to offer a synthesis of that architectural development which succeeded the so-called Romanesque epoch, from its birth in the twelfth to its extinction in the fifteenth century.

And as the groined vault is, broadly speaking, the essential characteristic of so-called Gothic architecture, and the flying buttress one of its most interesting manifestations, we shall make a special study of their origin, their modifications, and their principal applications in connection with religious, monastic, military, and civil architecture. We shall dwell more particularly upon religious architecture as presenting the grandest and most obvious evidences of artistic progress, not in its admirable buildings alone, but in those masterpieces of painting and sculpture to which it gave birth in France.

So-called Gothic architecture was no spontaneous and miraculous manifestation. Like all human activities, its end is easy to determine; but it is difficult to fix even an approximate date for its beginning. The traces of its origin are lost in that period of architectural activity which preceded it, and prepared its way by a train of unbroken evolution.

The cupola of St. Front, which we may reasonably call the mother cupola of France, was not an imitation of that of St. Mark at Venice, for both were based upon the church built by Justinian at Constantinople, in honour of the Holy Apostles. But the form thus imported into Aquitaine received such modification and development, as to make it virtually an original achievement. One of the knottiest of architectural problems was solved in the[12] process, and that admirable constructive principle was established which consists in concentrating the thrust of a vault upon four points of support strengthened by pendentives.

The construction of such a cupola as that of St. Front in dressed stone was an event of great moment in a district which still preserved the Gallo-Roman tradition in its integrity, and was commonly reputed the fatherland of our architecture. Its immediate consequences were shown before the close of the eleventh century by the erection of large abbey churches on the model of St. Front in various neighbouring provinces.

But while accepting the new principle, the architects of the period directed their energies to its perfectibility. Their efforts, and even their successes, in this direction are manifest so early as the first years of the twelfth century. The churches of Angoulême and of Fontevrault may be cited in proof. "We here recognise the main preoccupation of the Romanesque builders—namely, how best to reduce the immense masses of churches built with the primitive cupola by a more deliberate and judicious distribution of thrust and resistance. We further see how the adoption of these principles led to the emphasising of critical points by buttresses, which now began to project from the exterior walls."[3]

The new system spread rapidly, notably in Anjou and Maine, its growth being marked by an ever-increasing refinement and perfection. The architects of the rich abbeys of these provinces, the[13] importance of which was aggrandised by their strong attachments to the all-powerful religious organisation of the period, gave a further development to the Aquitainian method. They transformed the pendentives of the cupolas into independent arches which performed exactly the same functions, thus logically working out an architectonic principle of amazing simplicity, the success of which was so rapid that, by the middle of the twelfth century, it was systematically applied to the construction of great churches at Angers, Laval, and Poitiers.

The works of the Angevin architects were of course known to their Northern brethren, who, in common with all the builders of the day, had long been seeking the final solution of the great problem of the vault. The architects of the Ile-de-France at once appropriated the Angevin system with that special professional ingenuity which characterised them, and applied it to the construction of innumerable churches, large and small, all of them built on the basilican plan—that is to say, with three, or even five aisles.

Thus the Aquitainian cupola of dressed stone exercised an absolutely direct influence upon Gothic architecture, since it gave birth to the intersecting arch, which is the main feature of so-called Gothic. This influence was first manifested in the general arrangement of single-aisled churches vaulted upon intersecting ribs, the earliest departure from the original cupola. It was then more grandiosely demonstrated in vast abbey or cathedral churches, built in accordance with the basilican tradition, and all vaulted on the new principle.

[14]

Angers and Laval are primitive examples of churches whose square compartments carry groined vaults, which thenceforth took the place of cupolas with pendentives.

The abbey church of Noyon shows the application of this principle, novel in the twelfth century, to the several-aisled churches of the Northern architects. The original vaults of Noyon[4] were planned in square. The intersecting arches united the principal piers diagonally, the strain being relieved by a subordinate or auxiliary arch which rested upon secondary piers, indicated on the exterior by buttresses less salient than those of the main piers, and on the interior by a column receiving the lateral archivolts which united the chief piers.

This system of construction, the principle of which was logically developed at Noyon, for instance, no longer exists, save in its traditional state in the great churches of Laon, and in the cathedrals of Paris, Sens, and Bourges, to name but the principal, without regard to the innumerable churches built on these principles throughout Western Europe. In these great buildings the vaults were all square on plan down to the adoption in the first half of the thirteenth century of equal bays, vaulted on a rectangular plan, and marked inside and out by equal piers and projections, as at Amiens, Rheims, and many other churches of the period.

Hence we see how incontestable was the influence[15] of the cupola upon so-called Gothic architecture. This truth is demonstrated by monuments yet in existence, lapidary documents above suspicion. It cannot be insisted upon too strongly, not merely for the satisfaction of archæeologic accuracy, but more especially as yet another proof that the filiation between the art of the ancients and that of the so-called Romanesque architects is no less evident than that which links together the Romanesque and the so-called Gothic. Of this latter filiation we have a direct proof in the Aquitainian cupola, the parent of those of Angoumois, which in their turn gave birth to the Angevin intersecting arch, and so prepared the way for the flying buttress, which again was to mark a new departure.

So early as the eleventh century churches were built with one or several aisles, and in this latter case the side aisles only had ribbed vaults, the nave being covered by a timber roof. The next step was to vault all three aisles, buttressing the barrel-vaulted nave by continuous half-barrel vaults or ribbed vaults over the aisles, and further strengthening it by projecting transverse arches, or arcs doubleaux, the whole being crowned by a roof which embraced the side aisles. These cumbrous and timidly constructed buildings were merely imitations of the Roman basilicas. To ensure their solidity they had perforce to be narrow; and the necessary abolition of top lighting made them gloomy. We find then that, before the appearance of the cupola, mediæval architects were perfectly acquainted both with the barrel vault and the ribbed vault, the latter formed, on traditional principles, by the interpenetration of two demi-cylinders. They had even attempted to improve upon the construction by strengthening the line of penetration with a salient rib, giving an elliptic arch. But this rib was purely decorative, for[17] in the Roman vault the stones at the line of intersection, whether ribbed or not, were in complete solidarity with the filling on either side in which they were buried.

It follows that we shall seek in vain in the Roman ribbed vault the germ of the intersecting arch, with its essentially active functions.

For the origin of the intersecting arch we must turn to the eleventh century. We shall find it in the dressed stone cupola of St. Front, and more especially in its pendentives.

Fig. 1 gives the plan of one of the cupolas of St. Front. It is composed of four massive transverse arches, the thrusts of which are received upon four piers united by pendentives (Figs. 2 and 3) passing from the re-entering angles at the spring of the arches to the base of the circular dome itself, each of the concentric courses bearing upon the keys of the arcs-doubleaux, and transmitting to them, and therefore to the piers by which they are supported, the weight of the cupola itself.

Fig. 3 is a section through one of the pendentives of St. Front, following the line A B in Fig. 1. It[18] shows that the first six courses are cut so as to make what is called a tas de chargé; the upper surfaces are horizontal, the faces curved to the radius of the dome itself. After the sixth course the voussoirs are cut normally to the curve of the arch. The vaulting of religious buildings having long been the crux of mediæval architects, the construction of[19] the St. Front cupolas must have been an event much noised abroad, for towards the close of the eleventh century a large number of churches with cupolas were built in imitation of the mother church at Périgueux.

The construction of the churches of Angoulême and Fontevrault in the first years of the twelfth century shows that the architects were attempting to cover spaces of ever-increasing span on the Aquitainian model, while at the same time they set themselves to lighten their vaults, and consequently to reduce their points of support.

Fig. 4 gives the plan of one of the cupolas of Angoulême or of Fontevrault, both being built on precisely similar plan, with the exception of the number of bays to the nave.

Fig. 5 gives the section of a bay in one of these churches, and illustrates the considerable difference[20] already existing between the mother cupola of St. Front and its offspring. The cupola on pendentives begins to show a certain attenuation, and we shall presently note a fresh step forward towards the solution of that problem so persistently grappled with by the mediæval architect—how to reduce the weight of the vault.

The Church of St. Avit-Sénieur furnishes a most instructive example.

The cupola of this building is strengthened by stiffening ribs. It becomes an annular vault, formed of almost horizontal keyed courses, sustained by transverse and diagonal ribs, which act the part of a permanent centering.

[21]

The Church of St. Pierre at Saumur marks a further step onwards in the construction of vaults derived from the cupola.[5]

Finally, the architects of Maine and Anjou achieved the long-desired consummation. Under their treatment the pendentives resolved themselves into their actively useful elements, the visible signs of which were diagonal or intersecting arches, salient and independent, set in precisely the same manner as the pendentives of the cupola (Fig. 3), and performing identical functions (Fig. 8).

The vault proper is no longer formed of concentric courses, as in the mother cupola. It consists thenceforward of voussoirs cut normally[22] to the curve, and filling the triangles (A, B, C, D, Fig. 7) determined by the longitudinal, the diagonal or intersecting, and the transverse arches. These arches form a stone skeleton, no less solid though far less ponderous than the cupola pendentives, and sustain the vault by distributing its thrusts over four points of support.

The triangular fillings no longer imprison the ribs, or, more exactly speaking, the intersecting arches, nor do they any longer neutralise their active functions. These fillings, on the other hand, have, like the intersecting arch, gained a new independence. They now contribute to the elasticity of the divers organs of the vault, a most essential element in its solidity. The peculiar arrangement of the intersecting arches in the nave of Angers gives incontrovertible proof of the direct filiation of this building to the Aquitainian cupola. The voussoirs of the intersecting arches are about equal in horizontal section to those of the transverse arches, while their vertical section equals the thickness of the filling plus the internal salience which marks their function. They look in fact like slices cut from the pendentives of a cupola (A, Fig. 8).[23] It must be remarked, too, that at Angers the stones of the filling do not yet rest upon the extrados of the ribs, in the fashion adopted some years later in the Ile-de-France and elsewhere (see B, Fig. 8), but embrace them (as at A).

The identity of function in the pendentive and in the Gothic intersecting arch, both constructed, as they are, of stones dressed normally to their curves, shows that they sprang from a common origin, which is as much as to say that the Aquitainian cupola begat the intersecting vault.

The first application of the system of intersecting vaults appears in the great churches of Angers and Laval.

It is probable that the new methods propagated by the religious architects of Aquitaine and neighbouring provinces had excited the emulation of the Northern builders, more especially those of the Ile-de-France. Evidences to this effect are to be found in certain subordinate portions of their buildings at this period, such as side aisles or apsidal chapels. Their timid arrangement seems, however, reminiscent of the Roman system of ribbed vaulting, with a slightly increased prominence of the ribs superadded, rather[25] than of the revolution that had been effected in church vaulting generally.

But, if we except perhaps Laval, nowhere shall we find the new system of vaulting upon intersecting arches more mightily demonstrated than at Angers, the aisles of which measure 54 feet across. The[26] grandeur of the architectural composition, no less than the admirable technical skill shown in the details, gives proof of the consummate mastery arrived at by the builders of these noble structures so early as the middle of the twelfth century. The plan of these churches resembles that of Angoulême and Fontevrault. It is in no way allied to the Northern buildings.

They are constructed with single aisles, like the cupola churches, with a series of bays, square on plan; but the arrangement of the vaults has been perfected by the logical use of intersecting arches in the place of pendentives, the architects of the day having realised by this time the progress we have explained and demonstrated in the preceding chapter.

These vast aisles, vaulted on intersecting arches, are of course allied to the cupolas; they recall their general outline, but the arrangement of the vaulting is different. The intersecting ribs are no longer merely decorative features; they have taken on all the active functions of the arc-doubleau and the formeret. Their union constitutes an elastic ossature, the weight being concentrated upon four points of support, which receive the impost of the arches, and[27] compose a stone skeleton, each unit of which has been cut and dressed to fill the exact place it occupies in the whole.

If we compare the sections (Figs. 13 and 14) of the churches of Angoulême and Angers, we may clearly trace the filiation between these buildings, the one dating from the first years of the twelfth century, the other from some thirty or even forty years later. We shall also note the advance made by the Angevin architects in the construction of groined vaults in the[28]
[29] place of domes with pendentives, a development worked out by the more perfect and reasoned application of the same architectural principle.

The Church of Laval, built simultaneously with[30] that of Angers, or only a few years later, shows a further advance, not merely in the matter of form, but in the increased science and ingenuity of combinations, and the methodical accuracy of the execution.

The arches which compose the ossature of the vaults become independent in their functions, as at Angers, immediately upon leaving the abacus, an essential characteristic of the new system. The lateral points of support are composed of piers proper and of clustered columns, crowned by corbelled capitals, which, by prolonging them, mark the formerets, the diagonal, and the transverse arches as they fall upon the abaci. It is easy to see in this arrangement the origin of those clustered shafts so generally and even excessively used in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the main object of which was to conceal as far as possible the points of support.

[31]

These details, and the section (Fig. 12) showing the mode of construction in the vaults, demonstrate sufficiently that at Laval, no less than at Angers, a direct filiation exists between the dome upon pendentives and the groined and ribbed vault.

The new system derived from the domes upon pendentives, so brilliantly applied in Anjou and Maine in the first half of the twelfth century, was thenceforth the normal method of the religious architect. The admirable simplicity of the new method and its adaptability to every class of building, from the great abbey church to the modest chapel, sufficiently accounts for its rapid dissemination throughout Western Europe, where religious bodies had founded innumerable abbeys, large and small, of varying rules and orders, but all welded together by one mighty organisation.

A long array of churches on the Angevin model rose, not only in the neighbouring provinces—as Ste. Radegonde at Poitiers, Notre Dame de la Coulture and the nave of St. Julien at Mans,—but farther afield towards the south. To name only the most important—the charming Church of Thor, dedicated to Ste. Marie du Lac, between Avignon and the fountain of Vaucluse; that of St. Sauveur at St. Macaire, near Bordeaux; the nave of St. André at Bordeaux, begun in 1252 on the cupola plan, but modified and finally[33] crowned with a groined and ribbed vault; St. Caprais at Agen, which shows the same modifications, and lastly, the immense brick nave of St. Étienne at Toulouse, which measures 64 feet—all demonstrate the progression of the new principles in the second half of the twelfth century.

Towards the North the advance was no less general. Various buildings show to what excellent account contemporary architects had turned the system of vaults on intersecting arches, recognising[34] its admirable adaptability to different climates, and to the most diverse materials. But it was reserved for Angers, the cradle of its birth, to give an added perfection to this ingenious system.

The Church of the Ste. Trinité, on the right bank of the Maine, built by the sons or pupils of those architects who had planned St. Maurice for the hill on the opposite shore, marks a fresh advance in the construction of these vaults. Like St. Maurice, it has but a single aisle, which is divided into three bays, each as nearly as possible square on plan. The system of vaulting takes on a greater elegance by the insertion of a transverse arch, with its supporting shafts, in the centre of each bay. This divides the bay into two equal parts, and, cutting the diagonal ribs at their intersection, supports them at the critical point.

Fig. 19 gives the plan of these vaults, the system of which was eagerly seized upon by the Northern architects, and the great abbey church of Noyon[35]
[36] appears to have been the first-fruits of this new development of the Angevin idea.

The great abbey churches and immense cathedrals which were built from the second half of the twelfth to the middle of the thirteenth century attest the importance of the development carried out at Angers by the arrangement of their own vaults in square compartments. For we now find this system adopted in the construction of the churches or cathedrals of Noyon, Laon, Notre Dame at Paris, Sens, and Bourges, to name only acknowledged masterpieces of so-called Gothic.

The influence of the cupola, which we established in our first chapter, was both direct and consecutive. It was direct in churches built with one aisle and vaulted on intersecting arches, and consecutive in the so-called Romanesque churches, which were either completed or modified on the new lines by the substitution of vaults on intersecting arches of dressed stone for timber roofs. A large number of buildings in England, Normandy, Germany, Northern Italy, Switzerland, the Rhine Provinces, and those of Northern France bear testimony of the highest interest to the transformations consequent on the invention of the groined vault and its universal application.

Architects who had been trained in the great abbey schools, emboldened by the successes of their forerunners and their own individual experience, raised on every hand vast cathedrals, in which every known development of the system was essayed with unequalled daring. Going on from strength to strength, they eventually abandoned the antique[37] traditions, and disregarding the statical conditions which ensured the solidity of the ancient buildings,[38] they invented a system of construction which is, as it were, merely a skeleton in stone, a stone version of the timbered roof; its characteristic expression was[39]
[40] the permanent strut known as the flying buttress; its governing idea was equilibrium, for which it provided by architectural stratagems ingenious in the highest degree, but also extremely precarious. Its existence or stability depends for the most part on the quality of the materials and their degrees of resisting power, the essential organs, by which I mean those vital weight-carrying portions, the failure of which would involve the ruin of the whole, being outside the building, and therefore exposed to all those deteriorating influences from which the load they bear, that is to say, the vaults, are protected by walls and roof.

The great buildings constructed on these new principles consisted of a central nave with two, or even four side aisles. The huge structure depended for its light first upon low windows in the collateral portions, secondly, upon windows at a much higher level. Hence it became necessary to raise the vault of the central nave, and to give it an abutment in the form of detached semi-arches or flying buttresses. The crowns of these semi-arches impinged the piers at the planes of greatest pressure and received the collective thrust of all the ribs, formerets, transverse and diagonal arches. Their bases rested upon abutments, the strength of which was calculated according to the thrust they had to meet.

The primitive method of vaulting adopted in the central provinces of France in the construction of churches with three aisles rendered such buildings of necessity low and heavy. The main aisle being covered by a barrel vault, supported on either side by a continuous half-barrel vault, the sole means of lighting lay in the windows of the side aisles, so that the nave was always gloomy in the extreme. The Norman architects had avoided this difficulty, first in their native province, and afterwards in England, by vaulting the subordinate aisles only, and by raising the lateral walls of the nave high enough to allow a line of windows to be introduced between the lean-to roofs of the side aisles and the nave roof, the latter being an open timber construction instead of a vault.

The lateral gallery in the first story of Norman churches built on the basilican model is merely a development of the ancient tradition.[6] It bears the name of triforium because—or so we are told—each[42] compartment of such an interior gallery between the main piers of the nave was originally divided into three by pillars supporting lintels or by small columns supporting an arcade.

Towards the close of the eleventh century Norman architects on both sides of the Channel were raising vast churches, the side aisles of which bore above their ribbed vaults galleries after the fashion of the primitive basilicas. These galleries in their turn were covered by open timber roofs like that of the nave. The bays were emphasised in the nave and in the side aisles by transverse arches, or arcs-doubleaux, which served as buttresses to those of the main vault. But after the adoption, towards the middle of the twelfth century, of the Angevin method of vaulting for religious buildings, the functions of the lateral walls and of the supporting arches became better defined, for these walls and arches had now to meet the thrusts of the transverse as well as that of the diagonal arches, which, meeting in bundles, as it were, at each pier, gathered their energies at well-marked points.

It was thus that the cross walls or arcs-doubleaux of the side aisles were gradually modified till they became detached semi-arches concealed beneath the outer roof of the side aisles.

We have traced this modification in the Abbaye aux Dames at Caen.[7]

Fig. 24 shows us an English example. It may be followed out in a number of other churches in England, at Pavia in Italy, at Zurich in Switzer[43]land, and at Basle on the Rhine, to name but a few of the churches in which the modification of the vaults was long posterior to the construction of the building itself.

In France we shall find no example more deeply interesting than Noyon, which at the date of its construction (the last quarter of the twelfth century) formed, as it were, an epitome of the advance so far made by the architects of the Ile-de-France. In this curious building we find a fusion of the antique tradition developed by the Normans in their triforiums, and of the Angevin methods, as manifested in the groined vaults derived from domes: methods further perfected by the example of La Ste. Trinité[44] at Angers; in other words, by the adoption of intersecting arches planned on a square, the thrusts of all being received on the main piers, reinforced by an[45] intermediate transverse arch. And we note the appearance of the detached semi-arch beneath the roofing of the inferior aisles merging at its springing into the lateral arc-doubleau, and so resisting the thrust of the intersecting arches and transverse arches of the nave.

It has been said that Noyon was suggested by Tournai, doubtless on account of their superficial affinities. But the likeness is merely in general aspect, the methods of construction being wholly different. At Tournai the apsidal transepts are vaulted upon transverse arches of great strength, and upon radiating semi-arches united where they meet by a ring of voussoirs set horizontally, and at their springing by vaults keyed into their mass, an ingenious arrangement which recalls the vaulting of the Salle des Capitaines over the porch of the monastery church at Moissac.

The combination of these arcs-doubleaux, which, in addition to the solidity of their independent structure, are strongly reinforced by the massive circular courses of the walls, is very peculiar, for it dispenses altogether both with auxiliary arches and[46] with abutments. Tournai, therefore, cannot be held to have begotten Noyon, for here we have groined vaults, the intersecting arches of which demand the reinforcement of abutments either concealed or apparent to sustain the thrust of these vaults over the lateral arcs-doubleaux. The ingenious arrangement above cited had in no sense modified the methods of abutment followed by the architects of[47] the twelfth century even after the adoption of the vault on intersecting arches. These, as will be remembered, consisted in buttressing the walls and piers of the nave by cross walls or by arches concealed beneath the roofing of the side aisles.

We find at Soissons the first application of an architectural system, the special feature of which is the flying buttress.

The south transept of Soissons Cathedral was evidently suggested by Noyon. This is apparent in the adoption of the two-storied side aisle and in the semi-circular plan. But the method of vaulting common to both churches has a greater refinement at[48] Soissons. Reduced to its simplest expression of strength by the attenuation of its skeleton, the vault still exercises its full thrust on those parts which rise above the upper gallery.

The architect of Soissons was not content, like his brother of Noyon, to support the vault laterally by interior arches collaborating with the arcs-doubleaux of the triforium, and reinforced by an abutment impinging on the wall of the central nave. To him the idea occurred of detached semi-arches in open air, springing from above the roof of the triforium and its buttresses and marking each bay. Thus was born the flying buttress, a feature frankly emphasising its special aim and function, namely, to meet the thrust of the main vault at its points of concentration.

The flying buttress, in combination with the intersecting arch, gave[49] birth to a new system of construction, a system on which were raised vast buildings which compel our admiration and demand our careful study, but should not invite our imitation. They are monuments to the ingenuity of the twelfth and thirteenth century[50] architect, but no less are they beacons warning against the perils of a rationalism—more apparent than real—which their authors carried to its extreme limits, casting to the winds all traditional principles, and consequently all authority.

It would seem as though the architects of this period, emboldened by such achievements as the churches of Noyon, Soissons, Laon, Paris, Sens, and Bourges, and spurred by professional emulation, went on from one feat of daring to another, passing from the triumphs of Rheims, Amiens, and Mans to the supreme architectural folly of Beauvais, and creating monuments no less amazing in dimension than in the statical problems grappled with, if not always solved.

The study of mediæval architecture is one of the most fascinating of pursuits, but it is one beset with difficulties. The obscurity in which the origin of our great monuments is buried is profound and often impenetrable.

A fertile cause of error is the confusion which in many cases has arisen between the dates of foundation and of consecration. Very often a church was built and afterwards considerably modified, rather than actually reconstructed, on the same consecrated site.

Lightning was the most frequent cause of the destruction, total or partial, of mediæval churches. Striking the steeple, the tower, or the roof, it fired the timber superstructure of the nave. This in itself would not have been an irreparable disaster; but as the timbers gave way the calcined beams charred the piers, and so prepared the downfall of the whole building, which was then either restored or reconstructed in the fashion of the day. Hence, whether we base our deductions upon more or less[52] trustworthy records or upon contemporary readings of existing data, the result is too often a confusion among vanished monuments, or a contradiction between the buildings as they now exist and the historic records which relate to them.

[53]

Nothing is easier for interested theorists than to post-or ante-date the structure of a building. They have nothing to fear from the testimony of writers, and, with very few exceptions, it is difficult to assign a precise date to the construction of great churches and cathedrals or to point with certainty to their architects. The obscurity of these great artists is perhaps to be accounted for by the fact that they were ecclesiastics. As such the honour of their achievements belonged not to the individual, but to the corporate body, the order of which they were members, and members moreover who had, in most cases, taken the vow of humility.

Modern science, architectural and archæological, has failed to throw much positive light on this subject. It contents itself for the most part with ingenious hypotheses and learned deductions which leave us still in doubt as to precise dates. But we shall at least find some sort of foothold in a careful architectural survey of buildings themselves. This should be, of course, supplemented by study of historic records, and such a study will convince us that art in the Middle Ages, as in all epochs, obeyed the immutable laws of filiation and transformation. We shall follow the artist step by step, observing his research, his hesitation, his errors, and even his corrections.

These are trustworthy documents in which to study the origin of a building and to note its successive transformations, which latter were far more frequent than total reconstructions. For it was not until the beginning of the thirteenth century that great cathedral churches in any con[54]siderable numbers were conceived and continuously executed.[9]

[55]

[56]

The great abbey churches founded towards the close of the twelfth century in the royal domain, but continued and finished in the early years of the thirteenth, still preserved a more ancient tradition.

Laon, which is derived from Noyon and from the south transept of Soissons, consists of a nave with transepts, and of two-storied side aisles vaulted upon intersecting arches, above which, as at Soissons, rise flying buttresses, which meet the thrust of the main vault.

This arrangement of the side aisles proves the continuity of the Norman formulæ, just as the method of construction adopted in the main vault demonstrates the persistent influence of the dome.[10]

The admirably constructed main vault is square on plan, each square containing two transverse compartments, after the Angevin method as derived from the Aquitainian dome. Here we find indications that, if the builders of the Church of Laon had fully assimilated this method, their minds were nevertheless not altogether at rest as to the functions of the flying buttress. This was, of course, essential to the piers which received the united thrust of both transverse and diagonal arches. But it was far from logical to reinforce the intermediate piers supporting nothing but the auxiliary transverse arches by abutments identical with those of the main piers.

The illogicality so striking at Laon is absent from Noyon. There, on the contrary, the architects—of the original construction—had emphasised the functions of the main piers by buttresses of greater projection and solidity than those accorded to the secondary piers.

[57]

[58]

Notre Dame de Paris was begun towards the close of the twelfth century, and finished, save for the chapels, in the first half of the thirteenth. As at Laon, the Norman tradition is observed in the arrangement of the upper galleries of the side aisles, while the influence of the dome is again to be traced[59] in the sex-partite groining. The same illogical system of abutments obtains as at Laon.

This vast building, consisting of a nave and double side aisles of equal height sweeping round the semi-circular choir, seems to be one of the first five-aisled cathedrals; its grandiose arrangement, the boldness of its combinations, and the perfection of its detail mark the considerable progress made by the architects of the Ile-de-France.

The method of construction here adopted has a peculiar significance. The upper internal galleries, vaulted on diagonal arches, and raised considerably above the level of the second side aisle, the boldness of the flying buttress, which at one span embraces the two side aisles and forms the abutments of the main vault—alike prove that the architects of Notre Dame de Paris had adopted the newly discovered systems even to excess, and were applying them with unparalleled skill and ingenuity.

[60]

The Norman tradition which had obtained in the Ile-de-France passed away in the first years of the[61] thirteenth century. At Châlons-sur-Marne the nave is flanked by two-storied side aisles. But the upper gallery, vaulted and greatly reduced in size, shows that the conventional arrangement was fast dying out.

The influence of the dome was longer lived, as is shown in the construction of vaults at this period. We may still trace it at Langres in the domed form of the vaults, which, in spite of their rectangular plan, seem to be a reduced copy of the Angevin naves.

The naves of Sens and of Bourges are also vaulted in square compartments. The thrust of the vaults is carried by the diagonal arches to each alternate pier, the intermediate one receiving only the auxiliary transverse arch already[62] fully described. Yet here again the exterior flying buttresses are all of equal solidity in spite of the varying strain. This arrangement, prudent if illogical, shows once more with what distrust architects had adopted that system of exterior abutment, the characteristic of which is a detached arch exposed to all the vicissitudes of weather, and yet responsible for the stability of the whole edifice.

The Cathedral of Sens marks a new phase of development by its suppression of the upper gallery over the side aisles. These are now vaulted and covered by a lean-to roof; a flying buttress of single span receives the thrust of the main vault. The building is perfectly solid; its construction shows research, though it is as illogical as that of Laon or of Paris; for the exterior flying buttresses are all of equal strength, and so fail to proclaim their true functions, the interior thrusts varying considerably.

The arrangement at Bourges, which appears to have been mainly built, if not actually finished, in[63] the first half of the thirteenth century, differs from that of Sens. The structure is one of five aisles,[64] and in plan recalls Notre Dame de Paris, but the details are very dissimilar. The inner side aisles no longer support a gallery, nor are they of equal height with the outer aisles; they are raised so as to afford space for lighting (see Fig. 43). The main vault is sex-partite planned on squares; but the same illogicality exists here which we have already pointed out, and in connection with which we will risk appearing somewhat insistent, in the hope of directing special attention to it. It is more glaring here than elsewhere, the flying buttresses[65] themselves being of exaggerated dimensions and of double span, embracing the two side aisles.

[66]

Both at Bourges and Sens the space between the summit of the archivolts and the bases of the upper windows, known as the frieze, or, in modern parlance, the triforium, becomes a purely decorative feature. It consists of a narrow arcaded corridor, occupying in the interior of the building that portion of the wall space which in the exterior has been appropriated by the lean-to roof of the side aisles. At Sens there is merely a single gallery; at Bourges it becomes double, through the stepped arrangement of the side aisles (see Fig. 43), a variation in which we may trace an ingenious blending of the systems of Anjou and Poitiers with those of the Ile-de-France.

The Cathedral of Rheims, which was begun soon after the destruction of the original building by the fire of 1211, is a supreme expression of the fusion of the three systems—those of Aquitaine, of Anjou, and of the Ile-de-France. It may be taken as the most perfect manifestation of persistent efforts to establish a method of construction based on equilibrium—the equilibrium, that is to say, of a building vaulted on intersecting arches, the thrusts of which are received by exterior flying buttresses.

The temerity, and even the dangers of such a system, are sufficiently demonstrated in the wonderful works of the thirteenth-century architects themselves. For, notwithstanding the skill and beauty of their many admirable combinations, they were unable to reduce their methods to scientific formulæ. The statical power of their structures remained an uncertain quantity, determined by the durability of the material and its exposure or non-exposure to the weather, the interior skeleton being formed of the same material as the exterior.

The perils inherent in such a system are more[68] apparent at Rheims than elsewhere, because of the colossal proportions of the building. The arrangement of the flying buttresses, however, is more logical than at Laon, Paris, Sens, and Bourges, by reason of the quadripartite arrangement of the main vault. The thrusts being equally distributed among the supporting piers, each flying buttress performs an identical office; their equal strength and solidity is therefore perfectly appropriate and logical. But though theoretically correct in its disposition of flying buttresses of equal strength to meet thrusts of equal strength, the method is vitiated by its inherent weakness as a system of abutment. The fragility of the flying buttress exposed it to two grave dangers, active and passive; active, taking into account the constant strain upon it as an abutment; passive, in regard to the gradual reduction of its solidity by exposure to weather. In support of this statement,[69] it is only necessary to refer to the restorations which it has been found necessary to make within the last few years, to preserve the nave. The flying buttresses have been strengthened from below, a proceeding without which the collapse of the huge building would have been inevitable.

But we shall find much to call for unqualified admiration at Rheims in the grandiose conception of the work and in its powerful execution, in the magnificent arrangement of its eastern façade, and in the perfect harmony of the ornamentation, where sculpture, capitals, friezes, crockets, and floriations are so many types of mediæval decorative art at its best.

The Cathedral of Amiens, which dates from about 1220, and is one of the largest as well as one of the most admired of Gothic masterpieces, is directly founded upon that of Rheims. The plan is on the same lines, with this exception, that at Amiens the choir is of greater importance relatively to the nave, and that the piers and points of support are weaker and much more lofty.

The Rémois architects, while exercised by the problems of equilibrium which their system involved, sought to minimise its dangers, which they recognised no less fully than their predecessors, by prudently avoiding all false bearings. It will be easily seen by a comparison of the two sections (Figs. 45 and 48) that the builders of Amiens were troubled by no such misgivings, or that they were at least more venturesome if not more accomplished. They did not hesitate to base the columns which received the crowns of the flying buttresses on a corbel arrangement which had no solid bearing, as may be seen by[70] following the direction of the dotted line X in Fig. 48. The boldness, or rather the imprudence of such[71]
[72] an arrangement is patent, for the failure of anyone of the courses, or the decay of any part of the pier into which the corbels are keyed, would necessarily involve a rupture in the flying buttresses, on which the stability of the main vault depends. The disintegration of the whole building and its total ruin could be the only result. The perils of such combinations, or rather such tours de force of equilibrium, are exemplified at Beauvais. The architects who built the choir, about the year 1225, basing it on that of Amiens, determined to raise a monument which should surpass, both in plan and elevation, all the structures of their epoch. They increased the breadth of the choir and of its bays, raising, in the latter, intermediate piers on the crowns of the lower archivolts, thus dividing the upper[73] bays, and at the same time strengthening the vault by auxiliary transverse arches. They exaggerated the height of the archivolts and of the large windows,[74] and diminished their thickness, in order to give greater elegance and lightness, and the main vault rose to a height of more than 160 feet above the ground level. This tremendous elevation, the exaggeration of which in proportion to the width of the nave is striking, necessitated a complicated system of flying buttresses surpassing in boldness all that had gone before. The section in Fig. 51 will give some idea of what has been justly described as an architectural folly. It is astonishing that the structure should have stood as it has done, taking into account the false bearings of the intermediate piers, here again shown by the dotted line X (Fig. 51).

These rest for half of their thickness on off-sets from the piers, which, proving unequal to the strain, have been temporarily stayed, and must eventually be consolidated.

The choir, however, was finished about 1270, and stood for several years. But dislocations then declared themselves. The forces so elaborately balanced lost their equilibrium, and on the 29th November 1284 the vault fell, dragging down with it the flying buttresses, and carrying havoc through the rest of the building. In the reconstruction which followed it was thought imperative to double the points of support in the arcades both of the main and side aisles, and to reinforce the flying buttresses by iron chains.

During the thirteenth century a number of cathedrals were raised all over Europe on the model of the great buildings of Northern France, and more especially of Amiens, which seems to have roused a great enthusiasm; these were, however, of far[75] more modest dimensions. They had neither the exaggerated height nor the structural audacities of their exemplars. Few of these churches and cathedrals, the reconstruction of which on the new system generally began with the choir, which was[76]
[77] added to the primitive nave, were completed by those who initiated their erection. The most highly favoured in this respect were finished in the course of the fourteenth century; but in the greater number[78] of cases the work dragged slowly on, and reached its end some two centuries after its inauguration. Reconstructive undertakings were constantly impeded[79] by wars or social convulsions, which either hampered or entirely cut off the resources of bishops and architects, their promoters. Such interruptions were of great service to modern archæological study, offering as they do distinct evidence of the various transformations which were successively accomplished from the so-called Romanesque period to the Gothic.

The majority of these great buildings, which show traces of the vicissitudes through which they passed, bear a strong likeness to each other, and vary only in detail, according to the skill of their constructors.

The peculiar interest of Chartres centres in its remarkable statuary; it has, however, other features which command attention, such as the rose window of the north, transept and the design of the flying buttresses. These consist of three arches, one above the other, the two lower ones being connected by colonnettes, radiating from a centre, so that the lower arch is related to the upper, as the nave of a wheel is to the felloes, the colonnettes forming the spokes.

At Mans the arrangement of the choir is so far more remarkable in that it is extremely unusual, or indeed, in its way unique. The flying buttresses are planned in the form of a Y (see A on the plan Fig. 53), thus affording space for windows in the exterior wall, to light the vast circular ambulatory, which at Mans is of unusual importance, and surrounds the choir with a double aisle. The flying buttresses which rise above the arcs-doubleaux, bi-furcated (B on the plan), are over-attenuated in section; their exaggerated height and proportionate slenderness threaten to make them spring, so that it has been found necessary to bind them together by ties and[80]
[81] iron chains. Such expedients are a sufficient criticism of the ingenious but precarious system adopted by the architects of Mans.

The influence of the Ile-de-France in Normandy is manifest in the arrangement of choirs and apsidal chapels in Norman cathedrals of the thirteenth century. The Cathedral of Coutances, a monument of the eleventh century, was rebuilt in the early[82]
[83] years of the thirteenth century under the impulse given by Northern France to the architecture of the period. It is in the choir that we clearly trace this influence, in the double columns of the apse, and the ingenious disposition of its collateral vaults. But the façade is purely Norman, not merely in general design, but in the details of the composition, facsimiles of which may be found in England.

The Cathedral of Dol in Brittany, one of the great churches of the thirteenth century, seems to have escaped the influences of the Northern innovation. Its general plan, its square apse lighted by large windows, the details of its architecture and ornamentation, all proclaim its affinity to the great churches which rose contemporaneously with it on either side of the Channel, in Normandy, and in England. It is very probable that it was built by the same architects or their immediate disciples, working on the more ancient[84] methods of the Norman schools founded by Lanfranc at Canterbury towards the close of the eleventh century, on the model of those he had established in France at the famous Abbaye du Bec.

The Cathedrals of Rheims, Amiens, and Beauvais excited extraordinary enthusiasm in their time, not only in the provinces of France, but among neighbouring nations, notably in England, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Spain, and Italy.

This enthusiasm was less fervid in the provinces farthest from the royal domain; but even in these outlying districts several remarkable buildings rose in the first half of the thirteenth century, constructed on the new lines.

In 1233 the Cathedral of Bazas was begun, and, unlike the majority of such undertakings, was carried through and finished in a comparatively short time.

The Cathedral of Bayonne, a contemporary building, shared the fate of Meaux, Troyes, and Auxerre. It was completed, with one tower only, in the sixteenth century. In 1248 the foundations of Clermont Cathedral were laid. The plan provided for six or seven towers, but the choir was the only portion finished in the thirteenth century. The transept and four towers, together with a portion of[86] the nave, were completed in the following century, and the work was then abandoned until the reign of Napoleon III., who caused it to be again taken up. The Cathedral of Limoges was begun in 1273, under the direct inspiration of Notre Dame at Amiens. Down to our own times it has had to content itself with a choir, a transept, and the suggestions of a nave, the last of which has lately been completed. At Rodez a greater perseverance was shown, and the work went steadily on from 1277 until the Renascence, at which period, however, the two western towers were left unfinished, notwithstanding[87] a contemporary description of their magnificence, which, in a truly Gascon vein, compares them to the[88] Egyptian pyramids, among other world-renowned marvels.

"In 1272 Toulouse and Narbonne entered the lists against Amiens, imitating its plan, and proposing to at least equal it in dimensions. Neither of these undertakings proved happy. Archbishop Maurice of Narbonne died the same year the works were begun; his successors took but a lukewarm interest in their progress. In 1320 the sea re[89]treated, leaving the port on which the wealth of the inhabitants mainly depended high and dry. Fortunately the choir with its noble vault 130 feet high was already completed, but the transept walls were left to fall into ruins. At Toulouse Bishop Bertrand de l'Isle-Jourdain lived just long enough to carry the work above the triforium of the choir; it was then abandoned till the fifteenth century. His successors squandered the revenues of their vast diocese so shamelessly in pleasures and display that Popes Boniface VIII. and John XXII., scandalised at their disorders, dismembered their territory and subdivided it into four bishoprics, granting to the Bishop of Toulouse the title of archbishop by way of compensation. But this compensation was of small avail to future zealous prelates for the carrying out of Bertrand's projects, and the choir of Toulouse was never finished. It falls short of its predestined height of 130 feet by 90, and the transept was not even begun.

"The Cathedrals of Lyons, of St. Maurice at Vienne, and of St. Étienne at Toul have affinities more or less direct with the great architectural movement. At Bordeaux the building of a great cathedral was contemplated at the time of the English occupation; but the choir would never have been finished but for the liberality of King Edward I. and of Pope Clement V., who had formerly been archbishop of the town."[11]

The great cathedrals constructed in England in the thirteenth century bear witness to the expansion[90] of French art on the lines already laid down in the preceding century by the teaching and achievements of the Norman monkish architects who had followed William the Conqueror to Great Britain.[12]

English builders assimilated the constructive principles of the architects of Anjou and of the Ile-de-France. In the numerous cathedrals they raised from the thirteenth to the close of the fifteenth century it is easy to trace the original characteristics of French art throughout all the transformations or adaptations by which its methods were modified in accordance with British usages and ideas.

This influence is very apparent in the Cathedrals of York, Ely, Wells, Salisbury, and Canterbury, the last of which was constructed from the plans of an architect or master-mason, known as William of Sens; in that of Lichfield, where the spires of the façade recall those of Coutances in Normandy, and above all, at Lincoln, one of the most beautiful of English cathedrals. Here we have perhaps the most strongly-marked instance of the steady and continuous filiation between the buildings of France and England during the so-called Gothic period. It is quite possible that they were the work of the[91] same architects, as they certainly were carried out by pupils or disciples of the same master-builders.[13]

Lincoln Cathedral, founded in the eleventh century, and finished in 1092, shared the fate of so many other timber-roofed buildings of the period. The greater part of it was destroyed by fire in 1124. It was rebuilt and enlarged by St. Hugh in accordance with the new ideas he had brought with him from France, a very natural consequence of his supervision, when we take into account that as mandatory of Pope Gregory VII. he had been Bishop of Grenoble. The church was again partly destroyed by an earthquake in 1185. It was then rebuilt, enlarged, and completed by Bishop Grossetête, an Englishman by birth, who had, however, been educated and brought up in France in the early part of the thirteenth century, and had carried over with him to his native land the essence of the grand and noble inspirations which marked that marvellous era.

The lantern-tower at the intersection of the western transept, which had fallen in 1235, was either rebuilt or finished by Bishop Grossetête about 1240. In its general outline and in detail it recalls the great lantern-tower of Coutances in Normandy, which seems also to have served as model for that of St. Ouen at Rouen in the fourteenth century.

The vast and magnificent Cathedral of Lincoln is an admirable subject for comparative study. Its architecture combines most strikingly the characteristics of the two nations. It blends in one harmonious whole the massive solidity of English structure overlaid with detail, formed by lines vertical, rigid, dry, and hard as iron, and the mingled[94] grace and strength of French architecture, which may fitly be compared with gold, in its union of[95] the supple and the durable, of solidity and power of resistance equal to those of the less precious metal, with an adaptability to artistic ends far greater.

In the façade and the west towers English characteristics predominate, but the choir and the apse[96] are French in composition, and most probably in execution, as is also the presbytery, in which both the arrangement and the details of the bays recall those of the lateral façades of Bourges.[14] All three are veritable masterpieces, worthy of the most brilliant period of French mediæval architecture.

In Belgium French influence manifested itself so early as the first half of the thirteenth century in the building of the remarkable Church of Ste. Gudule at Brussels. Up to this period the methods of the Rhenish schools had obtained in the Low Countries, and the setting aside of these methods in favour of the new system of France is significant of the high repute of the latter throughout Western Europe. Further evidence to this effect is to be found in the great churches of Ghent, Tongres, Louvain, and Bruges among others, which were[97] either built between 1235 and 1300, or at any rate begun during this period, to be completed in the fourteenth century and even later.

Ste. Gudule at Brussels was begun about 1226; but only the choir and the transept were[98] finished by 1275. The nave was built in the fourteenth century, together with the towers of the west front, which, however, were not finally completed till the following century, or perhaps the sixteenth. Several chapels, the windows of which are filled with magnificent painted glass, date from the same period as these towers.

French influence is no less patent at Cologne, which is undoubtedly the daughter of Amiens. The opinion of a German writer is of special interest on this point.

"The famous Cathedral of Cologne, one of the masterpieces of the German School, is a direct emanation from French tradition. The choir is a replica of that of Amiens; it was dedicated in 1322, after which the work of nave and transepts was carried on continuously; the nave measures 43 feet in width, and 140 in height; the total length of the church is 503 feet. The two towers of the west front have been completed in our own times—from the original designs, it is said. The general effect, whether of interior or exterior, is certainly not equal to that of the finest French cathedrals, but the style is rich and pure, and touches perfection in the treatment of details."[15]

In Scandinavian countries French art, which had already manifested itself at Ripen in Jutland during the so-called Romanesque period, gives us a fresh instance of its expansive power in an important Swedish building which dates from the end of the thirteenth century. The Cathedral of Upsala has this peculiarity, that it was designed and even begun by a French architect, one Estienne de Bonneuil,[99]
[100] who, on 30th August 1287, received the royal authority to betake himself to Upsala to construct the cathedral.[16]

In Spain the chief monuments of thirteenth-century Gothic architecture which betray the influence of France are the great five-aisled Church of Toledo, the cathedral at Badajoz, and the front of St. Mark's at Seville. French influence again is manifest in the cathedrals of Léon, of Palencia, of Oviedo, of Pampeluna, of Valencia, and of Barcelona, founded at the end of the thirteenth century and continued in the fourteenth, as well as in the churches of Torquemado, Bilbao, Bellaguer, Monresa, and Guadalupe, all dating partly from the fourteenth century.

The Cathedral of Burgos, begun in the first half of the thirteenth century, shows a striking analogy with French buildings of about the same period in the plan and construction of its flying buttresses and windows as well as in the decorative sculpture of its portals. The lower stories of the west front seem to date from the fourteenth century, but the openwork spires which crown it were not finished until the fifteenth. In this curious building we find elements taken from France, mingled with decorative passages of pure Italian, and with others characteristically Spanish in their use of motives only to be explained by the vitality of the Saracenic traditions.

Innumerable churches were built in Italy during the so-called Gothic period, principally towards its[101]
[102] conclusion. Not to speak of the famous Cathedrals of Milan and Florence, nor of S. Anthony, nor of the Cathedral of Padua, the Cathedrals of Siena and Orvieto seem especially to lean away from antique and Lombard traditions towards those of France, a characteristic especially notable in the decorative details of their west fronts, which recall in many ways the work of French architects during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

[103]

It is the opinion of some archæologists that the true parent of the Cathedrals of Siena and Orvieto was the Church of St. Francis at Assisi, which is not far distant. Now St. Francis of Assisi is undeniably French in origin. This church, which[104] was founded in 1228 to receive the remains of St. Francis who died in 1226, was possibly completed as to the lower structure in the thirteenth century; but it is improbable, to say the least, that this completion should have been the work of a German, for at this period Gothic architecture was still in embryo in Germany, while in France it had reached its most glorious development. The upper church seems to be later in date by a century; we may clearly trace its affinities with French art in the system of construction, which has all the characteristics peculiar to that which prevailed in the south of France at the close of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century. Of this system the Church of Albi is the most finished type.[17] Assisi, in its single aisle, in its buttresses, both as to their interior projections and their exterior half-turreted forms, shows a complete analogy with the French Albigeois church.

"The thirteenth century was so prolific in religious architecture as to leave little scope to those which followed. But even had the growth of great religious monuments been less rapid at this period, the wars which convulsed France in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would have paralysed such undertakings as the building of great cathedral churches. The religious buildings actually completed in the fourteenth century are rare; still rarer are those which date from the fifteenth. In those stormy days enterprise was confined to the completion of unfinished churches, and the modification, restoration, or enlargement of twelfth and thirteenth century buildings. It was not until the close of the fifteenth and opening of the sixteenth century, when France was beginning to recover its former power, that a fresh impulse was given to religious architecture; even then, however, the Gothic tradition persisted, though in a corrupt and bastard form. Many of the great cathedrals were finished, and a number of small churches, which had been destroyed[106] during the wars, or had fallen into decay through long neglect, consequent on the poverty of the community, were either rebuilt or restored. The movement was, however, presently arrested by the[107] Reformation, when war, fire, and pillage again destroyed or mutilated most of the newly completed religious buildings. The havoc wrought by this last upheaval was in its nature irrevocable, for when order once more reigned at the close of the sixteenth century, the Renascence had swept away the last traces of the national art; and though superficially the system of construction which prevailed in French churches of the thirteenth century still obtained, the genius which had presided at their construction was extinct and its memory despised."[18]

The Church of St. Ouen at Rouen, except for the west front and its towers, which are modern, is a typical example of the rare religious buildings constructed in the north of France during the fourteenth century. The arrangement of these churches varies, inasmuch as, while in general they follow the methods of construction adopted by the Northern architects of the thirteenth century, their special characteristic is a refinement or rather an attenuation of the piers, less by actual reduction of their section than by a diminution of their apparent bulk. This was effected by multiplying the clustered shafts, the slenderness of which was still further exaggerated by the prodigality of the mouldings, and the over-hollowness of their profiles. These profiles and mouldings rise from the base to the summit, and in the fourteenth century mark the spring of the arches by rings of sculpture, crowned with rudimentary abaci. These latter details were the last traces of a tradition which was to finally[108] disappear in the fifteenth century. Thenceforward the lines of the intersecting arches of the vault, as of the longitudinal and transverse arches, run down without interruption to the base of the piers, where we find a complex faggot of mouldings crossing and[109] recrossing, and showing little beyond the technical dexterity of the carver.

The main preoccupation of the architects of this period seems to have been the reduction of solid surfaces so as to give full play to the soaring effect of their airy shafts and vaults. The walls disappear, save below the windows, which now occupy the entire space of each bay. The triangular divisions of the vault are concealed by a serried network of supplementary ribs, for the most part useless save as decorations. But it must in justice be remembered that to this exaggeration of the window spaces we owe the growth of the beautiful art of painting on glass. This art, the admirable fitness of which for decorative purposes can hardly be over-estimated, had already manifested itself in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the interval from that period to the Renascence it produced its grandest masterpieces.[19]

It must be borne in mind that the great constructive and reconstructive movement which had manifested itself throughout Western Europe, and notably in the north of France, by great buildings, the distinguishing characteristics of which are vaulted roofs and flying buttresses, had made little progress in Southern France. The few exceptions of importance are—Bazas, Bayonne, Auch, Toulouse, and Narbonne. The Southern architects, as we have already stated, adhered to the ancient tradition, whether influenced by impulses of reaction, resistance, or defiance. Their conservatism is comprehensible enough in view of the strong Gallo-Roman[110] tendencies which governed architectural activity throughout the district. The builders of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries did indeed accept the Angevin intersecting arch, an invention the admirable simplicity of which was its own recommendation. But this concession was without prejudice to their broad principles. In the general arrangement of their religious buildings they still adhered to Roman usage, and to such models as the Basilica of Constantine and the tepidarium of the Baths of Caracalla.[20]

Towards the close of the thirteenth, and throughout the fourteenth century, a large number of churches were built in the South, consisting of a single wide and lofty aisle, vaulted on intersecting arches, the thrusts of which were received by buttresses of great bulk and prominence in the interior of the building, but very slightly indicated on the exterior. The spaces between the massive interior buttresses, on either side of the aisle, were occupied by a series of chapels, supporting disconnected tribunes or a continuous corridor. The two great churches of the Cordeliers and of the Jacobins at Toulouse were built in the brick of the country in the second half of the thirteenth century. These have two aisles, according to the Dominican usage of the period, but the exterior arrangement is the same as in the one-aisled churches. The Churches of St. Bertrand at Comminges, and those of Lodève, Perpignan, Condom, Carcassonne, Gaillac, Montpezat, Moissac, etc., were built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries on the single-aisled plan. That of Perpignan has[111]
[112] this peculiarity; its vaults, though supported on intersecting arches, are built in accordance with Roman methods, which further prevail both in the forms of the terra-cotta materials, and in the manner of their application. The reins of the vault, which measures some 53 feet across, are ornamented by terra-cotta jars embedded in an admirably prepared lime mortar of great durability. The actual roof lies without the support of any intervening structure of timber upon the extrados of the vault. This consists of voussoirs of Roman brick, retained by a layer of terra-cotta upon which the tiles, also of the antique Roman form, are laid. This arrangement protects the vault from any infiltration of water due to the rupture of the tiles, an absolutely necessary precaution, if the former was to retain its stability.

The Cathedral of Ste. Cécile at Albi is a monumental type of the single-aisled system. It is one of the largest and most important of Southern buildings constructed on the traditional principles of the ancient Romans. The vast single aisle, some 60 feet wide, is built entirely of brick, with the exception of the window tracery, the choir screen, and the south porch. Here we may study constructive principles no less simple than sagacious, combining all the necessary conditions of stability. The points of support and abutments of the vault on intersecting arches are all enclosed by the outer wall; they are thus protected from the accidents of climate, and their durability is almost indefinitely assured.

The foundations of the cathedral, which was dedicated to St. Cecilia, were laid in 1282, on the ruins of the ancient Church of Ste. Croix. The[113] main building was finished towards the close of the fourteenth century, and the whole as it now stands was completed in the last years of the fifteenth and[114] early part of the sixteenth century, by the addition of the baldacchino of the southern porch, or principal entrance, of the stone rood loft, and choir screen, the stalls of carved wood, and the fresco decorations which adorn the whole building. This varied workmanship renders Albi one of the most instructive of studies in connection with French decorative art, the successive developments being[115] marked by monumental examples of the highest order, inspired or created by divers influences. The architecture is of the Southern French type, as far as the main building is concerned; in essentials, the same type prevails in the magnificent porch known as the baldaquin, in the choir screen, and in the rood loft; but in these later additions the inspiration of Northern art at the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century is also perceptible. The statuary and sculptured ornaments of wood and stone are Flemish; the paintings indicate their Italian origin by their crudity of colour and vulgarity of motive.

The Cathedral of Albi has a special interest as being one of the most curious examples of Southern Gothic architecture in the fourteenth century. It has a further peculiarity, inasmuch as it was not only a church, as it still is, but a fortress. Such a combination is readily accounted for by a study of the epoch following on the fierce struggle which ended in the extermination of the Albigenses, and of the social and political events resulting therefrom.

The interior is purely ecclesiastical, of the most beautiful type of its time; the grandeur of its dimensions, its structural perfection, and the magnificence of its decoration, are unsurpassed in their way.

The exterior is that of a fortress. Its intention is proclaimed by the buttresses rising from the glacis of the base to form, as it were, flanking towers; by the arrangement of the bays, or rather curtains, crowned by an embattled machicolated parapet, which unite these towers, and by the grandiose[116] military character of the architecture. The formidable aspect of the building is much enhanced by the western tower, in effect a donjon keep, completing the system of defence by its connection with the fortifications of the archbishop's palace, which in[117] their turn are carried on to ramparts, crowning the escarpments which, to the north, rise from the Tarn.[21]

A few fortified churches still exist—such, for example, as Les Stes. Maries (Bouches du Rhone), which dates from the thirteenth century. Albi was not a solitary instance of this usage. The Churches of Béziers, Narbonne, and many others of the thirteenth and fourteenth century had been surrounded by defensive outworks rendered necessary by religious strife. The buildings thus transformed into strongholds served the further purpose of sheltering fugitive populations in times of panic.

One of the most interesting of such examples is the Church of Esnandes, not far from Rochelle, on the creek of Aiguillon, a building which dates from the twelfth century. It was fortified at the beginning of the fifteenth century to resist the incursions of the English.

As we have already remarked on the authority of a learned writer, the buildings of the fifteenth century are less numerous than those of the fourteenth. Those concerned in such undertakings were content to finish churches begun at an earlier period, or to attempt their reconstruction, frequently on plans which it was impossible to carry out, so that many buildings were left incomplete. We may instance a very famous monument, the Abbey of Mont St. Michel. The Romanesque choir fell into ruins in 1421, during the Hundred Years' War. In 1452 Cardinal Guillaume d'Estouteville undertook the reconstruction of the church on a scale so considerable that the choir only was completed during the[118]
[119] first years of the sixteenth century.[22] This part of the church shows the effect of the decadence of which there had been indications so early as the close of the thirteenth century. Certain of the arrangements are very ingenious, notably that of the triforium, which rests on the reins of the lower vault, and forms, as seen from outside, a series of small apses standing out from the main wall. But the mason's work is negligent, especially in the flying buttresses, which were so carefully treated by the architects of the thirteenth century. The lines are attenuated by a multiplicity of mouldings to an almost threadlike slenderness; the spring of the arches is undefined by capitals, and the complicated network of the fenestration adds to the wire-drawn effect, and further diminishes the proportions of the building. There is little to admire but the extreme manual dexterity of the carvers. The carving of the granite, the only stone used at Mont St. Michel[23] save for the arcadings of the cloister, is very remarkable, as is also the ornamental sculp[120]
[121]ture; this is executed with extreme skill, in spite of the excess of detail with which it is loaded.

The decadence of Gothic architecture was manifest even at the close of the thirteenth century in such tours de force as the choir of St. Peter at Beauvais, and the Church of St. Urbain at Troyes. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries buildings or parts of buildings were constructed with remarkable skill, but the noble simplicity which was the strength of thirteenth-century architecture was no more. By the close of the fifteenth century a studied mannerism had taken its place. The western doorway of Alençon Cathedral is a typical example of this development, the defects of which were still further accentuated in the following century.

"The qualities of the architecture of the decadence must be sought not in the construction, but in the decoration of churches; here we may freely admire the happy detail and patient execution which mark the work of carvers and limners during the last two centuries of the Middle Ages."[24]

Gothic architecture put forth its expansive force at the close of the twelfth and during the thirteenth century, not only throughout Western Europe, but even in Eastern countries, where monuments still survive of the highest interest to us as the work of monkish architects who came from France in the wake of the first Crusaders. The modifications and enlargements of famous buildings in the Holy Land towards the close of the twelfth century show evident traces of their influence, which is further[122]
[123] manifested in certain structures of Rhodes and Cyprus from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, in which Western and more especially French types have served as models.

"It will hardly be disputed that the prolonged sojourn of the Crusaders in the Levant, the teachings of their architects, and the contemplation of their works, were considerable factors in the development of Arab art. There was a reaction of the West upon the East; sometimes indeed such a direct influence is perceptible as to astound and perplex the observer. To understand the part played by the Crusaders in the East, and to appreciate its Western and independent character, we must cast a rapid glance at the monuments constructed by them in Cyprus and Rhodes after their expulsion from[124] Syria. We shall find the movement which originated in the twelfth century progressing throughout the following centuries on the same lines; in other words, drawing a continuous inspiration from France.[25]

"The island of Cyprus was conquered in 1191[125] by Richard Cœur de Lion; in the following year it was ceded to Guy de Lusignan, in whose family it remained until the close of the fifteenth century. Catherine Cornaro, the widow of the last of the Lusignans, gave it in 1489 to the Venetians, who retained possession of it till its conquest by the Turks in 1571. Throughout the thirteenth century Cyprus was a refuge for successive remnants of the Christian colonies of Syria. French predominance was at its height in the fourteenth century. The religious monuments of this period are very numerous and of great variety of structure. Art had emerged from the cloister, and had ceased to be the monopoly of monastic bodies. In Cyprus we no longer find that scholastic uniformity which characterises the Latin churches of the Holy Land. The new blood of secularism had entered into Romanesque architecture and led to a fresh development of the art in Cyprus as in France Architects applied the thirteenth-century methods, fully recognising their consequences. They sacrificed to local exigencies by the substitution of flat roofs for timber ones, but this modification in nowise affected the general arrangement of their buildings.

"The most considerable monument of the thirteenth century is the Cathedral of Nicosia, built between 1209 and 1228, and dedicated to St. Sophia (see Fig. 79). This large three-aisled church has all the characteristics of French cathedrals of the period."[26]

The Churches of St. Catherine and of the Armenians, the mosques of Emerghié and of Arab[126] Achmet also date from the close of the thirteenth century. Among the more numerous buildings of the fourteenth century the most noteworthy are the Cathedral of St. Nicholas at Famagusta (Figs. 80 and 81), with its three portals and two towers; the Church of St. Sophia at Famagusta (Fig. 82), the Premonstrant Monastery of Lapaïs, remarkable for the beauty and nobility of its abbatial buildings, which comprise a large three-aisled chapel, and several religious buildings at Paphos and at Limasol. At Rhodes there are a number of churches built in the fifteenth century after French models, which had no less a vogue for dwelling-houses than for religious and military architecture; in a word, architecture—civil, religious, or military—was French in all its manifestations. "The guns of the order still point from the embrasures of the towers, Soliman's[127] stone cannon balls strew the neighbouring ground; sculptured on the house fronts are the blazons, and in many cases the French names, of their bygone owners. Involuntarily the mind travels back by the space of three centuries, reincorporating these forgotten worthies, and repeopling their dwelling-places. One half expects to see the emblazoned doors thrown open, to give egress to knightly owners, mustering for the last time under the banner of St. John."[27]

The first steeples were round, on the model of the Greek and Byzantine cupolas, and modest in diameter, so that the bells they contained can only have been small ones. These bells were suspended from the summit of the tower, the portion of wall surrounding them being pierced by arcaded openings, and crowned by a long pyramidal roof.[28]

Such towers were very frequently isolated from the body of the church. A large number of Italian churches, dating from all periods of the Middle Ages, have steeples at a considerable distance from the main building.

Force of habit determined the application of the round form to towers of the twelfth century; but it is evident that a square plan was preferred, even so early as the tenth century, and such a form was in course of time rendered necessary by the development of the founder's art, and the increase in the dimensions of bells at the beginning of the twelfth century. Besides the great bells which proclaimed[129] the hour of prayer to a distant flock, small bells were in use to regulate the religious exercises of the clergy. They are called in the Latin texts signum, schilla, nola; in French sin, esquielle, eschelitte; from the beginning of the tenth century they were placed in the campaniles which crowned the domes.

The Italian word campanile has the force of the French terms tour, clocher, beffroi (or the English tower, steeple, belfry). But the denomination clocher has a general application to all pyramidal structures rising above the roof of a church.

The belfry was a tower, in most cases isolated, which contained the bell destined to sound the curfew and tocsin, and to call the burghers to civic assemblies.

Like the belfry, the Italian campanile is generally an isolated building, but it is usually placed in the near neighbourhood of a church. Among the most famous campanili are those of Florence—begun in the fourteenth century, on the plans of Giotto,—of Padua, of Ravenna, and the famous leaning tower of Pisa.

In France the term campanile has a more general application, and is given to the little pierced[130] arcaded turrets which, in many churches, crown the walls of the façade and shelter small bells.

The most ancient belfries of the original provinces of France have great analogies with Byzantine monuments as to form, even when differing in detail. One of the most remarkable of these is the tower of St. Front at Périgueux, which seems to date from the first years of the eleventh century. It marked the sepulchre of the Saint, and apparently embraced two bays of the original three-aisled Latin church of the sixth century, evident traces of which have been discovered to the west of the great domed building of later times.

The tower of St. Front is composed of three square stories, diminishing on plan as they rise, and crowned[131] by a conical dome, resting upon a circular colonnade, the columns of which vary in height and diameter, and owe their origin to Roman examples in the neighbourhood.[29]

The influence of this remarkable building was very considerable. It served as a model to architects of the neighbouring provinces. The type was improved upon in the tower of the Abbey Church of Brantôme by the avoidance of the false bearings which mar the structure of St. Front, while at St. Léonard, near Limoges, a very original feature was superadded in the octagonal form of the crown or roof. The Auvergnat architects further perfected the construction by introducing internal piers for the support of the recessed walls of the upper stories, as at Puy.[30]

It is worthy of note that, in spite of the importance given to these buildings, the space allotted to the bells themselves was comparatively limited, which seems to indicate that the towers were destined for other purposes than the reception of bells. In the eleventh century the tower bore the same relation to the cathedral or abbey as did the donjon to the feudal castle. It was, in fact, the symbol of power. As abbots and bishops enjoyed the same rights as the nobles, it will be readily understood that the costliness of such emblems would be governed solely by the resources of their authors. The number of towers built at about the same period in connection with cathedrals and abbeys, and the importance of such as were attached even to simple parish[132]
[133] churches may be explained if we consider them mainly as denoting the status of an enfranchised[134] commune. The rivalries in connection with neighbouring towers undoubtedly had their origin in conditions such as these.

Towards the close of the eleventh century and throughout the twelfth many towers were built at an angle with the door, or in front of it, so as to form a porch, as at St. Benoît-sur-Loire and Poissy; or above it, as in the Churches of Ainay and of Moissac.

Later on immense towers with spires were built at each angle of the western façade, the gable of the nave rising between them.

At the Abbey Church of Jumiéges a large projecting porch filled the central bay of the ground story between the bases of the towers, but more frequently the towers were in one plane with the chief porch, and were themselves pierced with lateral porches, the three doors, with their richly sculptured voussoirs, forming one vast decorative whole.

The architects of the so-called Romanesque period built their towers at the intersection of the transepts; but avoiding the constructive audacities of the tower of St. Front, which was one of the most generally accepted models of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, they ensured the solidity of their central tower by placing the more or less conical cupola which crowned the structure upon a square base, carefully loaded and abutted at each angle.

At the close of the twelfth century the architects of the Ile-de-France adopted a square form for the body of the tower, and in imitation of Oriental and Rhenish builders, reserved the octagonal plan for[135] the spire, ensuring the solidity of the angles by a variety of ingenious combinations.

The great central towers of the Norman churches built in England and Normandy from the thirteenth to the fourteenth century were not always merely belfries, as at Salisbury or Langrune, for instance; in many cases they were lanterns, their functions being to light the centre of the church and to form a magnificent decorative feature at the intersection of transepts, nave, and choir in cruciform structures, such as St. Georges, Bocherville, Coutances, etc. Of all the French provinces Normandy clung most persistently to the lantern tower, and that of St. Ouen at Rouen is one of the most interesting examples.

In other provinces, notably Picardy, Champagne, Burgundy, and the Ile-de-France, lantern towers[136] were superseded by timber flèches cased in lead, which rose at the intersection of the roofs of nave and transepts.

[137]

Among the most remarkable towers of the twelfth century in the Northern provinces we may mention those of Tracy-le-Val (Oise), of the Abbey Church of the Ste. Trinité at Vendôme, and of Bayeux; those of the Abbaye-aux-Hommes at Caen; the old tower of the Cathedral of Chartres, and that of St. Eusèbe at Auxerre.

In the thirteenth century the height and decorative richness of these structures had increased to an extraordinary degree. The tower of Senlis (Fig. 86) is a most elegant example of the first years of a century which witnessed the birth of so many marvels of architecture.

In Burgundy several remarkable towers were built by the monks of Cluny, who were free from the asceticism introduced by St. Bernard among their brethren of Citeaux. The most notable of their structures are perhaps the towers of the Church of St. Père, near Vézelay, built about 1240.

In the South various original developments in Gothic architecture were logically brought about by a judicious use of the materials of the country, such as brick. Most interesting examples of such development are to be found in the tower of the Jacobin Church at Toulouse, which dates from the close of the thirteenth century, and the donjon tower of Albi, the characteristics of which we have already discussed.

Examples of isolated towers are hardly to be found of later date than the thirteenth century. Bordeaux perhaps offers an exception. But the general usage after this period was to include the towers in the composition of the façade; their actual[138] functions as belfries became apparent only above the level of the vaults. A beautiful example of this[139] treatment may be studied in the noble composition of Notre Dame de Paris.

Its contemporary, the Cathedral of Laon, has four towers, terminating in octagonal belfries, the angles of which are flanked by two-storied openwork pinnacles; on the second of these stories are placed colossal bulls, the effect of which is very striking.

The towers of Rheims, which date from the second half of the thirteenth century, are of secondary importance in the splendid façade; but they are marked by a feature which was a novelty at the time. The interior of the belfry is built with a cage to allow free play to the bells, and space for the timbers by which they are supported, while the exterior forms an octagonal tower flanked by important pinnacles.

Rheims may be said to mark in Gothic architecture the boundary which separated its period of perfection from that of exaggeration and mannerism. The mania for lightness and the desire to dazzle and astound soon seduced its artists into a dangerous path which led inevitably to decadence. Such effects first manifested themselves more especially in the provinces of the German frontier, and the spire of Strasburg, built in the fourteenth century, is a famous example of these mistaken tendencies.

Throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries towers adhered to the plan and general arrangement adopted by the later architects of the thirteenth century, diverging chiefly in the marvellous profusion of detail and of sculpture, and in the excessive lightness of design. The points of support were attenu[140]ated, and the mass of ornament seemed designed to conceal them as far as possible. In France the misfortunes of the times tended largely to perpetuate these dangerous foibles; for a number of churches which were founded at the close of the thirteenth century remained unfinished till the fifteenth and sixteenth, when Gothic art was in full decadence.

But we must not pass over unmentioned certain buildings famous for boldness of construction and magnificence of decoration, if not for purity of style. The following are perhaps the most important:—In France the tower of St. Pierre at Caen, which shows strong traces of that analogy, or family likeness, so to speak, uniting Norman edifices; and the[141] tower of St. Michel at Bordeaux, the spire of which was destroyed by a hurricane in 1768, and has lately been restored to its primitive height of 365 feet; in Austria the tower of St. Stephen, one of the most important of such buildings in that country, finished in 1433; the tower of the Cathedral of Freiburg-im-Breisgau (grand-duchy of Baden), one of the most beautiful and important examples. It was mainly constructed towards the close of the fourteenth century, but the openwork spire was added about the middle of the following century.

The Cathedral of Antwerp in Belgium was begun in the middle of the fourteenth century; the nave and the four side aisles were not completed till a century[142] later. The façade is said to have been begun in 1406 by a Boulognese master-mason, one Pierre Amel; but of the two belfry towers only that on the north was completed in 1518. Its principal merit lies in its boldness of construction and its unusual height of 410 feet, rather than in purity of style or beauty of detail, the latter being a conglomerate made up from every period of Gothic.

Choirs.—In Christian churches the choir[31] proper was an institution long before the chapels.[32]

At the extremity of the basilica, in the centre of the chalcidium or transept which gave to the basilican plan the form of a T or Tau—a figure venerated by the Christians as symbolising the Cross—were placed the altar, the[143]
[144] sanctuary, and the precincts occupied by the deacons and sub-deacons. The altar stood in the midst, between the hemicycle or apse and the nave arch. The hemicycle or apse which formed the Pagan tribunal was by the Christians reserved for ordained priests, hence its name, presbyterium. A semi-circular bench (consistorium), interrupted in the middle by a seat higher than the rest, on either side of which sat the inferior clergy, surrounded the apse, the raised seat (suggestus) being the throne of the bishop or his representative.

This portion of the basilica underwent a later modification; from the presbyterium it became the martyrium, or shrine in which was placed the body of the patron saint of the basilica or the relic to which the devotion of the faithful was specially addressed. This usage had been established even before the year 500 in the first basilica of St. Martin at Tours.

The primitive apse was lighted only from the nave or transept. After its transformation into the martyrium it was not only pierced with windows, but, according to some authors, was provided with openings along its base, or even arcaded, so as to give access to a low gallery running round it. If this be so, the characteristic arrangement of mediæval churches dates from the fifth century.

In later times when it became customary to place the altar at the back, against the wall of the apse, seats for the bishops, priests, and choristers—the choir—were arranged between the altar and the nave. In monastic churches, built after the Latin tradition, the choir was generally in the crossing, or[145] where there were no transepts, in the nave itself. It was separated from the congregation by a low enclosure of stone or marble. There are a few examples of churches with two choirs, one at the east, the other at the west.

In the first churches of the Romanesque epoch the choir was confined to the space between the piers of the crossing; it soon, however, made considerable advances. In monastic churches the choir or sanctuary was cut off from the surrounding spaces by barriers of stone or wood, and towards the nave was closed by a jubé, or rood screen and loft, the upper part of which was accessible to the monks for the reading of the epistle and gospel. Bishops, on the other hand, being free from the necessity of closing the choirs of their cathedrals, made a point of providing their flocks with wide spaces, in which ceremonies could be afforded a liberal development.

At the end of the twelfth century and beginning of the thirteenth these ideas governed the construction of important churches. Changes continued to be made, however, and from the reign of St. Louis we find the choirs of great cathedrals arranged on the exclusive principles of the monastic churches. The arcades surrounding them were filled with high stone walls, against the inner sides of which the stalls of the clergy, with their lofty and richly carved wooden canopies, were securely fixed.

Among the more famous choirs we may quote those of Notre Dame de Paris, of Amiens, of Beauvais, of Auch, of Lincoln, of Canterbury, of Spires, of Worms, of Burgos, etc. In order to satisfy the laymen whose view of the ceremonies[146] performed in the choir was intercepted by these enclosures, the sanctuary was surrounded by chapels contrived in the wall of the apse, and in the side aisles of the nave.

Chapels.—From the end of the tenth century, according to M. de Caumont, we shall sometimes find aisles running entirely round the choir or sanctuary and communicating with it by an arcade. Even at this early period there must have been chapels in such aisles. In the twelfth century the disposition to elongate the choirs of important churches became general, and brought with it certain modifications of the plan. The Church of Vignori, which dates from the tenth century, has an apse divided into three chapels, recalling in its arrangement that of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem.

The Church of St. Servan, built in the eleventh century, has five chapels round the choir, and the Auvergnat churches—Notre Dame du Port at Clermont, and St. Paul at Issoire among others,—which date from the beginning of the twelfth century, also show in this respect some interesting peculiarities. The importance given to the apse by these rings of chapels can scarcely be too much insisted on.

On plan these apsidal chapels are, for the most part, round-ended. They are pierced with one or more round-headed windows, and have segmental vaults. On the outside they are often ornamented by mouldings, modillions, and even by variations in the colour of their stones. Chapels between the buttresses of the nave are rare in several aisled[147] churches of the Romanesque period, but in many such buildings they were added at a later time.

The great revolution which took place in the art of building towards the end of the twelfth century had, for one of its results, the multiplication of chapels in the numerous great churches dating from that epoch. The principle of that revolution being to replace the inert masses which had previously resisted the various thrusts by comparatively slender points of support upon which those thrusts could be collected, stability being secured by a scientific calculation of forces, it led, as a natural consequence, to a considerable augmentation of disposable surfaces in the interior. These surfaces, mere curtains between the points of support, were ornamented with vast networks of stone, embracing panels of painted glass, on which the principal events of the Old and New Testaments, and the scenes so vividly outlined in the traditions of the time, were traced with admirable art. Room was found for chapels of considerable size, not only in the walls, or rather between the piers of the apse, but also in those of the side aisles, the bounding walls of which were carried out to the external faces of the buttresses receiving the thrust of the main vault, which buttresses now formed the lateral walls of a continuous line of chapels.

The veneration paid to the relics of saints increased greatly after the year 1000, in consequence of the pilgrimages to the Holy Land which preceded the Crusades. Each religious community established a patron, and demanded a special oratory dedicated to him, and it was a point of honour to[148] make such a shrine excel that of the neighbouring, and, in most cases, rival corporation. The demand for these shrines increased to such an extent at the close of the fourteenth and throughout the fifteenth century that, though chapels were constructed in all the available spaces of the vast cathedrals, they were found insufficient, and sanctuaries, which in earlier times had been the special property of particular bodies, were shared by several confraternities.

The Lady Chapel, or chapel dedicated to the Virgin, was generally in the apse, and in the thirteenth century, especially at its close, had been so considerably developed as to give great importance to the portion of the apse allotted to it. Very curious examples of this development are to be studied in the Cathedrals of Bourges, Amiens, Meaux, and Rouen, among others.

In many cathedrals and churches of the Middle Ages lateral chapels or annexes were built to serve some subsidiary purpose; such were chapter-houses, muniment rooms, treasuries, or even mortuaries, as the presbytery of Lincoln, the circular chapel at Canterbury, known as Becket's Crown, containing the tomb of Thomas à Becket, and Henry VII.'s chapel at Westminster.

A most interesting example of this species of structure dating from the end of the twelfth century is to be seen at Soissons Cathedral; a two-storied vaulted building is connected by openings with the upper galleries of the round-ended south transept, and contains a funeral chapel, with a vaulted chamber above for a treasury.

In many countries small ancient buildings are to be[149] found, known as baptisteries or chapels; these latter are doubtless the little rural churches which were built in great numbers in the first centuries of the Christian era, and are designated capella in texts of the time of Charlemagne, or perhaps oratories, such as it was customary to attach to the charnel-houses of towns or great religious establishments.[33]

The use of private chapels dates from the earliest days of Christianity; great personages who had embraced the new faith followed the example of the Romans who constructed private basilicas in their palaces. The custom was perpetuated, and the splendid Palatine Chapel of Aix is one of the most magnificent of its results. In later times kings and great nobles built themselves sanctuaries within their castles. In the time of Charles V. the Louvre owned an important chapel; the feudal castles of Coucy and Pierrefonds, among others, contained large chapels, the arrangement of which is very curious. Archæologists cite as of special beauty among seignorial chapels the ancient oratory of the Dukes of Bourbon at Moulins, the Chapels of Chenonceaux, Chambord, and Chaumont, and the Chapel of Jacques Cœur's hôtel at Bourges. Many episcopal palaces have very remarkable chapels, such as that of the archbishop's palace at Rheims.

Refuges, hospitals, madhouses, and prisons also had chapels more or less important.

The term Sainte Chapelle[34] was applied in the[150] Middle Ages to buildings raised over spots sanctified by the martyrdom of a saint, or destined to enshrine relics of peculiar holiness. The most famous was the royal oratory, built by Pierre de Montereau between 1242 and 1248 on the south side of the royal palace, now the Palais de Justice, Paris, to receive the Crown of Thorns, the pieces of the true Cross, and other relics brought by the royal founder, St. Louis, from the Holy Land.

The distinguishing feature of the Ste. Chapelle of Paris is its division into two stories—the upper chapel, which communicated with the royal apartments, and the lower chapel on the ground floor, which may have been open to the public. Its construction is remarkable no less for the happy boldness with which the whole of the spaces between the buttresses were utilised for the introduction of immense painted windows, than for the perfection of execution and the beauty of the sculptures, and this in spite of the rapidity with which the work was carried out. An annexe, which has now disappeared, adjoined the apse on the north, and consisted of three stories serving as sacristies and muniment rooms. The spire, a wooden structure cased in lead, dating from the time of Charles VII., was destroyed by fire in 1630; it was shortly restored, only to be again demolished at the close of the eighteenth century, and was finally replaced by the architect Lassus, who restored the building.

The Ste. Chapelle of St. Germain-en-Laye must have been built some years before that of the royal palace of Paris. It is remarkable for certain peculiarities of structure which show a greater[151] architectural skill; the piers which sustain the vault have a greater interior projection; the formerets are disengaged from the wall, and the square windows occupy the whole space between the buttresses, and rise to close beneath the cornice. This most original and learned arrangement gives the building a very graceful aspect, and brings out its elegant proportions.

The Ste. Chapelle of Vincennes, begun by Charles VI., was not completed until the reign of Henry II. In construction it is akin to that of Paris. The two-storied annexes which formed the sacristies and treasury were finished towards the close of the fifteenth century.

After the example of kings and princes the great abbeys began to raise important oratories independent of their conventual churches. The Abbey of St. Martin des Champs at Paris founded two large chapels about the middle of the thirteenth century,—one dedicated to the Virgin, and the other to St. Michael.

Pierre de Montereau was commissioned to build, in addition to the Ste. Chapelle of the palace, a chapel dedicated to the Virgin, within the precincts of the Abbey of St. Germain des Prés; the plan of the vaults differs here from that of the Ste. Chapelle of the palace. According to a drawing by Alexander Lenoir, made before the destruction of this chapel of the Virgin, the pointed arches comprised two bays, in imitation of the vaults on intersecting arches in Notre Dame of Paris, the origin of which we discussed in chapter vi.

The Abbey of Châalis, near Senlis, founded by[152] Louis the Fat in 1136, which was one of the most important abbeys of the Cistercian order in the thirteenth century, possessed an abbey church of five aisles, over 330 feet long. Towards the middle of the thirteenth century it nevertheless founded a Ste. Chapelle, known as the Chapelle de l'Abbé. The building has undergone various vicissitudes, and the ribbed vaults which date from the reign of St. Louis were once decorated with frescoes, attributed to Primaticcio. The building still exists, however, almost in its entirety. It illustrates the considerable influence exercised by the Ste. Chapelle of Paris from its very foundation on the great nobles, more especially the heads of rich abbeys eager to parade their immense power and wealth.

In the Middle Ages all the arts were auxiliary to architecture. The architect traced the details of his conception in the workshop, and superintended the construction; he directed stone-carvers, masons, sculptors, illuminators, painters, and glass-stainers, and laid his imprimatur on every branch of the work of which he was the creator.

Thus the connection between the allied arts was very close. The history of sculpture is that of architecture, for the diverse influences which marked their origin and modifications were common to both. Each reached its apogee in the brilliant manifestations of the thirteenth century, and each followed the same path to decadence less than two centuries later.

Statuary and ornamental sculpture were inseparable, being executed by the same artists in pursuance of the same idea: the study of nature.

In obedience to the law of increasing development they abandoned the hieratic forms imposed by religious tradition, but only to give a new expression to these very traditions, which were still preserved and venerated.

[154]

Roman inspiration, and even direct imitation of Roman sculpture, is clearly traceable in the first half of the thirteenth century. Rheims, which may be accepted as the masterpiece, the last word, so to speak, of Gothic architecture, illustrates this influence in certain magnificent examples of the western porch.

The architects of the thirteenth century were pre-eminently the children of their generation. Ignoring their Latin descent they followed in the paths of the innovators so far as monumental structure was concerned; but they in their turn inaugurated a new departure by abandoning the Byzantine convention in statuary and sculptured ornament which[155]
[156]
[157] had prevailed throughout the preceding century, in favour of the more ancient Roman tradition. In this one respect they made a salutary return upon those antique principles which they afterwards definitively abandoned.

The influence of Roman art upon French mediæval sculpture is unquestionable. Its course may be traced through the relations existing between North and South long before the Crusades, principally by means of the great religious communities, and even more manifestly in the countless monuments raised in Gaul on Roman models, or in those constructed by Gallo-Romans for several centuries. Many of these survived the incursions of the barbarians.

The origin of orna[158]mental sculpture is no less venerable. Superficially, it would seem to have drawn its inspiration mainly from the Romanesque epoch; but according to modern savants[35] its source must be looked for in much remoter periods. Oriental art, imported into Scandinavia, and there barbarised, was introduced into Ireland in the early centuries of our era. The Irish monks, whose power was very great, and who seem to have been the principal agents in the Renascence of the days of Charlemagne, created, or at any rate greatly influenced Carlovingian art by their manuscripts and miniatures. From Carlovingian art that of the so-called Romanesque period was born, and this was[159] in its turn the parent of the ornamental sculpture of the thirteenth century. In the admirably decorative character of this art we recognise the influence of an ancient tradition handed on from generation to generation, to be finally rejuvenated, invigorated, and transformed as to detail by a close study of nature,[160] precisely as had happened in the allied development of statuary.

[161]

The architects of the Ile-de-France, like those of Rheims, assimilated the principles of the new art with the supple skill which characterised them, such assimilation bearing rich fruit at Notre Dame de Paris in the sculptured figures of the west porch, and no less in their accessory ornaments.

A most instructive comparative study is furnished by the north and south porches of Chartres Cathedral. Here we find, in one[162] building, examples of sculptures inspired by the hieratic tradition of Byzantium, and of those which had been transformed and naturalised by a return to antique ideals.

At Amiens again certain of the sculptures were influenced by the new principles. But in the greater part there is a prodigality of motive and looseness of execution which indicate decline no less surely than the mistaken ingenuity of the structural details.

Mediæval sculpture followed the fortunes of architecture, both in its rise and fall. In its first beginnings it was characterised by a purity of style not unworthy of Rome in her most glorious days, but rapidly losing touch with the antique ideal, it lost measure and proportion in its development. The wise laws of simplicity, essential to[163]
[164] all greatness in art, were set aside in favour of an unruly exuberance which ran riot in details, and was the immediate cause of a decline perceptible even in the fourteenth century, and absolute in the fifteenth. "Sculpture was at its zenith. We are astounded by the activity and fertility of thirteenth-century artists, who peopled façades and embrasures with figures from seven to ten feet in height, and animated every tympanum with countless statuettes. The façade of Notre Dame, by no means one of the richest, has[165] sixty-eight colossal statues, for the most part of the highest excellence; at Chartres and at Amiens there are over a hundred to each porch. The famous figure of Christ at Amiens is a masterpiece; bas-reliefs work out the details of the main subject, and enrich the story with innumerable pictures of amazing vigour and originality."

[166]
[167]

The favourite themes of the thirteenth century had something in common with those of the Romanesque epoch, though there is a sensible difference of treatment and considerable progress in composition, which exhibited more of taste and learning and less of eccentricity. But the satiric power and delight in caricature of our forefathers still demanded an outlet. These found expression in many a caustic gibe at clergy, princes, and rich burghers, and took substance in many a quaint gargoyle. A luxuriant system of ornamentation, adapted from the vegetable kingdom, was auxiliary to statuary. The main subject was enframed by it, or relieved against it; while often the composition itself was enriched[168] by its introduction to complete the decorative effect. Or such a system of decoration was the only sculpturesque motive employed; it was then used with the utmost elaboration, and developed at the expense of statuary. Such was the case in Burgundy and Normandy, in which provinces the latter art was of slow growth. The Byzantine character of the scrolls, carved bands, and fantastic foliage of Romanesque art disappeared; ornament took on a new independence, and began to seek its types among native plant forms.

The carved leafage (Fig. 106) of the cloister arcades in the Abbey of Mont St. Michel strikingly illustrate this departure. The very plants which inspired the thirteenth[169]-century sculptors still flourish at the foot of the ancient abbey walls.

Thus the flora of our own fields was applied in lithic form to the elements of our church architecture. But the breadth proper to architectural sculpture was still preserved by means of ingenious combinations.

It was not until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that the imitation of natural forms became servile, tedious, and over-minute, and that the beauty of the whole was sacrificed to exaggerated faithfulness of detail.[36]

It should be noted that the decadence which manifested itself in monumental sculpture was far less rapid in the more intimate art which may be distinguished as imagery. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries all sculptors were image-makers; but towards the close of the latter, and during the fifteenth, the term was specially applied to carvers of images in wood, ivory, etc.[170] Art still flourished in their ateliers in all its beauty, notably that of the goldsmiths, who carved images in high or low relief in precious metals, and who, thanks to the severely paternal regulations of the maîtrise, were enabled to bring French decorative art to the highest degree of perfection. The beautiful carved wooden stalls of Amiens, Auch, and Albi, to name[171]
[172] but the most famous, testify to the vigorous talent of the fourteenth and fifteenth-century image-carvers.

Flemish ateliers, which were kept up by the severe rules of the guilds, exercised a salutary influence upon the Burgundian craftsmen. This is more especially true of the great workshops of Antwerp and of Brussels, and perhaps also of those of Southern Germany. Burgundian influences reacted in their turn upon the artists of the Ile-de-France, notably in Paris (that brilliant centre of all artistic activities in the fourteenth century), and stirred them to emulation. The union of these various elements brought about the revival of the fine tradition of the thirteenth century, and towards[173]
[174] the close of the fifteenth century paved the way for a French Renascence, which heralded that more famous movement of the sixteenth, the credit of which is usually given to the Italians, who, however, such was the infatuation of the times, contributed rather to the debasement than to the regeneration of French national art.

[175]

The remarkable sculptures that owe their origin to the ateliers of Antwerp are distinguished by one of the quarterings of the civic arms, a severed hand burnt in with a red-hot iron. Those of Brussels are branded in like fashion. The images of wood, ivory, and vermeil, that we figure as illustrating the art of the image-carvers from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, show that the old tradition was still cherished in this community. Their artists were so far swayed by iconographic convention that a certain hieratic[176] sentiment is perceptible in their works; but this is never allowed to outweigh fitness of action and expression, and their masterpieces are so instinct with taste and delicacy, composed with so much skill and executed with such freedom, that they are the admiration of modern artists.[37]

[177]

[178]

These essentially French qualities they owe, primarily, of course, to the genius of their creators, but in a scarcely inferior degree to the fostering care of the maîtrises, institutions which only require a certain modification by the progressive leaven of today, to become models for the imitation of all whose function it is to develop national art.

The origin of painting dates from remote antiquity, and the art had already passed through many developments before it was applied by Gothic architects to the decoration of their buildings.

"In the thirteenth century the architectonic painting of the Middle Ages reached its apogee in France. The painted windows, the vignettes of manuscripts, and the mural decorations of this period all denote a learned and finished art, and are marked by a singular harmony of tones, and a corresponding harmony with architectural forms. It is beyond question that this art was developed in the cloister, and was a direct product of Græco-Byzantine teachings."[38]

From the archæological point of view, however, it is important to bear in mind the considerable influence exercised upon continental art by the manuscripts and miniatures of Irish monks, so early as the reign of Charlemagne.

Towards the close of the twelfth century sculpture and painting alike entered on a new phase,[180] resulting from that process of architectural evolution we have been considering. The hieratic tradition was set aside for the direct teaching and inspiration of nature. But as the mastery of the painter increased, the mural spaces available for the application of his new methods diminished rapidly, till, by the thirteenth century, the only wall surfaces left to him were those beneath the windows, and some few[181] triangular spaces in the vault, where the interlacing network of arches became gradually closer and closer. Finding themselves thus practically excluded from the new Gothic buildings, the painters of the day turned their attention with entire success to the decoration of ancient monuments by the new naturalistic methods. The domes of great abbey churches such as St. Front (Périgueux) offered immense bare surfaces, the concave forms of which they utilised with extraordinary skill, adorning them with compositions in which figure and ornament are so adroitly combined, that they seem to be of normal proportions, in spite of their really colossal size (Fig. 117).

Thanks to a discovery of mural paintings made in the Cathedral of Cahors in 1890, of the greatest archæological importance, we are able to verify these statements.

During the progress of certain works undertaken for the preservation of the two domes, some paintings of great interest were laid bare on the removal of several coats of whitewash from the western cupola. Traces of similar decoration were found on the eastern cupola and its pendentives, but these it was found impossible to preserve, the action of the air causing them to peel at once from the surfaces. But the western composition is intact, and though the brilliance of the colour has no doubt suffered from time, we can still appreciate the learning, vigour, and firmness of hand perceptible in the design, which is outlined in black.

This western cupola, which is ovoid, and some fifty-three feet in diameter, like that of the east, is[182]
[183] divided by its pictorial scheme into eight sectors, separated by wide bands of boldly-designed fruits and flowers. Fig. 116 gives an exact idea of the general arrangement. Eight colossal figures of prophets, varying in height from fifteen to sixteen feet approximately, form the chief motives of the decoration. David, the prophet king, and the four great prophets: Daniel to the left of David; then in order, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel on the right, towards the choir of the church, and the three minor prophets—Jonah, Esdras, and Habakkuk—are painted in modulated tones, the dark outline forming a setting, on a background varying from tawny to deep red. The figures are enframed in a firmly-drawn architectural setting. This architecture is painted in gray against the masonry, the courses of which are indicated by double lines of brown upon the pale ochre of the general surface. Each prophet holds a phylactery or banderole inscribed with his name in beautiful thirteenth-century characters.

The floriated bands which divide the sectors terminate above in a circular frieze surrounding the crown of the cupola. The latter represents a starry sky, the centre painted with the apotheosis of St. Stephen, the patron of the cathedral. The frieze is painted with scenes from the trial and stoning of the Saint; the life-size figures are full of expression and grouped with great variety. In these paintings there are evident leanings towards the naturalistic evolution; and though the figures of the prophets are still hieratic in certain respects, the poses, heads, and details all point to evident research in the matter of physiognomy. This research is carried very far in[184] the figures of the circular frieze, where the hands have evidently been carefully studied from nature.

Technically speaking, these paintings are not frescoes. "The medium employed seems to have been egg, the white and yolk mixed, and the method very analogous to that of water-colour painting.... The red tones were laid over a bed of deep orange, the effect being one of extraordinary vigour and brilliance, taking into account the means at command. The use of a prepared ground was systematic, and was resorted to whenever intensity of the tones or colour effects was desired. Evident efforts in the[185] direction of modelling are noticeable, though these have been neutralised to a great extent by a lack of concentration in the lights, and if it were not for the thick outline in which each figure is set, there would be much in common between the methods of these paintings and those renderings of diffused light affected by our modern plein-airistes. The general tone is that of the simpler paintings of the thirteenth century, that is to say, of those in which no gold was used. The effect is warm and brilliant, the dominant hue orange, heightened by reds of various tints."[39]

According to the archæological records derived from various works of the historians of Le Quercy, these paintings in the west cupola of Cahors were carried out under the direction of the Bishops Raymond de Cornil, 1280-93, Sicard de Montaigu, 1294-1300, Raymond Panchelli,[40] 1300-1312, or Hugo Geraldi, 1312-16, the friend of Pope Clement V. and of Philip IV. of France, who was burnt alive at Avignon, or perhaps even of Guillaume de Labroa, 1316-24, whose residence was at Avignon, and who governed the diocese of Cahors through a procurator. From this period onwards there was no further question of decorative works, the successors of these bishops being fully occupied in maintaining the struggle against the English invaders.

It seems reasonable therefore to infer that the Cahors paintings date either from the end of the thirteenth century or the beginning of the fourteenth.[186] In any case, these decorations are of very great artistic merit, and of the highest interest as an unique example of French decorative art at the finest period of the thirteenth century, when Gothic architecture had reached its apogee, and was producing masterpieces which served as models for contemporary artists, and even more notably, for those of the early fourteenth century.

That vigilant guardian of our beautiful cathedrals and historic monuments, the Administration des Cultes, has taken measures which do it infinite honour in this matter. No attempt has been made to restore the paintings, but all necessary steps have been taken to ensure their preservation as they stand, so as to leave intact the archæological value of these convincing witnesses to the genius of our French mediæval painters.

The mural spaces available for fresco decoration having been gradually suppressed, and decorative painting limited to the illumination of certain subordinate members of the structure, the mediæval artists began to apply themselves to the decoration of the great screens of glass which, with their sculptured framework of stone, now filled the entire spaces between the piers. In this new art, or rather this incarnation of the spirit of decoration under a new form, we find a fresh illustration of that supple assimilative genius which already distinguished the French artist.

"It is in the nature of the material used, that painted windows should greatly affect the character of the building they decorate. If their treatment is injudicious, the intended architectural effect may be[187]
[188] greatly modified; if, on the other hand, they are intelligently applied, they tend to bring out the beauty of structural surroundings.... As is the case with all architectonic painting, stained glass demands simplicity in composition, sobriety in execution, and an avoidance of naturalistic imitation. It should aim neither at illusion nor perspective. Its scheme of colour should be frank, energetic, comprising few tints, yet producing a harmony at once sumptuous and soothing, which should compel attention, but seeks not to engross it to the detriment of the setting. Like a mural mosaic, an Eastern carpet, or the enamelled goldsmith's work of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a truly decorative window has no affinities with a picture, a scene or landscape gazed at from an open window, where the interest concentrates itself upon a particular point, and where the illumination is not equally diffused throughout. The fundamental law of decorative painting rests on a convention the aim of which is the satisfaction of the eye, which finds its pleasure to a far greater degree in the logical decoration of some structural or useful object than in its realisation of[189] natural phenomena. Between painted windows and pictures a great gulf is fixed; and the modern school, the heir of the Italian Renascence, seeking to bridge it over, has seduced decorative art from the safe paths of sound judgment."[42]

The true functions of stained glass were never more admirably understood than in the twelfth[190] century. The artists of that day had a perfect comprehension of those colour-harmonies, the subdued splendour of which best accorded with the simple and vigorous forms of Romanesque architecture. Upon his glass of various tints the painter first outlined his figure or ornament in black. This outline he supported with a flat half-tint which supplied a rough modelling and allowed the forms expressed to make their fullest effect from a distance.[191] When, in the thirteenth century, the extreme austerity of religious buildings began to relax, the splendour of the painted windows increased proportionately; but the coloration, though it increased[192] in glow and vigour, still preserved its complete harmony with its surroundings. An additional richness is perceptible in work of the fourteenth century, at which period red glass began to be used with a certain prodigality. The system of execution remains unchanged so far; but the black outline is considerably attenuated, and the half-tone which emphasises it loses much of its importance. The figures, in place of the hieratic repose of an earlier period, affect a certain grace and animation which herald a tendency towards realistic imitation. These germs of naturalism soon bore fruit. At the close of the fourteenth century the discovery of how to obtain yellow from salts of silver, and the facility with which it could be used to warm the grayer tones of glass by the help of the muffle, caused a revolution in the art of glass-painting, and prepared the way for polychromatic enamelling. This discovery, eminently useful when discreetly applied, was to lead to regrettable exaggerations.

In the fifteenth century the figures of saints were usually drawn upon glass so tinted as to be of a soft white tone; the hair, beards, head-dresses, jewels, trimmings, and embroideries were painted in yellow. The figures stood out in bold relief against a background of blue or red, and were divided by a damasked drapery of green or purple. Vast architectural motives were introduced enframing the figures and filling up the immense window spaces of the latest period of mediæval art. The transformation was radical. It is of interest to note that the final development of the Gothic style ought logically to have brought about a recrudescence of vigour in the[193]
[194] coloration of stained glass; but the exact reverse was the case; and a marked modification took place in the glowing effects won by a diversity of strong tints. The sort of camaïeu which was the result obliged the painter to insist more strongly on the modelling of the figures, and to give less importance to the black outline, which was eventually suppressed altogether.

In the sixteenth century painted glass became to a certain extent translucent pictures, in which architectural fitness was no longer respected. Composition lost its simplicity. A subject spread from panel to panel, regardless of the intervening tracery. Nevertheless, we forget the defects of this luxuriant development, and cease to wonder at its popularity, in view of that broad and vigorous execution and beauty of colour which give it a special decorative value of its own.

Enamelling is so closely allied to glass-painting as to claim a word for itself. Here, again, the decorative art of the Middle Ages was characteristic[195]ally displayed, and though the process is more specially applicable to the ornamentation of goldsmith's work than to the decoration of large surfaces, it is one of the most brilliant and exquisite of the auxiliary arts.

The earliest enamels are champlevé and cloisonné. By the champlevé process a hollow, the edges of which outlined the figures or ornaments, was cut in the field or ground of metal for the reception of the fusible enamel; for cloisonné, cloisons, or slender walls of metal were fixed upon the field to separate flesh from draperies, and one tint generally from another. The background, the cloisons, and the flesh were gilt and burnished; details were defined by[196] engraved lines, so that the draperies only were enamelled.

[197]

Fig. 128 reproduces an enamel of the close of the eleventh century, in which these various characteristics may be studied. The inscriptions on either side of the cross are formed by letters vertically superposed, which read downwards.

From the beginning of the thirteenth century enamels were executed by the process known as taille d'épargne. By this method the ground was cut out, as described above, for the reception of the various ingredients which, after undergoing the process of firing, formed the enamel; the draperies, hands, and feet of the figures which were épargnés (spared or left) were modelled and chased in very low relief; but the central figure, such as the Christ, and the heads of the subordinate personages or attendant angels, were always in high relief, vigorously modelled, and chased.

Fig. 129, a plaque forming the cover of an evangelium, is a characteristic example of this class of enamel. It dates from the early thirteenth century, and is a production of the ateliers founded at Limoges by the monks of Solignac.

The reliquary figured No. 130 is also a work of the Limousin enamellers. The methods employed are identical, but the carving of the figures is less delicate, indeed almost rudimentary, the modelling being replaced by hasty strokes of the graver. The lower panel of this reliquary represents the martyrdom of Thomas à Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, the upper part his apotheosis. It is crowned by a ridge roof of two sides.

As is well known, Thomas à Becket was canonised two years after his tragic death, which had[198] aroused general reprobation throughout Christendom. The universal feeling expressed itself at Limoges by the manufacture of a great number of reliquaries destined to receive relics of the sainted martyr.

In the details of the draperies and hands of those portions of Fig. 129 which are carved in low relief, we may trace the germs of those low-relief enamels known as translucent, or to be more exact, transparent enamels. This process originated in Italy, and was commonly employed in France, and[199]
[200] even in Germany throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, more especially the latter. These enamels could only be executed on gold and silver. The method consisted in modelling the design in very low relief on the face of the plate, which was then covered with a transparent enamel of few colours. The process was a slow and difficult one;[201] the pieces were consequently very costly, and the demand for them proportionately restricted.

The enamellers of the sixteenth century, especially those who flourished at its beginning, were evidently inspired by these low-relief enamels to seek the same brilliant opalescence of effect by more scientific and less costly methods. But the simplification of the process degenerated into vulgarisation, and its original qualities gradually faded out. Fig. 131, representing Our Lady of Sorrows, and signed I. C. (Jehan Courteys or Courtois), gives some idea of the design, at least, of the painted enamels executed by the Limousin artists of the early sixteenth century.

Gothic architecture, more especially in its religious manifestations from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, made its prolific influence felt, not only by the structural qualities of its vast and numerous buildings, but by those various arts created, perfected, or at least developed, for their decoration. We have traced a bare outline of its activities, regretting that space fails us to make an exhaustive study of their various manifestations. The priceless fragments which illustrate these offshoots of an art essentially French are now the chief ornaments not only of French, but of all European museums. They take rank as factors of the first importance in art education, pointing the way to fresh masterpieces of French genius.

The origin of monastic architecture is of no greater antiquity than the fourth century of the Christian era. The hermits and anchorites of the earliest period made their habitation in the caves and deserts of the Thebaïd; their sole monument is the record of their virtues, which have outlived any buildings they may have raised during their years of solitude. But the first Christians who banded themselves together under a common rule, and discarded anchoritism for the cenobitic life, marked their worldly pilgrimage by monuments, traces of which are still to be found in historic records or fragmentary remains.

The history of abbey churches is identical with that of cathedrals.[43] The architectural evolutions and transformations which succeeded each other in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries manifested themselves in both. Like the cathedrals, the abbey churches were the creation of monkish architects, and were carried out either under their immediate direction or that of their pupils.

But a kindred field of study offers itself in the[206]
[207] abbeys themselves, their organisation and adaptation to the domestic needs of their be-frocked inmates.

Monastic institutions date from the Roman era. The first abbeys were those established in France in the fourth century, by St. Hilary of Poitiers and St. Martin of Tours. These religious associations or corporations, which eventually became so powerful, by reason not only of their numbers, but of the spirit which animated them, must be reckoned as among the most beneficent forces of the Middle Ages. Even from the philosophical side alone of the religious rule under which they flourished, by virtue of which enlightened men wielded supreme power, they were admirable institutions.

To instance one among many, the so-called Rule of St. Benedict is in itself a monument, the basis of which is discipline, the coping-stone labour. These are principles of undying excellence, for they are the expression of eternal truths. And from them our modern economists, who so justly exalt the system of co-operation, might even in these latter days draw inspiration as useful and as fruitful as that by which men were guided in the days of Benedict.

Three great intellectual centres shed their light on the first centuries of the Middle Ages. These were Lérins, Ireland, and Monte Casino. Their most brilliant time was from the fourth century to the reign of Charlemagne, by which period they may be said to have prepared the way for successive evolutions of human knowledge, by assiduous cultivation of the sciences and arts, more especially architecture, in accordance with the immutable laws of development and progress.

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Lérins.—St. Honoratus and his companions, when they landed in the archipelago, built on the principal island a chapel surrounded by the cells and buildings necessary for a confraternity. This took place about 375-390 A.D. The members of the budding community were learned monks, who had accepted the religious rule which had now become their law. They instructed neophytes sent them from the mainland, and their reputation grew so rapidly that Lérins soon took rank as a school of theology, a seminary or nursery whence the mediæval church chose the bishops and abbots best fitted to govern her.

The school of Lérins was so esteemed for learning that it took an active part in the great Pelagian controversy which agitated Christendom at the time,[44] and zealously advocated the doctrines of semi-pelagianism, but this tendency was finally subdued by St. Vincent of Lérins, whose ideas were more orthodox. The theological teaching of Lérins seems to have dominated, or at least to have directed religious opinion in Gaul down to the sixth century.

Ireland.—So early as the sixth century Ireland was the centre of art and science in the West. The Irish monks had followed the oriental tradition as modified by its passage through Scandinavia; they exercised a considerable influence on continental art by their manuscripts and illuminations, and prepared the way for the renascence of the days of Charle[209]magne, to which such importance was given by the monuments of the Romanesque movement.

St. Columba was a monk of the seminary of Clonard in Ireland, whence towards the close of the sixth century he passed over to the continent, founding the Abbeys of Luxeuil and Fontaine, near Besançon, and later that of Bobbio, in Italy, where he died in 615. His principal work was the Rule prescribed to the Irish monks who had accompanied him, and those who took the vows of the monasteries he had founded. In this famous work he did not merely enjoin that love of God and of the brethren on which his Rule is based; he demonstrated the utility and beauty of his maxims, which he built upon Scriptural precepts, and upon fundamental principles of morality. The school of Luxeuil became one of the most famous of the seventh century, and, like that of Lérins, the nursery of learned doctors and famous prelates.

Monte Casino.—In the sixth century St. Benedict preached Christianity in the south of Italy, where, in spite of Imperial edicts, Paganism still prevailed among the masses. He built a chapel in honour of St. John the Baptist on the ruins of a temple of Apollo, and afterwards founded a monastery to which he gave his Rule in 529. This was the cradle of the great Benedictine order.

The number of St. Benedict's disciples grew apace. He had imposed on them, together with the voluntary obedience and subordination which constitute discipline, those prescriptions of his Rule, which demanded the partition of time between prayer and work. He proceeded to make a practical[210] application of these principles at Monte Casino, the buildings of which were raised by himself and his companions. Barren lands were reclaimed and transformed into gardens for the community; mills, bakehouses, and workshops for the manufacture of all the necessaries of life were constructed in the abbey precincts, with a view to rendering the confraternity self-supporting; auxiliary buildings were reserved for the reception of the poor and of travellers. These, however, were so disposed that strangers were kept outside the main structure, which was reserved exclusively for the religious body.

The great merit of St. Benedict, apart from his philosophical eminence, lies in his comprehension of the doctrine of labour. He was perhaps the first to teach that useful and intelligent work is one of the conditions, if not indeed the sole condition, of that moral perfection to which his followers were taught to aspire. If he had no further title to fame, this alone should ensure his immortality.

"The apostles and first bishops were the natural guides of those who were appointed to build the basilicas in which the faithful met for worship. When at a later stage they carried the faith to distant provinces of the empire, they alone were able to indicate or to mark out with their own hands the lines on which buildings fitted for the new worship should be raised.... St. Martin superintended the construction of the oratory of one of the first Gallic monasteries at Ligujé, and later of that of Marmoutier, near Tours, on the banks of the Loire. In the reign of Childebert, St. Germain directed the building of the Abbey of St. Vincent—afterwards[211] re-named St. Germain-des-Près—in Paris. St. Benedict soon added to his Rule a decree providing for the teaching and study of architecture, painting, mosaic, sculpture, and all branches of art; and it became one of the most important duties of abbots, priors, and deans to make designs for the churches and auxiliary buildings of the communities they ruled. From the early centuries of the Christian era down to the thirteenth century, therefore, architecture was practised only by the clergy, and came to be regarded as a sacred science. The most ancient plans now extant—those of St. Gall and of Canterbury—were traced by the monks Eigenhard and Edwin.... During the eleventh and twelfth centuries there rose throughout Christendom admirable buildings due to the art and industry of the monks, who, bringing to bear upon the work their own researches, and the experience of past generations, received a fresh stimulus to exertion in this age of universal regeneration, by the enthusiasm with which their kings inspired them for the vast ruins of the ninth century."[45]

From the earliest centuries of the Christian era communities both male and female had been formed with the object of living together under a religious rule; but it seems evident that the greater number of monasteries owed their fame and wealth, if not their actual origin, to the reputation of their relics. These attracted the multitude. Pilgrimages became so frequent, and pilgrims so numerous, that it was found necessary to build hospices, or night-refuges, in various towns on their routes. A confraternity[212] of the Pilgrims of St. Michael was formed in the beginning of the thirteenth century in Paris, where the confraternity of St. James of Pilgrims had already built its chapel and hospital in the Rue St. Denis, near the city gate.

From the seventh to the ninth century important abbeys flourished in nearly all the provinces now comprised in modern France. Later, under the immediate successors of Charlemagne, great monasteries were founded in all the countries which made up his dominions. Charlemagne himself had greatly contributed to the development of religious institutions by his reliance on the bishops, and more especially the monks who represented progress, supported his policy, and enforced his civilising mission. But after his death the study of art and science declined so rapidly that a radical reform became necessary in the tenth century, a reform which seems to have had its birth in the Benedictine Abbey of Cluny, established in Burgundy about the year 930.

From this hasty sketch of monastic organisation some idea may be gathered of the importance of religious institutions in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and of the immense services they had rendered the State by diligent and useful toil, among the chief fruits of which must be reckoned the revival of agriculture, and the development of the sciences and arts, more especially architecture.

Monastic architecture exercised a great and decisive influence upon national art by its vast religious buildings, the precursors of our great cathedrals.

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Until the middle of the twelfth century science, letters, art, wealth, and above all, intelligence—in other words, omnipotence on earth—were the monopoly of religious bodies. It is bare historic justice to remember that the Middle Ages derived their chief title to fame, and all their intellectual enlightenment, from the abbeys, and that the great religious houses were in fact schools, the educational influence of which was immense. It must be borne in mind that if the great cathedrals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were not actually constructed by the monks, their architects were nevertheless the pupils of monks, and that it was in the abbey schools, so generously opened to all, that they imbibed the first principles of the art they afterwards turned to such marvellous account.

The study of architecture in particular was not merely theoretical. It was demonstrated by the monks in their important monastic buildings, the crowning point of which was the abbey church, a structure often larger and more ornate than contemporary cathedrals.

On the plan commonly adopted, the cloister, a spreading lawn adorned with plants, adjoined the church on the north, and sometimes on the south. An open arcade surrounded the cloister, by means of which communication with all the necessary domestic offices was provided. Of these the principal were: the refectory, generally a fine vaulted hall, close to the kitchens; the chapter-house, a building attached to the church, the upper story of which was the dormitory of the monks; the vaulted cellars and granaries, above which were the lodgings[214] provided for strangers; the storerooms were connected with stables, cattle-stalls, and various outdoor offices, often of great extent. All these dependencies for the service of the community were kept strictly separate one from another, thus all necessary measures were taken to provide for the needs and duties of hospitality without any disturbance of the religious routine.

The abbeys of the Romanesque period were largely used as models in their day. They were modified by lay architects or monkish builders who, however, were careful to abate nothing of their perfection; they partook of the developments which marked the middle of the thirteenth century, and were subjected to that progressive transformation, the great feature of which was the adoption of the Angevin intersecting arch, the distinguishing characteristic of Gothic architecture.

The Benedictines, the Cistercians, the Augustinians, the Premonstrants, and notably the congregation of Cluny were all energetic builders, and the vast and magnificent structures of their creation were reckoned the most perfect achievements of their day. The study of their buildings—the church, the dwelling-places of abbot and monks, with all their dependencies—is most instructive. It fills us with admiration for the learning and judgment of the monkish builders who, accepting the limitations imposed by climate, locality, material, the numbers of their inmates, and the resources of their order, turned them all to account as elements of beauty and harmony.

The architects of the first abbeys undoubtedly adopted the constructive methods of the period, and built in the Latin, Roman, or Gallo-Roman manner. The double gateway of the Abbey of Cluny, the architect of which was probably Gauzon, sometime Abbot of Beaune, who laid the foundations of the famous monastery, is an interesting proof of this assertion. But monastic architecture underwent the same modifications to which ecclesiastical architecture[216] had been subjected under those various influences which manifested themselves in the glorious monuments built from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, when Gothic architecture reached its apogee.

The abbots of the many abbeys of various orders built throughout this period were too enlightened to disregard the progress of their contemporaries, and they promptly applied the new principles to the construction or embellishment of their monasteries.

The Abbey of Cluny was founded in 909 by William, Duke of Aquitaine, and declared independent by Pope John XI., who in 932 confirmed the duke's charter. Its rapid development and growth in power is sufficiently explained by the social and political circumstances of its origin. At the begin[217]ning of the tenth century Norman invasions and feudal excesses had destroyed the work of Charlemagne. Western Christendom seemed to lapse into barbarism after the havoc made by the Saracens and Northern pirates among towns and monasteries. Civil society and religious institutions had alike fallen into the decay born of a conflict of rights and a contempt of all authority.

Cluny rapidly became a centre round which all the intelligence which had escaped submersion in the chaos of the ninth century grouped itself. Its school soon attained a distinction equal to that which marked the first great seats of learning at the beginning of the Middle Ages. Thanks to the Rule of St. Benedict, on which the Benedictines of Cluny had grounded their community, the abbey developed greatly in extent and wealth. Throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries it seems to have been the prolific nursery-ground whence Europe drew not only teachers for other monastic schools, but specialists in every branch of science and of letters, notably architects, who aided in the expansion of Cluny and its dependencies, and further practically contributed to the construction of the numerous abbeys founded by the Benedictines throughout Western Europe, and even in the East, the cradle of Christianity.

While this struggle of intelligence against ignorance was in progress, a social revolution had accomplished itself by the enfranchisement of the communes, a development of the utmost importance in its relation to science, art, and material existence, in a word, to the whole social system.

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Architecture, that faithful expression of the social state which had its origin in Pagan civilisation, became Christianised by its culture in the abbeys, and in its new development rose to that pre-eminence the marvels of which we have already studied in the first part of this work. But though the successes achieved by the architecture of this period were rapid and dazzling, its decadence was profound, for it was induced by too radical an emancipation from antique principles, the superiority of which had been established in the first centuries of the Middle Ages.

The Abbey of Cluny soon became too small for the increasing number of monks. St. Hugh undertook its reconstruction in the closing years of the eleventh century, and the monk Gauzon of Cluny began the works in 1089 on a much more extensive plan, indeed on a scale so magnificent that the church of the new abbey was esteemed the first in importance among Western buildings of the kind.

The plan (Fig. 134) shows the arrangement of the abbey at the close of the eleventh century, when the monastic buildings had been reconstructed some time previously. The ancient church was intact; the choir had been begun in the time of St. Hugh, but the building had not been consecrated till 1131. The chapel which precedes it on the west was completed so late as 1228 by Roland I., twentieth abbot of Cluny.

At A on the plan stood the entrance, the Gallo-Roman gateway which still exists. At B, in front of the church, a flight of steps led up to a square platform, from which rose a stone cross; a flight of broad steps gave access to the chapel entrance at C,[219] an open space between two square towers. The northern tower was built to receive the archives; that on the south was known as the Tower of Justice. The ante-church or narthex at D seems to have been set apart for strangers and penitents, who were not[220] allowed to enter the main building. Their place of worship was distinct from the abbey church, just as their lodging was separated from the buildings reserved for the brotherhood, who were permitted no intercourse with the outer world. At E was the door of the abbey church, which was only opened to admit some great personage whose exceptional privilege it was to enter the sanctuary.

At Cluny, as at Vézelay, one of the dependencies of Cluny, the Galilee, which is found in all Benedictine abbeys, was built with aisles and towers on the same scale as an ordinary church. It communicated with the buildings set apart for guests over the storehouses of the abbey to the west of the cloister at F on the plan. From the Galilee access to the abbey church was obtained at E, by means of a single doorway, which from descriptions seems to have resembled the great door of the monastery church at Moissac in arrangement and decoration.

The special characteristic of the Abbey Church of Cluny is its double transept, an arrangement we shall find reproduced in the great abbey churches of England, notably at Lincoln. According to a description written in the last century, the Abbey Church of Cluny was 410 feet long. It was built in the form of an archiepiscopal cross, and had two transepts: the first nearly 200 feet long by 30 feet wide; the second, 110 feet long and wider than the first. The basilica, 110 feet in width, was divided into five aisles, with semi-circular vaults supported on sixty-eight piers. Over three hundred narrow round-headed windows, high up the wall, transmitted the dim light that favours meditation. The high altar was[221]
[222] placed immediately beyond the second transept at G, and the retro-choir and altar at H. The choir, which had two rood screens, occupied about a third of the nave. It contained two hundred and twenty-five stalls for the monks, and in the fifteenth century was hung with magnificent tapestries. A number of altars dedicated to various saints were placed against the screens and the piers of nave and side aisles. At a later period chapels were constructed along the aisles and on the eastern sides of the two transepts.

Above the principal transept rose three towers roofed with slate; the central, or lantern tower was known as the lamp tower, because from the vaults of the crossing below it were suspended lamps, or coronas of lights which were kept burning day and night over the high altar.

To the south of the abbey, at F on the plan, was a great enclosure, surrounded by a cloister, some vestiges of which still remain. K and L mark the site of the abbatial buildings which were restored in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; M and N the structures raised last century over the primitive foundations. To the east lay the gardens and the great fish-ponds which still exist, with portions of their enclosures. Another surviving fragment is a building of the thirteenth century, said to be the bakery, and marked O on the plan.

The abbots who succeeded St. Hugh were unable to preserve the primitive conditions of the foundation. The excessive luxury resulting from over-prosperity brought about demoralisation, and by the end of the eleventh century discord was rife at Cluny.

Peter the Venerable, who was elected abbot in 1112, restored order for a time, and established a chapter general, consisting of two hundred priors[223] and over twelve hundred other monks. In 1158, at the time of Peter's death, these numbers had increased by more than four hundred, and the order had founded monasteries in the Holy Land and at Constantinople.

The Abbey of Citeaux.—The reform of the Benedictine orders became a pressing necessity, and St. Robert, Abbot of Solesmes, entered upon the task about 1098. St. Bernard continued it, after having quitted his abbey, with twenty-one monks of the order, to take refuge in the forest of Citeaux, given him by Don Reynard, Vicomte of Beaune. His main achievement was reorganisation of such a nature as to deal effectually with the decay of primitive simplicity throughout the order, which had completely lost touch with monastic sentiment.

"Frequent intercourse with the outside world had demoralised the monks, who attracted within their cloister walls crowds of sightseers, guests, and pilgrims. The monasteries which, down to the eleventh century, were either built in the towns, or had become centres of population in consequence of the Norman and Saracen invasions, retained their character of religious seclusion only for a certain number of monks, who devoted themselves to intellectual labours. Besides which, the brethren had become feudal lords, holding jurisdiction side by side with the bishops, and St. Germain-des-Près, St. Denis, St. Martin, Vendôme, and Moissac owned no over-lordships but that of the Pope. Hence arose temporal cares, disputes, and even armed conflicts, among them. The greed and vanity of the abbots at least, if not of their monks, made itself[224] felt even in religious worship, and in the buildings consecrated thereto."[46]

St. Bernard, in an address to the monks of his day, reproves their degeneracy, and censures the exaggerated dimensions of the abbey churches, the splendour of their ornamentation, and the luxury of the abbots. O vanity of vanities! he exclaims, and folly great as vanity! The Church is bedecked in her walls, but naked in her poor! She overlays her stones with gold, and leaves her children without raiment! The curious are given distractions, and the miserable lack bread! It was to suppress such abuses that the Cistercian order was founded by St. Robert and St. Bernard, and also to put an end to the disputes arising from ecclesiastical jurisdiction by making the new abbeys dependencies of the bishoprics. They were to be built in solitary places, "and to nourish their inmates by agriculture. It was forbidden to found them over the tombs of saints, for fear of attracting pilgrims, who would bring worldly distractions in their train. The buildings themselves were to be solid, and built of good freestone, but without any sort of extraneous ornament; the only towers allowed were small belfries, sometimes of stone, but more usually of wood."[47]

The Cistercian order was founded in 1119, and St. Robert imposed the Rule of St. Benedict in its primitive severity. To mark his separation from the degenerate Benedictines, whose dress was black, he gave his monks a brown habit. After determining their religious duties he gave minute[225] instructions as to the arrangement of the buildings. The condition chiefly insisted upon was that the site of the monastery should be of such extent and so ordered that the necessaries of life could be provided within its precincts. Thus all causes of distraction through communication with the outside world were removed. The monasteries, whenever possible, were to be built beside a stream or river; they were to contain, independently of the claustral buildings, the church and the abbot's dwelling, which was outside the principal enclosure, a mill, a bakehouse, and workshops for the manufacture of all things requisite to the community, besides gardens for the use and pleasure of the monks.

The Abbey of Clairvaux was an embodiment of the reforms brought about by St. Robert, and later by St. Bernard. The general arrangement and the details of service were almost identical with those of Citeaux, just as Citeaux itself had been modelled upon Cluny in all respects, save that a severe observance of the primitive Benedictine rule was insisted upon in the disposition of the later foundation. All superfluities were proscribed, and the rules which enjoined absolute seclusion as a means towards moral perfection were sternly enforced.

The result is undoubtedly interesting as a religious revival; but we may be permitted to regret that the intellectual impetus given to art progress by the great Benedictine lords spiritual of Cluny should have been checked by the frigid utilitarianism to which architecture—then an epitome of all the arts—was reduced by the purists of Citeaux in its application to the monasteries of the reform.

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The Cistercian monuments are not, however, wanting in interest.

Of Clairvaux and Citeaux little remains but fragments embedded in a mass of modern buildings, for the most part restorations of the last century. As records these are less to be relied upon than the historical and archæological documents which guided Viollet-le-Duc in his graphic reconstruction of famous Cistercian abbeys, an essay not to be bettered as a piece of lucid demonstration (see his Dictionary, vol. i. pp. 263-271).

In the eleventh century a large number of monasteries had been built throughout Western Europe by monks of various orders, in imitation of the great monastic schools of Lérins, Ireland, and Monte Casino. Among the famous abbeys of this period may be mentioned "Vézelay and Fécamp, sometime convents for women, afterwards converted into abbeys for men; St. Nicaise, at Rheims; Nogent-sous-Coucy, in Picardy; Anchin and Annouain, in Artois; St. Étienne, at Caen; St. Pierre-sur-Dives, Le Bec, Conches, Cerisy-la-Forêt,[48] and Lessay, in Normandy; La Trinité, at Vendôme; Beaulieu, near Loches; Montierneuf, at Poitiers, etc."[49]

The Abbeys of Fulda, in Hesse, and of Corvey, in Westphalia, the latter founded by Benedictine monks from the Abbey of Corbie, in Picardy, were in their day the chief centres of learning in Germany.

In England St. Alban's Abbey, in Hertfordshire, was built in 1077 by a disciple of Lanfranc, the illustrious abbot of the famous Abbey of Le Bec, in Normandy. A large number of monasteries were[228]
[229] founded later on by various orders, notably the Benedictines—Croyland, Malmesbury, Bury St. Edmund's, Peterborough, Salisbury, Wimborne, Wearmouth, Westminster, etc., not to mention the abbeys and priories which had existed in Ireland from the sixth century.

The mother abbey of Citeaux gave birth to four daughters—Clairvaux, Pontigny, Morimond, and La Ferté.

The importance of Clairvaux was much increased in the first years of the twelfth century by the fame of her abbot, St. Bernard, that most brilliant embodiment of mediæval monasticism. His influence was immense, not alone in his character of reformer and founder of an important order, but as a statesman whom fortune persistently favoured in all enterprises tending to the increase of his great reputation.

St. Bernard distinguished himself in the theological controversies of his century at the Council of Sens in 1140, and in successful polemical disputations with Abélard, the famous advocate of free will, and other heterodox philosophers who heralded the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Somewhat later he took an active part in promoting the hapless second Crusade under Louis VII., and in 1147, a few years before his death, he entered vigorously into the Manichæan controversy as a strenuous opponent of the heresy which was then agitating the public mind and preparing the way for the schism which, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, brought about the terrible war of the Albigenses, and steeped Southern France in blood.

The monastic fame of St. Bernard was established[230] not only by the searching reforms he instituted at Clairvaux among the seceding monks of Cluny and Solesmes, but by the success of the Cistercian colonies he planted in Italy, Spain, Sweden, and Denmark, to the number of seventy-two, according to his historians.

During his lifetime the poor hermitage of the Vallée d'Absinthe (which name he changed to Claire-Vallée, Clairvaux) had become a vast feudal settlement of many farms and holdings, rich enough to support more than seven hundred monks. The monastery was surrounded by walls more than half a league in extent, and the abbot's domicile had become a seignorial mansion. As the fount of the order, and mother of all the auxiliary houses, Clairvaux was supreme over a hundred and sixty monasteries in France and abroad. Fifty years after the death of St. Bernard the importance of the order[231]
[232] had become colossal. During the thirteenth century, and from that time onwards, the Cistercian or Bernardine monks built immense abbeys, and decorated them with royal magnificence. Their establishments contained churches equal in dimension to the largest cathedrals of the period, abbatial dwellings adorned with paintings, and boasting oratories which, as at Chaâlis, were Stes. Chapelles as splendid as that of St. Louis in Paris. The very cellars held works of art in the shape of huge casks elaborately carved.

Thus, by a strange recurrence of conditions, the settlements founded on a basis of the most rigorous austerity by the ascetics who had fled from the splendours of Solesmes and Cluny to the forest,[233] became in their turn vaster, richer, and more sumptuous than those the magnificence of which they existed to rebuke. With this difference, however: the ruin brought about by the luxury of the Cistercian establishment was so complete that nothing of their innumerable monasteries was spared by social revolution but a few archæologic fragments and historic memories.

The influence of the Cistercian foundation extended to various countries of Europe. It was manifested in Spain, at the great Abbey of Alcobaco, in Estramadura, said to have been built by monkish envoys of St. Bernard; in Sicily, in the rich architectural detail of the Abbey of Monreale; and in Germany, in the foundation of such abbeys as those of Altenberg in Westphalia, and Maulbronn in[234] Wurtemberg. In 1133 Everard, Count of Berg, invited monks of Citeaux to settle in his dominions, and in 1145 they founded a magnificent abbey on the banks of the Dheen, which was held by the Cistercian order down to the period of the Revolution, when it shared the fate of other religious houses.

The Cistercian Abbey of Maulbronn is the best preserved of those which owed their origin to St. Bernard throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The abbey church, the cloister, the refectory, the chapter-house, the cellars, the storerooms, the barns, and the abbot's lodging, the latter united to the other buildings by a covered gallery, still exist in their original condition. More manifestly even than Altenberg does the Abbey of Maulbronn prove that simplicity marked the proceedings of the Benedictines during the first years of the twelfth century, under the rule or influence of St. Bernard. From this period onward Cistercian brotherhoods multiplied with great rapidity in the provinces which were to form modern France.

In the Ile-de-France the ruins of Ourscamp, near Noyon, of Chaâlis, near Senlis, of Longpont and of Vaux-de-Cernay, near Paris, bear witness to the monumental grandeur of once famous and important abbeys. The monasteries and priories of the twelfth century are numerous in Provence; we may name Sénanque, Silvacane, Thoronet, and Montmajour, near Arles, at the extremity of the valley of Les Baux. Among the abbeys founded in the thirteenth century were Royaumont, in the Ile-de-France; Vaucelles, near Cambrai; Preuilly-en-Brie; La Trappe, in Le[235] Perche; Breuil-Benoît, Mortemer, and Bonport, in Normandy; Boschaud, in Périgord; l'Escale-Dieu, in Bigorre; Les Feuillants, Nizors, and Bonnefont, in Comminges; Granselve and Baulbonne, near Toulouse; Floran, Valmagne, and Fontfroide, in Languedoc; Fontenay, in Burgundy, etc.

Towards the close of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth century other fraternities had been formed in the same spirit as that of Citeaux; "in the first rank of these was the Order of the Premonstrants, so named from the mother abbey founded in 1119 by St. Norbert at Prémontré, near Coucy."[50]

To this order the monastery of St. Martin at[237] Laon, and others in Champagne, Artois, Brittany, and Normandy owed their origin.

In the early part of the twelfth century Robert d'Arbrisselles founded several double monasteries for men and women, on the model of those built in Spain in the ninth century; that of Fontevrault was not more successful as a monastic experiment than the rest, but it gave rise to a number of superb buildings. The abbey itself contributed in no slight degree to the progress of architecture, which developed in Anjou at the dawn of the twelfth century, and manifested itself principally at Angers in works the supreme importance of which we have dwelt upon in the early part of this volume.

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The episcopal churches also owned claustral buildings for the accommodation of the cathedral clergy who lived together in communities according to the ancient usage which obtained down to the fifteenth century. The Cathedrals of Aix, Arles, and Cavaillon, in Provence, of Elne, in Roussillon, of Puy, in Velay, of St. Bertrand, in Comminges, still preserve their cloisters of the twelfth century.

The Abbey of La Chaise Dieu, in Auvergne, founded in the eleventh century, was one of the monastic schools which rose to great importance, mainly through the talents of its monkish architect and sculptor, Guinamaud, who established its reputation as an art centre. By the close of the twelfth century La Chaise Dieu was turning out proficients in sculpture, painting, and goldsmith's work.

The buildings of La Chaise Dieu were reconstructed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

The order of preaching friars, founded by St. Dominic in the early part of the thirteenth century, is noted rather for its intellectual than for its architectural achievements; the fame of the Dominicans rests upon their preaching and writings, not upon the number or magnificence of their monasteries.

About the same period St. Francis of Assisi founded the order of minor friars, who professed absolute poverty—a profession which, however, did not prevent their becoming richer at last than their forerunners. These two orders—preaching and mendicant friars, apparently formed in protest against the supremacy of the Benedictines—were strongly supported by St. Louis, who also protected other[239] orders, such as the Augustinians and Carmelites, by way of balancing the power of the Clunisians and Cistercians.

To the preaching friars St. Louis granted the site of the Church of St. Jacques, in the Rue St. Jacques, Paris—whence the name Jacobin as applied to monks of the Dominican order,—and here they built in 1221 the Jacobin monastery, the church of which, like those of Agen and Toulouse, has the double nave peculiar to the churches of the preaching friars.

From the thirteenth century onwards the arrangement of the abbeys diverges more and more from[240] the Benedictine system in the direction of secular models. The daily life of the abbots had come to differ but little from that of the laymen of their time, and as a natural consequence, monastic architecture lost its distinguishing characteristics.

The Rule of the Carthusian Order, founded towards the close of the eleventh century by St. Bruno, was of such extreme austerity, and was so persistently adhered to down to the fifteenth century, at least, that we need not wonder to find no vestiges of buildings erected by this community contemporaneously with those of other great foundations. The Carthusians clung longer than any of their brethren to the vows of poverty and humility which obliged them to live like anchorites, though dwelling under one roof. Far from living in common, on the cenobitic method, after the manner of the Benedictines and Cistercians, they maintained the cellular system in all its severity. Absolute silence further aggravated the complete isolation which encouraged them to scorn all that might alleviate or modify the rigours of their religious duties.

In time, however, the Carthusians relaxed something of this extreme asceticism in their monastic buildings, if not in their religious observances. Towards the fifteenth century they did homage to art by the construction of monasteries which, though falling short of the Cistercian monuments in magnificence, are of much interest from their peculiarities of arrangement.

The ordinary buildings comprised the gate-house, giving access by a single door to the courtyard of the monastery, where stood the church, the prior's[241] lodging, the hostelry for guests and pilgrims, the laundry, the bakehouse, the cattle sheds, storerooms, and dovecote. The church communicated with an interior cloister, giving access to the chapter-house and refectory, which latter were only open to the monks at certain annual festivals. The typical feature of St. Bruno's more characteristic monasteries is the great cloister, on the true Carthusian model—that is to say, rectangular in form, and surrounded by an arcade, on which the cells of the monks open. Each of these cells was a little self-contained habitation, and had its own garden. The door of each cell was provided with a wicket, through which a lay brother passed the slender meal of the Carthusian who was forbidden to communicate with his fellows.

The Rule of St. Bruno, as is commonly known, enjoins the life of an anchorite; the Carthusian must work, eat, and drink in solitude; speech is interdicted; on meeting, the brethren are commanded to salute each other in silence; they assemble only in church for certain services prescribed by the Rule, and their meals, none too numerous at any time, were only taken in common on certain days in the year.

The severity of these conditions explains the extreme austerity of Carthusian architecture. It had, as we have already said, no real development until the fifteenth century, and then only as regards certain portions of the monastery, such as the church and its cloister, which were in strong contrast with the compulsory bareness of the great cloister of the monks.

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The ancient Chartreuse of Villefranche de Rouergue, either built or reconstructed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, still preserves some remarkable features. The plan, and the bird's-eye view (Figs. 145 and 146) from L'Encyclopédie de l'Architecture et de la Construction, gives an exact idea of the monastery. Some of the cells are still intact, also the refectory, and certain other portions of the primitive structure.

In spite of the rigidity of the Rule of St. Bruno certain foundations of his order became famous, notably the monastery established by the Carthusians on the invitation of St. Louis in the celebrated castle of Vauvert, beyond the walls of Paris, near the Route d'Issy. The castle was regarded with terror by the[243] Parisians, who declared it to be haunted by the devil, whence the popular expression: aller au diable Vauvert, which later was corrupted into aller au diable au vert. The Carthusians, nevertheless, took up their quarters in the stronghold, and enriched it with a splendid church built by Pierre de Montereau, the foundation stone of which was laid by St. Louis in 1260. The Chartreuse of Vauvert developed[244] greatly, and became one of the most famous of the order. It was in the lesser cloister of this monastery that the artist Eustache Le Sueur painted his famous frescoes from the life of St. Bruno in the beginning of the seventeenth century.

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The most famous Carthusian monasteries of Italy are those of Florence, which dates from the middle of the fourteenth century, and is attributed in part to Orcagna, and of Pavia, founded at the close of the fourteenth century by Giovanni Galeazzo Visconti.

The French Carthusian monasteries of greatest interest after Vauvert, which had the special advantage of royal protection, are those of Clermont, in Auvergne, Villefranche de Rouergue (Figs. 145 and 146), Villeneuve-lez-Avignon, and Montrieux, in Var. The Chartreuse of Dijon is one of the most ancient, not only as to its buildings, which are the work of the Duke of Burgundy's architects, but in respect of its famous sculptures of the tomb of Philip the Bold, and his wife, Margaret of Flanders, and those[246] of the Well of Moses, carved by the Burgundian brothers, Claux Suter, who flourished at the close of the fourteenth century, and had much to do with the revival of art at that period.[51]

But the most imposing of all, and the most famous, if not the most beautiful, is that in the mountains near Grenoble, universally known as La Grande Chartreuse.

The original monastery is said to have been founded by St. Bruno. It consisted merely of a humble chapel and a few isolated cells, which are supposed to have occupied the site in the Desert, on which the Chapels of St. Bruno and St. Mary now stand. The existing buildings were reconstructed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the manner of the day, of which the arcades of the great cloister are good examples. The present church, which is extremely simple in design, has preserved nothing of its sixteenth-century decoration but the choir stalls. The great cloister consists of an arcaded gallery, on which the sixty cells of the monks open. It is arranged in strict accordance with the Rule of St. Bruno as regards its connection with the main buildings, the chief features of which we have already pointed out.

The monasteries built throughout the twelfth century were provided with outer walls, by means of which the claustral buildings, offices, workshops, and even farms of the community were enclosed. Thus all the necessaries of life were produced within the precincts, and all communication with the outside world was avoided.

But by the end of the century the great abbeys had become feudal castles; and fortified walls were raised around them, often embracing the town which had grown up under their protection and shared their fortunes. This was the case at Cluny, and the town acknowledged its obligations to the monks by the payment of tithes.

In the reign of Philip Augustus and St. Louis the abbots were not only the heads of their monasteries but feudal chieftains, vassals of the royal power, and as such obliged to furnish the sovereign with men-at-arms in time of war, and to maintain a garrison when required.[52]

[248]

The Abbey of Tournus was, like Cluny, surrounded by walls connected with the city ramparts.

The Abbey of St. Allyre, in Auvergne, near Clermont, was defended by walls and towers, which seem to have been added to the original structure of the ninth century at some period during the thirteenth, when such fortification of religious houses became necessary.

In many other monasteries a system of defence more or less elaborate was adopted; but the most famous of all the abbeys built by the Benedictines was unquestionably Mont St. Michel, which, for boldness and grandeur of design, is unique among military and monastic monuments from the eleventh to the close of the fifteenth century.

The Abbey of Mont St. Michel was founded in 708 by St. Aubert, according to tradition. At the[249]
[250]
[251] close of the tenth century it was restored by Richard Sans Peur, third Duke of Normandy, with the help of the Benedictine monks from Monte Casino, whom he had installed at St. Michel in 966. It increased greatly in wealth and extent in the eleventh century, and by the end of the twelfth was in the full tide of its prosperity. Its buildings, however had not yet that importance to which they attained in the following century.[53] In the twelfth century they consisted of the church, which was built between 1020 and 1135[54] and the monastic buildings proper (lieux réguliers), with lodgings for servants and guests to the north of the nave, at G, G´, and F on the plan, Fig. 152. To these, which were restored or reconstructed in a great measure by the Abbot Roger II. at the beginning of the twelfth century, additions were made on the south and south-east by Robert de Thorigni from 1154 to 1186.

The monastery was not then fortified.

[252]

[253]

Built on the summit of a rock, the impregnable steepness of which provided a natural rampart north and west, it depended solely upon the advantages of its position for defence. Its situation in the midst of a treacherous sandy plain—a position which gave rise to the mediæval name, Le Mont St. Michel au Péril de la Mer—secured it against attempts at investiture, and even to a great extent against sudden assaults. Enclosures of stone or wooden fences surrounded it at those points on the east where the less rugged nature of the surface rendered access comparatively easy, and where stood the entrance, with the various habitations which had grouped themselves round it. The so-called town had been founded in the tenth century by a few families decimated by the Normans, in their raids upon Avranches and its neighbourhood after the death of Charlemagne. In the thirteenth century it consisted of a small number of houses which, by[254] way of security against the vagaries of the sea, were built upon the highest point of the rock to the east.

In 1203 the greater part of the abbey, the church excepted, was destroyed during the wars between Philip Augustus, King of France, and John, King of England.

Historic records prove conclusively that the abbey had no defensive works properly so-called in the twelfth and early part of the thirteenth century.

From this period onwards abbeys, more especially those of the Benedictine orders, were transformed into regular fortresses capable of sustaining a siege. The abbots, in their character of feudal lords, fortified their monasteries to ensure them against disasters such as had marked the early years of the thirteenth century. Mont St. Michel is one of the most curious examples of such fortification.

The original architects of the abbey seem to have been unwilling to diminish the height of the mount by levelling. Resolving to detract in no degree from the majesty of so splendid a base for[255] their church, they set about their work on the same principle as the pyramid builders. Our illustrations show how the buildings were raised partly on plateaux circumscribing the apex of the mount, partly on that apex itself. The result is that the monastery, as we see it, has a core of rock rising at its highest point to the very floor of the church. The ring of lower stories rests upon walls of great thickness, and upon piers united by vaults, the whole forming a substructure of perfect solidity.

The section made through the transept (Fig. 153) gives an exact idea of the portion which dates from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and of the buildings which gradually grouped themselves round this nucleus, such as the so-called Merveille (Marvel) to the north, and the abbot's lodging to the south.

The longitudinal section (Fig. 154) shows the crypt, or lower church. This was not, as has been frequently asserted, actually hollowed out of the rock; it was, however, very ingeniously contrived in the fifteenth century over the ruins of the Romanesque church in the space between the declivity of the mount and the artificial plateau of the earlier architects. The substructures of the Romanesque church which were enlarged by Robert de Thorigni in the thirteenth century are indicated in this diagram. They are of gigantic proportions, especially towards the west.

Fig. 155 shows the so-called Galerie de l'Aquilon (Gallery of the North Wind), one of the upper stories of the claustral buildings to the north of the church constructed by Roger II., eleventh abbot (1106-1122).

After the fire of 1203, when the abbey had become a feof of the royal domain, the Abbot[256]
[257]
[258] Jourdain and his successors rebuilt it almost entirely, with the exception of the church.

As the peculiarities of the site made it impossible to adhere strictly to the Benedictine system of direct communication between the main buildings and the[259] church, the lieux réguliers, or accommodation reserved for the monks, were disposed above the magnificent building to the north of the church, which, from the time of its foundation, was known as La Merveille (the Marvel).

This vast structure fairly takes rank as the grandest example of combined religious and military architecture of the finest mediæval period.

[260]

The Merveille consists of three stories, two of which are vaulted. The lowest contains the almonry[261] and cellar; the intermediate story the refectory and the knights' hall; the third the dormitory and cloister. The building consists of two wings running east and west; the apartments are superposed as follows:—In the east wing the almonry, the refectory, and the dormitory; in the west the cellar, the knights' hall, and the cloister.[56]

This splendid structure is built entirely of granite. It was carried out by one continuous effort, under the inspiration of an incomparably bold and learned design of the Abbé Jourdain, to which his successors religiously adhered.

The undertaking was entered upon in 1203 and finished in 1228, the final achievement being the cloister, the architects or sculptors of which are commemorated by an inscription in the spandril of one of the arcades in the south walk.

To fully appreciate this stupendous monument, we must realise the extraordinary energy which enabled its architects to complete it in the comparatively short space of twenty-five years. We must take into account the conditions of its growth, its situation on the very summit of a rugged cliff, cut off from the mainland at times by the sea, at other times by an expanse of treacherous quicksand. We must consider the enormous difficulties of transporting materials, seeing that all the granite used was quarried by the monks from the neighbouring coast. It is true that an unimportant quota of the stone was dug from the base of the rock itself. But though the passage across the sands was by this[262] means avoided, the difficulties of raising great masses of stone to the foot of the Merveille, the foundations of which are over 160 feet above the sea-level, had still to be met. It seems certain that the east and west buildings of which the Merveille consists were built at the same time, for though certain differences[263] are perceptible in the form of the exterior buttresses, they evidently result from the interior formation of the various apartments. A study of the plans, sections, and façades of the buildings is convincing on this head, and the general arrangements, notably that of the staircase, all point to the same conclusion.[264] This staircase is a spiral in the thickness of the buttress which, with its crowning octagonal turret, forms the point of junction between the two buildings. It winds from the almonry of the eastern ground-floor to the knights' hall on the west, passing through the dormitory of the eastern block to terminate in the northern embattlement above.

The eastern and northern façades of the Merveille are models of severe and virile beauty; a massive grandeur characterises them, especially striking and impressive in the northern front as viewed from the sea. The vast walls of granite (the material used throughout, save in the inner walk of the cloister) are pierced with windows varying in shape according to the character of the rooms they light. Those of the dormitory are very remarkable. They are long and narrow, and affect the aspect of loopholes, deeply splayed outwards; the peculiar form of the honeycombed window-heads suggests a reminiscence[265] of Arab types seen by the French Crusaders in Palestine. The thrusts of the interior vaulting are met on the exterior by massive buttresses, the vigorous profiles of which contribute greatly to the nobility of the general effect.

These formidable façades were practically fortifications, but the Merveille was further defended to the north by an embattled wall, flanked by a tower which served as a post for watchmen, to which the covered ways running round the base of the western buildings converged.

In the middle, on a level with the north-west angle of the Merveille, a châtelet, or miniature keep, now destroyed, guarded the rugged passage between embattled walls which led to the Fountain of St. Aubert, and was known as the Passage du Degré (passage of the stairway).

The various buildings of the abbey which were added in the fourteenth century, after the construction of the Merveille, are: the abbot's lodging, with its offices on the south, and certain military works which completed the defensive system. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries these were gradually extended to the walls of the town, as we shall see in Part III., "Military Architecture."

The distinctive character of military architecture in the Middle Ages must be sought in defensive fortification. In all other respects its constructive methods were identical with those employed in architectural works generally. The few ornamental features of military buildings, as, for instance, the interior vaults and the profiles of consoles and cornices, diverge but slightly from the accepted types of such features in the churches, monasteries, and domestic structures of the period.

The Latin, Roman, Gallo-Roman, Romanesque, and Gothic architects were versed in every department of the art they practised. The same architect was called upon to construct the church and the fortress, the abbey, and the ramparts which were often its necessary complement, the donjon, and castle, the town hall, the hospital, the rural barn, and the urban dwelling. He was responsible not only for the inception of every class and form of building, but for its successful elaboration; on him alone the responsibility of its execution rested; no scientific specialist checked his conclusions and verified his[270] calculations as in our own time. The system by which the architect and the engineer have each[271] their separate functions and responsibilities in the construction of the same building was unknown. The builder, or mason, as some would have him called, was an architect in the fullest sense; he himself traced the diagrams of his conceptions, and directed the execution of every detail, careful alike of stability and beauty.

It is a curious and disheartening phenomenon that such a direct contravention of the principles of mediæval art as the modern system of divided responsibility implies, should obtain only among the French, the very people to whom Western Europe owes its initiation into those principles. In England, in Belgium, in Holland, Switzerland, and Germany the architect is also the engineer; the science and the art of his craft are inseparable. "This intimate union of qualities gives an individuality to certain productions of these nations which we might well lay to heart and make the subject of serious comparative study. We must needs admit to begin with that we ourselves have become disciples rather than pioneers in a great movement."[57]

The one preoccupation of the modern engineer seems to be the satisfaction of imperious necessity. He is inclined to neglect all that mathematics cannot give him. And yet he has brought about a very sensible progress by his mathematical application of modern science. He has unquestionably excelled in industrial masterpieces perfectly adapted to the needs of the moment, if wanting in the[272] qualities that make for immortality. We accept with qualified admiration his marvellous bridges and kindred works in metal—marvellous yet ephemeral; but we accept them merely as a temporary substitute for the more solid if less showy stone bridges of our early architects.

We would not have the servant of yesterday the master of to-morrow. We protest against the degradation of the architect from his high and noble estate to the rank of a mere decorator, however skilful. We would not witness the extinction of the ancient French traditions which inspired so many masterpieces, and to which we look as the source of many yet to come.

It appears, moreover, that the general acceptation of the word ingénieur (engineer) is a totally mistaken one. It is derived from the mediæval term engigneur, which was very differently applied.

The architect and the engineer of our own day are both constructors, but with a difference. The architect loves and cultivates his art; the engineer, with few exceptions, despises, or affects to despise, his.

In the Middle Ages their functions were perfectly distinct. The architect constructed what the engigneur used his utmost cunning to destroy. The architect built ramparts and strengthened them with towers; the engigneur undermined them if attacking, or countermined them if defending. It was his business to invent or direct the use of engines of war, such as rams, mangonels, arblasts, and machines for the slinging of enormous projectiles, or grenades. He constructed the portable wooden towers which[273] the besieging party brought up against the walls for an escalade, directed the sappers who undermined them, and, in fact, superintended the manufacture of all such offensive engines as were necessary in the conduct of a siege, a process which, before the invention of firearms, necessitated preparations as prolonged and tedious as they were complicated and uncertain. In short, the architect was the constructor of fortifications, the engigneur their assailant or defender. It was not until the time of Vauban that military engineers were called upon to exercise functions so much more extensive. At an earlier period there were, however, specialists in construction who undertook such works as the circumvallation of Aigues-Mortes, but their labours had little in common with those of modern engineers.

Before the feudal period the fortifications of camps consisted either of earthworks, of walls built of mud and logs, or of palisades surrounded by ditches, in imitation of the Roman methods of castrametation. The enceintes of towns fortified by the Romans were walls defended by round or square towers. These walls were built double; a space of several yards intervened, which was filled up with the earth dug from the moat or ditch, mixed with[274] rubble. The mass was levelled at the top and paved to form what is technically known as a covered way, or terrace protected by an embattled wall rising from the outer curtain.

That portion of the enceinte of Carcassonne which was built by the Visigoths in the sixth century is thus constructed on the Roman model. "The ground on which the town is built rises considerably above that beyond the walls, and is almost on a level with the rampart. The curtains[58] are of great thickness; they are composed of two facings of dressed stones cut into small cubes, which alternate with courses of bricks; the intervening space is filled not with earth, but with a concrete formed of rubble and lime."[59] The flanking towers which rise considerably above the curtains were so disposed that it was possible to[275] isolate them from the walls by raising drawbridges. Thus each tower formed an independent stronghold against assailants.

Fig. 165 shows a portion of the north-west ramparts of the city of Carcassonne, with the first round tower; to the left of the drawing is the Romano-Visigothic tower, flanking right and left the curtains of the same period.

In accordance with the Roman tradition the enceinte of a town, formed, as we have seen, of ramparts strengthened by towers, were further defended by a citadel or keep, of which we shall have more to say in the following chapter. This keep commanded the whole place, which was usually situated on the slope of a hill above the bank of a river. The bridge which communicated with the opposite bank was fortified by a gate-house or tête de pont, to guard the passage.

The circumvallation of towns often consisted of a double enclosure, divided by a moat. By the close of the twelfth century architects had caught the inspiration of the great military works of the Crusaders in the East, and military architecture had progressed on the same lines as religious and monastic architecture.

The territories, conquered by the Crusaders in the course of establishing the Christian supremacy in the East, had been divided into feofs as early as the twelfth century. These soon boasted castles, churches, and monastic foundations, of the Cistercian and Premonstrant orders among others.

According to G. Rey, the following abbeys and priories were built in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem[276] at this period:—The monasteries of Mount Sion, Mount Olivet, Jehoshaphat, St. Habakkuk, and St. Samuel, etc., and in Galilee, those of Mount Tabor and Palmarée. The military organisation was regulated by the Assises de la haute Cour (Assizes of the Supreme Court), which determined the number of knights to be furnished by each feof for the defence of the kingdom, and in like manner, the number of men-at-arms required from each church and each community of citizens.... The middle of the twelfth century was the period at which the Christian colonies of the Holy Land were most flourishing. Undeterred by the wars of which Syria was the theatre, the Franks had promptly assimilated the Greek and Roman tradition as manifested in Byzantine types of military architecture. The double enclosure flanked by towers, one of the main features of Syrian fortresses built by the Crusaders, was borrowed from the Greeks. Many of their strongholds, notably Morgat, the so-called Krak of the knights, and Tortosa, were of colossal proportions. They may be divided into two classes. In the first, the buildings are of the Frankish type, and seem to be modelled on the French castles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The flanking towers are nearly always round; they contain a defensive story, while their summits and those of the intervening curtains are crowned with battlements in the French fashion. Other features subsequently introduced were: the double enceinte, borrowed from the Byzantines, the inner line of which commanded the outer, and was sufficiently near to allow its defenders to engage, should assailants have carried the first[277] barrier; secondly, stone machicolations in place of the wooden hourds or timber scaffoldings which were retained in France till the close of the thirteenth century; and finally, the talus, a device by which the thickness of the walls was tripled at the base, thus affording increased security against the arts of the sapper and the earthquake shocks so frequent in the East.

The buildings of the second class belong to the school of the Knights Templars. Their characteristic features are the towers, invariably square or oblong in shape, and projecting but slightly from the curtains. The fortress of Kalaat-el-Hosn,[60] or Krak of the knights, commanded the pass through which ran the roads from Homs and Hamah to Tripoli and[278] Tortosa, and was a military station of the first importance. Together with the castles of Akkar, Arcos, La Colée, Chastel-Blanc, Areynieh, Yammour, Tortosa, and Markab, and the various auxiliary towers and posts, it constituted a system of defence designed to protect Tripoli from the incursions of the Mahometans, who retained their hold on the greater part of Syria.... The Krak, which was built under the direction of the Knights Hospitallers, has a double enceinte, separated by a wide ditch partly filled with water. The inner wall forms a reduct, and rising above the outer enclosure commands its defences. It also encompasses the various dependencies of the castle, the great hall, chapel, domestic buildings, and magazines. A long vaulted[279] passage, easy of defence, was the only entrance to the place. To the north and west the outer line consisted of a curtain flanked by rounded turrets, and crowned by machicolations, which formed a continuous scaffolding of stone along the greater part of the enceinte.

The action of the East upon the West was manifested in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the application to the fortification of Carcassonne and Aigues-Mortes of methods in use among the Crusaders in Syria.

This oriental influence is apparent at Carcassonne in the double enceinte borrowed from Syrian fortresses.

The city of Carcassonne stands upon a plateau commanding the valley of the Aude, the site of an[280] ancient Roman castellum. In the sixth century it fell into the hands of the Visigoths, who fortified it. It increased considerably in extent during the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, but in the time of Simon de Montfort (1209) and of Raymon de Trancavel (1240) the enceinte was not nearly so important as it became under St. Louis. By the middle of the thirteenth century the king had begun the construction of defensive works on a vast scale, and built the outer enceinte, which still exists, as may be seen on the plan (Fig. 167) taken from Viollet-le-Duc's Cité de Carcassonne.

The primary object of the enceinte was to secure the place against a sudden attack during the completion or enlargement of its interior defences. The additions of St. Louis, which were carried on by Philip the Bold, rendered Carcassonne impregnable[281] in the general estimation. "As a fact, it was never invested, and did not open its gates to Edward the Black Prince till 1355, when all Languedoc had submitted to him."[61]

Oriental influences are equally evident at Aigues-Mortes. The Genoese Guglielmo Boccanera, who constructed the enceinte, was apparently familiar with the system of fortification adopted by the Crusaders in Syria. The machicolations which here make their first appearance in Languedoc (in the reign of Philip the Bold), proclaim the filiation of Aigues-Mortes to the Syrian fortresses. Italian influences are also perceptible in the square plan of the flanking towers. French architects had always preferred the round tower, as more solid in itself, and less open[282] to attack from sappers, who, in advancing against a building of this form, were fully exposed to the missiles of the defenders from the curtains adjoining; while, on the other hand, the angles of the square tower gave a certain protection to assailants advancing against its front.

The ramparts of Avignon, which date from the fourteenth century, seem to have been constructed on Italian methods. The curtains are flanked by square towers, open towards the town, and surmounted by embattled parapets corbelled out from the walls, and machicolated so as to command their bases.

In the thirteenth century walls and towers were provided with movable wooden scaffoldings, as[283] shown at A in the figure. Spaces were left in the masonry of the walls for the insertion of wooden beams, which, projecting from the curtain, supported an overhanging gallery. This, being pierced with traps or apertures in the flooring, commanded the base of the wall, and was an important element in defensive operations. But as it was found that these timber galleries were easily set on fire by assailants, they were replaced in the fourteenth century by stone machicolations, as shown at B, consisting of corbels, supporting an embattled parapet. Between the inner face of the parapet and the outer face of the curtain the supporting corbels alternated with openings for the defence of the base, as already described. This arrangement, among the earliest examples of which are the square towers of Avignon, was soon generally adopted by architects in the construction of city ramparts.

"The art of fortification, which had made great advances at the beginning of the thirteenth century, remained almost stationary to the end of it. During the Hundred Years' War, however, it received a fresh[284] impetus. When order had been restored in the kingdom, Charles VII. set about the restoration or reconstruction of many fortresses recaptured from the English. In the defensive works of such towns and castles, and in various new undertakings of a like nature, we recognise the method and regularity proper to an art based on well-defined principles, and far advanced towards mastery."[62]

In the Abbey of Mont St. Michel the successive modifications applied to military enceintes from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, are illustrated in the fullest and most interesting manner.

Of the fourteenth century fortifications, which surrounded the original town at the summit of the rock, connecting the ramparts with the Merveille on the north, and the abbey buildings on the south, some fragments still remain. The tower on the north is intact. The walls are crowned with machicolations, in accordance with the then novel system of massing the defences at the top of the ramparts. The gate of the enceinte was to the south-east,[285] judging from the miniatures in the livre d'heures of Pierre II., Duke of Brittany, which show the arrangement of the original enceinte at the close of the fourteenth century.

The abbey was at this time governed by Pierre Le Roy, one of its ablest abbots and most famous constructors. He rebuilt the summit of the Tour des Corbins (merveille), restored, and re-roofed the abbey buildings to the south of the church, which, begun by Richard Justin in 1260, were carried on at intervals by his successors till they were partially destroyed by the fire of 1374. He completed the eastern defences by the addition of the square tower at O on the plan (Fig. 151), in which he built several rooms for the accommodation of his soldiers. The tower is known as the Tour Perrine, in memory of its author. We have seen that the abbots gradually became great feudal chieftains; the Abbot of Mont St. Michel was further commandant of the place for the king; and he was empowered to bestow feofs on the nobles of the province, who bound themselves in return to keep guard over the mount in certain contingencies, enumerated in the following rendering of a Latin text:—[63]

"The tenure of these vavassories was by faith and fealty, and their holders were bound to furnish relief and thirteen knights, each of whom was to come in person to guard the gate of the abbey when necessary—that is to say, in time of war; each to keep guard for the space of the ebb and flow of the sea—that is to say, during the rising and falling of[286] the tide; and each to be provided with gambeson, casque, gauntlets, shield, lance, and all requisite arms; and further to present themselves thus armed yearly at the feast of St. Michael in September."

In the early years of the fifteenth century he built the gate-house and crenellated curtain which connects it with the Merveille, to the north of the guard-room, Bellechaise (see Fig. 163, beginning of this chapter). The gate-house was placed in front of the northern façade of Bellechaise (D, Fig. 150); an open space between this and the south wall of the new structure formed a wide machicoulis for the protection of the north gate (that of Bellechaise), which, by the erection of the new building, had been transformed into a second interior entrance. The gate-house or châtelet is a square structure, flanked at the angles of the north front by two turrets, corbelled out upon buttresses. In general appearance they resemble a pair of huge mortars standing on their breeches. Between the pedestals of these turrets was the doorway and the inclined vault over the staircase leading to the guard-room. This entrance was defended by a portcullis worked from within on the first story, and by three machicoulis at the top of the curtain, between the battlements of the turrets. For the further protection of the gate-house Pierre Le Roy built the barbican which covers it to the east and north, and also commands the great staircase (Grand Degré) on the north. He modified the ramparts by the addition of the tower known as the Tour Claudine at the north-east angle of the Merveille. In the lower story of this tower he constructed a guard-room, the postern of which[287] communicated with the Grand Degré, and by a series of ingenious and unique combinations was so contrived as to command all the approaches.[64]

In 1411 the Abbot Robert Jolivet was nominated lord of the abbey by Pope John XXIII. After his election by the monks he was made captain of the garrison by the king, but continued to live in Paris. In 1416, however, he hastened to his abbey, which was threatened by the English, who had possessed themselves of Lower Normandy after the battle of Agincourt in 1415. Whilst the English were busy fortifying Tombelaine, Robert Jolivet completed his walls and certain towers round about the town, which still exist. To meet the expenses of his undertaking the abbot obtained a grant from the king of fifteen hundred livres from the revenues of the Viscounty of Avranches, besides a subsidy from the Master of the Mint at St. Lô.

At the time when Robert Jolivet was building[288]
[289] the new ramparts, from about 1415 to 1420, the town had greatly increased towards the south, and even setting aside the dangerous proximity of the English at Tombelaine, some more extensive system of defence than that afforded by the fortifications of the fourteenth century was imperatively needed to secure the place against attack. Robert Jolivet incorporated his new walls on the east with those of the preceding century, which, following the escarpments of the cliff, descend to the beach, and are protected by the northern tower. These walls he flanked with an additional tower projecting considerably from the surface, which was destined to command the adjoining curtains and protect the main line of his defences. He then carried his walls round to the south of the rock and strengthened them by five other towers. The last of these, known as the Tour du Roi, forms the south-eastern projection of the place, and commands the western gate of the town.

The walls and their sloping bases are defended by stone machicolations above, the consoles of which support open crenellated parapets. Several of the towers were roofed, and afforded shelter for the defenders of the ramparts. After leaving the Tour du Roi the walls turn off at a right angle and unite themselves to the abrupt declivities of the rock by means of a series of steps and covered ways, commanded by a fortified guard-room. Even the inaccessible peaks of the rock itself are fortified and connected with the defences of the abbey on the south.

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, and still[290] more notably towards its close, firearms had been successfully used in various sieges, and had made such rapid progress that the whole system of attack and defence was transformed. Towers gave way to bastions, the terraces of which became batteries, while the battlements of the earlier mode were replaced by epaulments. Machicolations which were now merely a traditional decoration at last disappeared altogether, and military science gradually took the place of architecture, for which there was henceforth little scope in this particular field.

The first French castles of the mediæval period seem to have been built for the purpose of arresting invasion and affording shelter to communities decimated by the raids of the Normans. They consisted of simple intrenchments more or less extensive. Surrounded by a fossé or ditch formed of earthworks, the scarp of which was defended by a palisade, they had much in common with the camps of the ancient Romans. In the centre of the enclosure rose the motte (mote or mound), a conical elevation, either natural to the ground, or artificially formed on the model of the Roman prætorium. This was surmounted by a building, generally of wood, which served as a post of observation and a retreat less accessible than the enceinte itself.

In these rudimentary dispositions we recognise the germ of those feudal keeps and castles which were such important features of mediæval architecture, notably during the Gothic period.

Defensive works of this nature sprang up at various points of the royal domain which were exposed to the incursions of the Scandinavian pirates;[292] but the temporary concessions of Charles the Bald were claimed as definitive by those to whom they had been made. "When, therefore, that feeble monarch proclaimed the heredity of the feofs at Quierzy-sur-Oise in 877, he did but sanction that which was already an accomplished fact.... When the feudal system was firmly established, the nobles turned their attention to the maintenance of their usurpations alike against the kings of France, strangers, and neighbours. To this end they carefully chose the best strategic positions in their territories, and fortified them in the most durable fashion at their command. The imposts they levied were considerable, and their serfs were subject to endless exactions."[65] Stone castles were accordingly built[293] which, in general arrangement, adhered to primitive models. In 980 Frotaire had raised no less than five around Périgueux, his episcopal town.

In 991 Thibault File-Étoupe built a fortress on the hill of Montlhéry, near the royal residences of Paris and Étampes, which was very formidable to the first five kings of the house of Capet. Later, when it became a royal possession, it was one of the chief bulwarks of the city.

In the Middle Ages the castle bore the same relation to the fortified town as did the keep to the feudal castle, and the history of one is bound up in that of the other.

In a fortified town the castle was the lodging of the leader and his soldiers. It was connected with the ramparts of the place, and had one or more[294] special outlets; it was further provided with defences on the side of the town itself, so that upon occasion it became an isolated stronghold.

The Castle of Carcassonne is a famous example of such offensive and defensive fortification. It was built in the first years of the twelfth century, and is composed of various lodgings for the chief and his garrison, defended east and north, on the side towards the city, by towers and curtains (Fig. 175). At the south-west angle independent reducts and towers guard the courtyards and approaches. The west front overlooks the open country, and here was placed the gate, which was defended by a series of formidable devices so ingenious as to preclude all possibility of surprise.

[295]

During the Romanesque and Gothic periods the castle was a miniature town, with its own fortified enceinte, composed of walls reinforced by towers which served as refuges at various points of the circumference, and formed so many reducts for the arrest of assailants.

The keep was the citadel of this miniature town, the temporary lodging of the lord whose vassals lived in the internal offices, and whose soldiers occupied the gate-house buildings and the towers of the ramparts. The noble sought to give his special habitation the most formidable aspect possible, and thereby to strike terror to the beholder, a very necessary device in those days of conflict when the friend of night was often the implacable foe of morning. "In times of peace the keep was the receptacle for the treasure, arms, and archives of the family; but the lord did not lodge there; he only took up his quarters in the keep with his wife and children in time of war. As it was not possible for him to defend the place alone, he surrounded himself with a band of the most devoted of his followers who shared his dwelling. From thence he exercised a scrupulous surveillance over the garrison and its approaches, for the keep was always placed at the most vulnerable point of the fortress, and he and his bodyguard held the horde of vassals and retainers in due subservience; as they were able to pass in and out at all hours by secret and well-guarded passages, the garrison was kept in ignorance of the exact means of defence, the lord, as was natural, doing all in his power to make them appear formidable."[66]

Castles and keeps of stone were generally built upon the natural scarp of some spur commanding two valleys and near the banks of a river; the primitive mounds of the feudal fortresses were abandoned; as we have already remarked, these were in many cases artificial, and would have been quite inadequate to the support of the huge masses of masonry of the new architecture.

"By the close of the tenth century and the opening years of the eleventh, Foulques Nerra was raising castles throughout his own territories in Anjou, and on every available point of vantage he could wrest from his neighbour, the Count of Blois and Tours; the latter built fortresses to resist the aggressor and complete the network of strongholds begun by his father, Thibault the Trickster, one of the most turbulent nobles of his day."[67]

The keep of Langeais, on a precipitous hill overlooking the Loire, was founded by Foulques Nerra at the close of the tenth century; the walls, which are still standing on three sides, show traces of Gallo-Roman methods of construction; the dressed stones are of small size, and brick and stone are used conjointly for the voussoirs of the window arches.

A large number of castles and keeps were built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, among others those of Plessy, Grimoult, Le Pin, and La Pommeraye, the last on a mound surrounded by deep moats which separate three lines of circumvallation from each other; Beaugency-sur-Loire, the vast keep of which was four stories high; and Loches,[297] which is ascribed to Foulques Nerra, but which seems to belong rather to the twelfth century, at which period military architecture had made a great advance. The keep of Loches is perhaps the finest of all such structures in France; in height it is nearly 100 feet; the ramparts seem to date from the thirteenth century; the form of the towers on plan is a pointed arch, a shape adopted as offering greater resistance at the part most frequently attacked by the sapper.

At Falaise, where the castle like that of Domfront is built on a rugged promontory, the ramparts are later than the keep, the architectural details of[298] which point to the twelfth century. This hypothesis is supported by a passage in the Chronicle of Robert du Mont, quoted by M. de Caumont. In 1123 Henry II. rebuilt the keep and ramparts of Arques, and carried out similar restorations at Gisors, Falaise, Argentan, Exmes, Domfront, Amboise, and Vernon.

Other keeps of equal interest in point of situation, plan, or details of construction are:—Ste. Suzanne, Nogent-le-Rotrou, Broue, L'Islot, Tonnay-Boutonne, Pons, Chamboy, Montbazon, Lavardin, Montrichard, and Huriet in the Bourbonnais. All these, in common with those first described, are square or rectangular on plan. From the end of the twelfth century onwards the cylindrical form[299] predominates in the plan of keeps and towers. On the whole, it offered the best resistance to the mediæval assailant. The convex surface was of equal strength all round, and as we have seen in the preceding chapter, the circular trace for towers[300] gave the garrison the best chance of defending their bases from the curtain, and of opposing the work of sappers and miners.