DIEPPE—CASTLE—CHURCHES—HISTORY OF THE PLACE—FEAST OF THE ASSUMPTION.
(Dieppe, June, 1818.)
The bombardment of this town, alluded to in my last, was so effectual in its operation, that, excepting the castle and the two churches, the place can boast of little to arrest the attention of the antiquary, or of the curious traveller. These three objects were indeed almost all that escaped the conflagration; and for this they were indebted to their insulated situations, the first on an eminence unconnected with the houses of the place, the other two in their respective cemeteries.
The hill on which the castle stands is steep; and the building, as well from its position, as from its high walls, flanked with towers and bastions, has an imposing appearance. In its general outline it bears a resemblance to the castle of Stirling, but it has not the same claims to attention in an architectural point of view. It is a confused mass of various æras, and its parts are chiefly modern: nor is there any single feature that deserves to be particularized for beauty or singularity; yet, as a whole, a picturesque and pleasing effect results from the very confusion and irregularity of its towers, roofs, and turrets; and this is also enhanced by a row of lofty arches, thrown across a ravine near the entrance, supporting the bridge, and appearing at a distance like the remains of a Roman aqueduct. What seems to be the most ancient part is a high quadrangular tower with lofty pointed pannels in the four walls; and though inferior in antiquity, an observer accustomed only to the English castellated style, is struck by the variety of numerous circular towers with conical roofs, resembling those which flanked the gates of the town. Some of these gates still remain perfect; and one of them, leading to the sea, now serves as a military prison. It was the Sieur des Marêts[[4]], the first governor of the place, who began this castle shortly after the year 1443, when Louis the XIth, then dauphin, freed Dieppe from the dominion of the English, attacking in person, and carrying by assault, the formidable fortress, constructed by Talbot, in the suburb of Pollet. Of this, not a vestige now remains: the whole was levelled with the ground in 1689; though, at a period of one hundred and twenty years after it was originally taken and dismantled, it had again been made a place of strength by the Huguenots, and had been still further fortified under Henry IVth, in whose reign the present castle was completed; for it was not till this time that permission was given to the inhabitants to add to it a keep. In its perfect state, whilst defended by this keep, and still further protected by copious out-works and bomb-proof casemates, its strength was great; but the period of its power was of short duration; for the then perturbed state of France naturally gave rise to anxiety on the part of the government, lest fortresses should serve as rallying points to the faction of the league; and the castle of Dieppe was consequently left with little more than the semblance of its former greatness.
Of the churches here, that of St. Jaques is considerably the finest building, and is indeed an excellent specimen of what has been called the decorated English style of architecture, the style of this church nearly coinciding in its principal lines with that which prevailed in our own country during the reigns of the second and third Edward. It was begun about the year 1260, but was little advanced at the commencement of the following century; nor were its nineteen chapels, the works of the piety of individuals, completed before 1350. The roof of the choir remained imperfect till ninety years afterwards, whilst that of the transept is as recent as 1628[[5]]. The most ancient work is discernible in the transepts, but the lines are obscured by later additions. A cloister gallery fronted by delicate mullions runs round the nave and choir, and the extent and arrangement of the exterior would induce a stranger, unacquainted with the history of the building, to suppose that he was entering a conventual or cathedral church. The parts long most generally admired by the French, though they have always been miserable judges of gothic architecture, were the vaulted roof, and the pendants of the Lady-Chapel. The latter were originally ornamented with female figures, representing the Sibyls, made of colored terra cotta, and of such excellent workmanship, that Cardinal Barberini, when he visited this chapel in 1647, declared he had seen nothing of the kind, not even in Italy, superior to them for the beauty and delicacy of their execution; but they are now gone, and, according to Noel[[6]], were destroyed at the time of the bombardment. The state, however, of the roof does not seem to warrant this observation; and, contrary also to what he says, the pendants between the Lady-Chapel and the choir are still perfect, and serve, together with numerous small canopies in the chapel itself, to give a clear idea of what the whole must have been originally. One of the most elegant of the decorations of the church is a spirally-twisted column, elaborately carved, with a peculiarly fanciful and beautiful capital, placed against a pillar that separates the two south-eastern chapels of the choir. The richest object is a stone-screen to a chantry on the north side, which is divide into several canopies, whose upper part is still full of a profusion of sculpture, though the lower is sadly mutilated. I could not ascertain its history or use; but I do not suppose it is of earlier date than the age of Francis Ist, as the Roman or Italian style is blended with the Gothic arch. The Chapel of the Sepulchre, is not uncommonly pointed out as an object of admiration. There is certainly some, handsome sculpture round the portal; but it is not this for which your admiration is required: you are told that the chapel was made in 1612, at the expence of a traveller, then just returned from Palestine, and that it offers a faithful representation of the Holy Sepulchre itself at Jerusalem; by which if we are to understand that the wretched, grisly, painted, wooden figures of the three Maries, and other holy women and holy men, assembled round a disgusting representation of the dead Saviour, have their prototype in Judea, I can only add I am sorry for it: for my own part, putting aside all question of the propriety or effect of symbolical worship, and meaning nothing offensive to the Romish faith, I must be allowed to say that most assuredly I can conceive nothing less qualified to excite feelings of devotion, or more certain to awaken contempt and loathing, than the images of this description, the tinselled virgins, and the wretched daubs, nick-named paintings, which abound in the churches of Picardy and Normandy, the only catholic provinces which I have yet visited; so that, if the taste of the inhabitants is to be estimated by the decoration of the religious buildings, this faculty must be rated very low indeed. The exterior of the church is as richly ornamented as the inside; and not a buttress, arch, or canopy is without the remains of crumbled carving, worn by time, or disfigured by the ruder hand of calvinistic or revolutionary violence. Tradition refers the erection of this edifice to the English. From the certainty with which a date may be assigned to almost every part, it is very interesting to the lover of architecture. The Lady-Chapel is also perhaps one of the last specimens of Gothic art, but still very pure, except in some of the smaller ornaments, such, as the niches in the tabernacles, which end in escalop shells.
The other church is dedicated to St. Remi, and is a building of the XVIIth century; though, judging from some of its pillars, it would be pronounced considerably more ancient. Those of the transept and of the central tower are lofty and clustered, and of extraordinary thickness; the rest are circular and plain, and not very unlike the columns of our earliest Norman or Saxon churches, though of greater proportionate altitude. The capitals of those in the choir are singularly capricious, with figures, scrolls, &c.; but it is the capriciousness of the gothic verging into Grecian, not of the Norman. On the pendants of the nave are painted various ornaments, each accompanied by a mitre. The eastern has only a mitre and cross, with the date 1669; the western the same, with 1666; denoting the æra of the edifice, which was scarcely finished, when a bomb, in 1694, destroyed the roof of the choir, and this remains to the present hour incomplete. The most remarkable object in the church is a bénitier of coarse red granite, on whose basin is an inscription, to me illegible. The annexed sketches will give you some idea of it:
In the letters one looks naturally for a date: the figures that alternate with them are probably mitres, and, like those on the roof, indicate the supreme jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Rouen in the place.
Dieppe itself is, by its own historians[[7]], said to boast an origin as early as the days of Charlemagne[[8]], who is reported to have built a fortress on the scite of the present town, and to have called it Bertheville, in honor of the Berthas, his mother and his daughter. Bertheville was one of the first places taken by the Normans, by whom the appellation was changed to Dyppe or Dieppe, a word which in their language is said to signify a good anchorage. Other writers[[9]], however, treat the whole of the early chronicle of Dieppe as a fiction, and maintain, that even at the beginning of the XIth century the town had no existence, and the place was only known as the port of Arques, within whose territory it was comprehended; nor was it till the end of the same century that the inhabitants of Arques were, partly from the convenience of the fisheries, and partly from the advantages of the salt trade, induced to form this settlement. Whatever date may be assigned to the foundation of Dieppe, it is frequently contended that William the Conqueror embarked here for the invasion of England, and it seems undoubted that he sailed hence for his new kingdom in the next year, agreeably to the following passage from Ordericus Vitalis, (p. 509) by which you will observe, that the river had at that time the same name as the town, "Deinde sextâ nocte Decembris ad ostium amnis Deppæ ultra oppidtim Archas accessit, primâque vigiliâ gelidæ noctis Austro vela dedit, et mane portum oppositi littoris, (quem Vvicenesium vocitant) prospero cursu arripuit." In 1188, our Henry II built a castle upon the same hill on which the present fortress stands. This strong hold, however, afforded little protection; for we find that, in 1195, Philip Augustus of France, entering Normandy with an hostile army, laid siege to Dieppe, and set fire not only to the town, but also to the shipping in the harbor. Two years subsequently to this event, Dieppe ceased to form a part of the demesne of the Sovereign of the Duchy. Richard the Ist had given great offence to Walter, Archbishop of Rouen, by persisting in the erection of Château Gaillard, in the vicinity of Andelys, which belonged to the archbishop in right of his see; and though our lion-hearted monarch was not appalled either by the papal interdict or by the showers of blood that fell upon his workmen, yet at length he thought it advisable to purchase at once the forgiveness of the prelate and the secular seignory of Andelys, by surrendering to him, as an equivalent, the towns and lordships of Dieppe and Louviers, the land and forest of Alihermont, the land and lordship of Bouteilles, and the mills of Rouen. This exchange was regarded as so great a subject of triumph to the archbishop, that he caused the memory of it to be perpetuated by inscriptions upon crosses in various parts of Rouen, some of which remained as late as 1610, when Taillepied wrote his Recueil des Antiquitéz et Singularitéz de la Ville de Rouen. The following lines are given as one of these inscriptions in the Gallia Christiana[[10]]:
"Vicisti, Galtere, tui sunt signa triumphi
Deppa, Locoveris, Alacris-mons, Butila, molta,
Deppa maris portus, Alacris-mons locus amœnus,
Villa Locoveris, rus Butila, molta per urbem.
Hactenus hæc Regis Richardi jura fuere;
Hæc rex sancivit, hæc papa, tibique tuere[[11]]."
Nor was this the only memorial of the fact; for the advantages of the exchange were so generally recognized, that the name of Walter became proverbial; and to this day it is said in Normandy of a man who over-reaches another, "c'est un fin Gautier." It might be inferred from the terms of the bargain in which Dieppe merely appears as one of the items of the account, that it was then a place of little consequence; yet, one of the old chroniclers speaks of it at the time it was taken by the French under Philip Augustus, as
"portus famâ celeberrimus atque
Villa potens opibus."
These historians, however, of former days are not always the most accurate; but from this period the annals of the place are preserved, and at certain epochs it is far from unimportant in French history: as, when Talbot raised in 1442 the fortress called the Bastille, a defence so strong and in so well-chosen a situation, that even Vauban honored its memory by lamenting its destruction; when the inhabitants fought with the Flemings in the channel, in 1555; when Henry IVth, with an army of less than four thousand men, fled hither in 1589, as to his last place of refuge, winning the hearts of the people by his frank address:—"Mes amis, point de cérémonie, je ne demande que vos cœurs, bon pain, bon vin, et bon visage d'hôtes;" and when, as I have already mentioned, the town sustained from our fleet a bombardment of three days' duration, and was reduced by it to ashes.
For the excellence of its sailors, Dieppe has at all times been renowned: no less an authority than the President de Thou has pronounced them to be men, "penes quos præcipua rei nauticæ gloria semper fuit;" and they have proved their claims to this encomium, not only by having supplied to the navy of France the celebrated Abraham Du Quesne, the successful rival of the great Ruyter, but still more so by having taken the lead in expeditions to Florida[[12]]; by having established a colony for the promotion of the fur trade in Canada, if indeed they were not the original discoverers of that country; and by having been the first Christians who ever made a settlement on the coast of Senegal. This last-mentioned event took place, according to French writers, at as early a period as the XIVth century; and, though the establishment was not of long duration, its effects have been permanent; for it is owing to the consignments of ivory then made to Dieppe, that many of the inhabitants were induced to become workers in that substance; a trade which they preserve to the present time, and carry the art to such perfection that they have few rivals. This and the making of lace are the principal employments of such of the natives as are not engaged in the fishery. In the earlier ages of the Duchy, the inhabitants of the Pays de Caux found a more effectual and important employment in the salt-works which were then very numerous on the coast, but which have long since been suffered to fall into decay. Ancient charters, recorded in the Neustria Pia, trace these works on the coast of Dieppe, and at Bouteilles on the right of the valley of Arques, to as remote a period as 1027; and they at the same time prove the existence of a canal between Dieppe and Bouteilles, by which in 1390 vessels loaded with salt were wont to pass. But here, as in England, such works have been abandoned, from the greater facility of communication between distant places, and of obtaining salt by other means.
At present the only manufacture on the beach is that of kelp, for which a large quantity of the coarser sea-weeds is burned; but the fisheries, which are not carried on with equal energy in any other port of France, are the chief support of the place. The sailors of Dieppe were not confined to their own seas; for they used to pursue the cod fishery on the coast of Newfoundland with considerable success. The herring fishery however was a greater staple; and previously to the revolution, when alone a just estimate could be formed of such matters, the quantity of herrings caught by the boats belonging to Dieppe averaged more than eight thousand lasts a year, and realized above £100,000. This fishery is said to have been established here as early as the XIth century[[13]]. From sixty to eighty boats, each of about thirty tons and carrying fifteen men, were annually sent to the eastern coast of England about the end of August; and then, again, in the middle of October nearly double the quantity of vessels, but of a smaller size, were engaged in the same pursuit on their own shores, where the fish by this time repair. The mackerel fishery was an object of scarcely less importance than that of herrings, producing in general about one hundred and seventy thousand barrels annually. Great quantities of these fish are eaten salted and dried, in which state they afford a general article of food among the lower classes in Normandy. Surely this would be deserving of the attention and imitation of our merchants at home. During the war with England this branch of trade necessarily suffered; but Napoléon did every thing in his power to assist the town, by giving it peculiar advantages as to ships sailing under licences. He succeeded in his views; and, thus patronized, Dieppe flourished exceedingly, and the gains brought in by the privateers connected with the port, added not a little to its prosperity. Hence to this hour the inhabitants regret the peace, although the town cannot fail to be benefitted by the fresh impulse given to the fisheries, and the quantity of money circulated by the travellers who are continually passing. Napoléon intended also to bestow an additional boon upon the place. A canal had been projected many years ago, in the time of the Maréchal de Vauban, and was to have extended to Pontoise, through the fertile districts of Gournay and Neufchâtel, and to have communicated by different branches with the Seine and Oise. This plan, which had been forgotten during so many reigns, Napoléon determined to carry into effect, and the excavations were actually begun under his orders. But the events which succeeded his Russian campaign put a stop to this, as to all similar labors: the plan is now, however, again in agitation, and, if performed, Dieppe will soon become one of the most important ports in France.
By the revolution Dieppe was emancipated from the dominion of the Archbishop of Rouen, who, by virtue of the cession made by Richard Cœur de Lion, exercised a despotic sway, even until the dissolution of the ancien régime. His privileges were oppressive, and he had and made use of the right of imposing a variety of taxes, which extended even to the articles of provision imported either by land or sea. Yet it must be admitted that the progress of civilization had previously done much towards the removal of the most obnoxious of the abuses. The times, happily, no longer existed, when, as in the XIIth century, the prelate, with a degree of indecency scarcely to be credited, especially under an ecclesiastical government, did not scruple to convert the wages of sin into a source of revenue, as scandalous in its nature as it must have been contemptible in its amount, by exacting from every prostitute a weekly tax of a farthing, for liberty to exercise her profession[[14]].
Many uncouth and frivolous ecclesiastical rites and ceremonies of the middle ages, which good sense had banished from most other parts of France, where they once were common, still lingered in the archbishop's seignory. Thus, at no very remote period, it was customary on the Feast of Pentecost to cast burning flakes of tow from the vaulting of the church; this stage-trick being considered as a representation of the descent of the fiery tongues. The Virgin, the great idol of popery, was honored by a pageant, which was celebrated with extraordinary splendor; and as I must initiate you in the mysteries of Catholicism, I think you will be well pleased to receive a detailed account of it. The ceremony I consider as curiously illustrative of the manners of the rulers, of the ruled, and of the times; and I will only add, by way of preface, that it was instituted by the governor, Des Marêts, in 1443, in honor of the final expulsion of the English, and that he himself consented to be the first master of the Guild of the Assumption, under whose auspices and direction it was conducted.—About Midsummer the principal inhabitants used to assemble at the Hôtel de Ville, and there they selected the girl of the most exemplary character, to represent the Virgin Mary, and with her six other young women, to act the parts of the Daughters of Sion. The honor of figuring in this holy drama was greatly coveted; and the historian of Dieppe gravely assures us, that the earnestness felt on the occasion mainly contributed to the preservation of that purity of manners and that genuine piety, which subsisted in this town longer than in any other of France! But the election of the Virgin was not sufficient: a representative of St. Peter was also to be found among the clergy; and the laity were so far favored that they were permitted to furnish the eleven other apostles. This done, upon the fourteenth of August the Virgin was laid in a cradle of the form of a tomb, and was carried early in the morning, attended by her suite of either sex, to the church of St. Jacques; while before the door of the master of the guild was stretched a large carpet, embroidered with verses in letters of gold, setting forth his own good qualities, and his love for the holy Mary. Hither also, as soon as Laudes had been sung, the procession repaired from the church, and then they were joined by the governor of the town, the members of the guild, the municipal officers, and the clergy of the parish of St. Remi. Thus attended, they paraded the town, singing hymns, which were accompanied by a full band. The procession was increased by the great body of the inhabitants; and its impressiveness was still farther augmented by numbers of the youth of either sex, who assumed the garb and attributes of their patron saints, and mixed in the immediate train of the principal actors. They then again repaired to the church, where Te Deum was sung by the full choir, in commemoration of the victory over the English, and high mass was performed, and the Sacrament administered to the whole party. During the service, a scenic representation was given of the Assumption of the Virgin. A scaffolding was raised, reaching nearly to the top of the dome, and supporting an azure canopy intended to emulate the "spangled vault of heaven;" and about two feet below the summit of it appeared, seated on a splendid throne, an old man as the image of the Father Almighty, a representation equally absurd and impious, and which could alone be tolerated by the votaries of the worst superstitions of popery. On either side four pasteboard angels of the size of men floated in the air, and flapped their wings in cadence to the sounds of the organ; while above was suspended a large triangle, at whose corners were placed three smaller angels, who, at the intermission of each office, performed upon a set of little bells the hymn of "Ave Maria gratiâ Dei plena per Secula," &c. accompanied by a larger angel on each side with a trumpet. To complete this portion of the spectacle, two others, below the old man's feet, held tapers, which were lighted as the services began, and extinguished at their close; on which occasions the figures were made to express reluctance by turning quickly about; so that it required some dexterity to apply the extinguishers. At the commencement of the mass, two of the angels by the side of the Almighty descended to the foot of the altar, and, placing themselves by the tomb, in which a pasteboard figure of the Virgin had been substituted for her living representative, gently raised it to the feet of the Father. The image, as it mounted, from time to time lifted its head and extended its arms, as if conscious of the approaching beatitude, then, after having received the benediction and been encircled by another angel with a crown of glory, it gradually disappeared behind the clouds. At this instant a buffoon, who all the time had been playing his antics below, burst into an extravagant fit of joy; at one moment clapping his hands most violently, at the next stretching himself out as if dead. Finally, he ran up to the feet of the old man, and hid himself under his legs, so as to shew only his head. The people called him Grimaldi, an appellation that appears to have belonged to him by usage, and it is a singular coincidence that the surname of the noblest family of Genoa the Proud, thus assigned by the rude rabble of a sea-port to their buffoon, should belong of right to the sire and son, whose mops and mowes afford pastime to the upper gallery at Covent-Garden.
Thus did the pageant proceed in all its grotesque glory, and, while—
"These labor'd nothings in so strange a style
Amazed the unlearned, and made the learned smile,"
the children shouted aloud for their favorite Grimaldi; the priests, accompanied with bells, trumpets, and organs, thundered out the mass; the pious were loud in their exclamations of rapture at the devotion of the Virgin; and the whole church was filled with "un non so che di rauco ed indistinto".—But I have told you enough of this foolish story, of which it were well if the folly had been the worst. The sequel was in the same taste and style, and ended with the euthanasia of all similar representations, a hearty dinner.
Footnotes:
[4] Description de la Haute Normandie, I. p. 130.
[5] Histoire de Dieppe, II. p. 86.]
[6] Essals sur le Département de la Seine Inférieure, I. p. 119.
[7] Histoire de Dieppe, I. p. 1.
[8] Another author, mentioned by the Abbé Fontenu, in the Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions, X. p. 413, carries the antiquity of the place still eight centuries higher, representing it as the Portus Ictius, whence Julius Cæsar sailed for Britain.
[9] Description de la Haute Normandie, I. p. 125.
[10] Vol. XI. p. 55.
[11] The deed itself under which this exchange was made is also preserved in Duchesne's Scriptores Normanni, and in the Gallia Christiana, XI. Instr. p. 27, where it is entitled "Celebris commutatio facta inter Richardum I, regem Angliæ et Walterium Archiepisc. Rotomagensem." It is worth remarking, in illustration of the feudal rights and customs, how much importance is attached in this instrument to the mills and the seignorage for grinding: the king expressly stipulates that every body "tam milites quàm clerici, et omnes homines, tam de feodis militum quàm de prebendis, sequentur molendina de Andeli, sicut consueverunt et debent, et moltura erit nostra. Archiepiscopus autem et homines sui de Fraxinis (a manor specially reserved,) molent ubi idem Archiepiscopus volet, et si voluerit molere apud Andeli, dabunt molturas suas, sicut alii ibidem molentes. In escambium autem ... concessimus ... omnia molendina quæ nos habuimus Rotomagi, quando hæc permutatio facta fuit, integrè cum omni sequelâ et molturâ suâ, sine aliquo retinemento eorum quæ ad molendinam pertinent vel ad molturam, et cum omnibus libertatibus et liberis consuetudinibus quas solent et debent habere. Nec alicui alii licebit molendinum facere ibidem ad detrimentum prædictorum molendinorum; et debet Archiepiscopus solvere eleemosinas antiquitùs statutas de iisdem molendinis."
[12] A very copious and interesting account of the nautical discoveries made by the inhabitants of Dieppe, and of their merits as sailors, is given by Goube, in his Histoire du Duché de Normandie, III, p. 172-178.
[13] Goube, Histoire de Normandie, III, p. 170.
[14] Noel, Essais sur le Département de la Seine Inférieure, I. p. 194.