207. HOSPITAL AT TONNERRE. SECTION OF THE GREAT HALL
Several hospitals of the Gothic period still exist. That of St. John at Angers is one of the most remarkable. It comprises a great hall, divided into three aisles, and vaulted on intersecting arches, and a chapel dating from the close of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century. The fine barn at Angers is of the same period; the plan and details of construction are very curious, and resemble those of the barns and granaries already described.
The Hôtel Dieu of Chartres dates from about the same period.
The hospital of Ourscamps, near Noyon, is very similar as to the scheme of construction which seems to have been one generally adopted by the religious architects of the twelfth, and more notably of the thirteenth century. The grandiose proportions of the vast building recall the great vaulted halls of contemporary abbeys, such as those of St. Jean des Vignes at Soissons, and of the merveille at Mont St. Michel. Certain individual features characterise it as a hospice specially designed for the sick, the poor, and pilgrims.
The Hospice of Tonnerre appears to have been rebuilt in the fourteenth century. The vast design is very impressively carried out. The great hall, over 60 feet wide by some 300 long, is covered with an open timber roof, boarded in so as to form a semi-circular vault, which is singularly effective.
The internal arrangements are very ingenious. A wooden gallery in the half-story commanded a view into each unceiled cubicle, by means of which it was possible to keep constant watch over the patients without disturbing them.
The hospital of Beaune has been so often described as to call for little comment. The painted timber vault of the great hall seems to have been imitated from that of Tonnerre. Its distinctive character has unfortunately been destroyed by the construction of a ceiling, the joists of which rest on the tie-beams of the original skeleton. But the inner court is intact, with the arcade and well and wash-house so familiar from descriptions and illustrations. Another picturesque and often described feature is the great roof on the south side, with its double row of dormer windows surmounted by a rich ornamentation of hammered lead.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the practice of vaulting the great halls of hospitals with stone was abandoned. It became usual in France and in Flanders to cover the vast aisles with timber roofs, the boarded vaults of which were either pointed or barrel-shaped.
The term maladrerie was applied to the small lazar-houses, numbers of which were built in France in the neighbourhood of abbeys or of priories remote from towns and great religious centres.
The Maladrerie du Tortoir, not far from Laon, on the Route de la Fère, is a type of such rural hospitals. Both in plan and in the details of construction it recalls the hospital of Tonnerre, more especially in the ingenious arrangement of the interior.