However it may have been, the church was once more destroyed, and, as was happening all over Italy and France at this period, it was destroyed only to rise from its ashes more beautiful than ever. So Angers, Poitiers, Beauvais, Cambrai, Rouen were rebuilt almost as soon as burnt, in the enthusiastic rivalry of the Christian builders of the day. ‘Humanity,’ in the fine phrase of Raoul Glaber, ‘rose from its long agony and set itself to build, and to shake off the rags of its old age in order to put on the white robe of the churches.’
The great bishop with whose name the new Cathedral at Chartres was to be indissolubly connected, the Fulbert of Fulbert’s Cathedral, had been the favourite pupil of Gerbert of Reims and had practised medicine in the Monastery of S. Père, where that art was long held in high honour. But Fulbert was more than a mere doctor. He was a poet, a mathematician, a theologian, grammarian and skilful musician as well. When, therefore, he became the head of the School of Chartres (from which a few years later John, called the Deaf, was to issue, doctor of Henry I. and chief of the sect of Nominalists, whose pupil was Rosselin, whose pupil Abeilard) scholars flocked from England, Germany, Denmark and all parts of France to listen to the teachings of the French Socrates, and to receive from his eloquent lips the precepts of wisdom and the counsel of friendship. For his knowledge was immense and his learning encyclopædic, ranging from the minutest details of the exact sciences to the most daring speculations of metaphysics. Fulbert, we are told, like a modern Plato, would often withdraw to a garden near the bishop’s palace, watered by the clear stream (it was clear in those days), and there, surrounded by his chosen pupils, expound with mingled sweetness and force the tenets of philosophy and the doctrines of faith. ‘The teacher of philosophers, the marvel of his age, the sun whose rays gave life,’ his pupil Adelmann called him. And among the philosophers he taught, and the rare flowers of intellect which in this age of brute force expanded beneath the quickening rays of his mind, Adelmann enumerates Lanfranc, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Walter of Burgundy, Lambert and Engelbert of Paris and Orléans, Hildier, wise as Socrates and learned as Pythagoras, and Sigo, the musician of the delicate ear. Fulbert’s letters,[37] which place him among the most interesting historians of this obscure period, reveal him as a theologian firm and decided, as a statesman eager to enforce order and to secure the administration of justice, as a man broad-minded, charming, enthusiastic, humane.
Inspired by a mysterious voice which bade him ‘build a sanctuary worthy of his filial love and the divine majesty,’ Fulbert now set about procuring funds to build first a veritable crypt, and then above it the new Cathedral, adopting, however, the general plan of the church left by his predecessor in order to make use of the enormous existing foundations.[38] The subterranean aspect of the old church, built about the grottoes and heaped round by the rapid deposit of rubbish which continually raised the soil of mediæval towns, would naturally suggest this scheme. But to carry it out funds beyond the ordinary were needed.
Fortunately Fulbert was no ordinary beggar. Not only did he know how to use the usual means of encouraging gifts, in money and in kind, from the clergy and people of the diocese by holding special assemblies on the site of the proposed church, and by sermons which promised heavenly rewards for those who took part in the building, but he used his connections with the great world and his power of letter-writing to the best advantage.
He wrote first of all to ‘his beloved Lord,’ the ‘good King Robert,’ in whom the historian sees more of a monk than of a sovereign.
‘All our resources fail us for the rebuilding of our church, and a great necessity is upon us. Come then to our aid, O holy father; strengthen our weakness and succour our distress to the end that God may reward your soul with all blessings.’
And doubtless the ‘father of religious architecture’ responded generously to this eloquent appeal from his former teacher.
Meanwhile every belfry in the diocese attested by its silence the disaster of the church and the sorrow of its bishop. ‘On account of the disaster,’ he writes, ‘which has befallen my church, I wish to make known my profound grief to all. In consequence I have commanded that all the bells which are wont to ring with joy and gladness shall attest henceforth by their silence my bitter sadness.’
Fulbert wrote next to his most beloved and pious Duke of Aquitaine, and he received handsome annual subscriptions from him whilst the Cathedral was a-building. ‘Your marvellous and inexhaustible charity,’ writes the bishop, ‘is pleased to overwhelm me with many gifts which I do not deserve. I should blush to receive your offerings were I not sure that you will be magnificently rewarded hereafter.’
Eudes II., Count of Chartres and Blois, was, before he met his death in the Battle of Bar-le-Duc, a generous contributor. That was to be expected from so rich a seigneur for the restoration of the principal church of his own county and town, but deeply was Fulbert touched by the receipt of a contribution from Cnut, King of Denmark and England, who, as William of Malmesbury records, ‘sent many sums to the churches across the seas, and chiefly enriched that of Chartres, where flourished Fulbert, renowned for his holiness and philosophy.’