Close above the church we take a road up the hill-side. It is well to turn presently, to take in the strange grouping of the tower and the tall choir, as seen from a point a little above them. But our object now is that which is historically the central, physically the loftiest, point at Beaumont, the castle on the Bellus Mons itself. We soon begin to see fragments of masonry rising above us on the left hand. Here, then, is the castle; and so in a sense it is. That is, it is part of its works, within its precincts; but it is not the head work of all. We go on a little further, and we see signs of mound and ditch plainly enough. But we do not take in their full grandeur, till we are kindly admitted within the gate of one of the small holdings into which the site of the fortress of Roger's rearing is now cut up. Then we see, indeed, why it was that "Rogerius de Vetulis" was changed into "Rogerius de Bello Monte."
It is, indeed, a "bellus mons" in the sense of commanding a wide and pleasant outlook. The town and church of Beaumont, from some points the abbey close below, the wide vale of the Rille and the hills beyond, make up a cheerful landscape. But if by the "bellus mons" we were to understand a fair natural hill, we should be led astray. The actual site of Roger's keep is neither a natural hill nor an artificial mound. It is a piece of the natural hill artificially cut off from the general mass. The founder chose a point of the hill-side which suited his objects. Its southern face, towards the open country, was steep enough for purposes of defence; for the rest, he cut off the piece of ground that was to be fortified by a gigantic ditch in the form of a horse-shoe. It is a ditch indeed, one that gladdens the eye that is looking out for such things. There is not so much of it, but what there is seems as grand as anything at Arques or Old Sarum. Lilybæum stands apart; Roger must have had plenty of labour at his command; but he had not, like the engineers of Carthage, to dig through the solid rock. It is a ditch to look down on from above, and also to walk along in its depth, and to look up on each side. The ground is not absolutely open all round; some obstructions of farm-buildings, and the like, hinder one from stepping out the horse-shoe quite as far as it goes; but the top of the mound—if mound is the right word—is perfectly free. There are fragments of masonry left everywhere, but there is no continuous wall anywhere, nor any scrap of detail by which we could fix a date. Still, enough is left for all purposes of historical association, enough to show in what kind of a place Roger of Les Vieilles fixed his home. It is not exactly an eagle's nest; for that kind of dwelling Normandy supplies fewer opportunities than some other lands. But it comes much more nearly to an eagle's nest than the home of any lord of Laigle who dwelled at Laigle. The exact ground-plan Mr. Clark, and few besides Mr. Clark, could make out. But without making out the exact ground-plan, we learn enough to teach us not a little about both Roger's Beaumont and Beaumont's Roger.
Was the lord of Beaumont-le-Roger entitled to a sainte chapelle in his castle? Perhaps he might seem to be so when he was also Count of Meulan and Earl of Leicester. Perhaps it might seem so still more when Beaumont had come into the hands of French kings, and had begun to be granted out as a comté-pairie for their sons. But, seemingly before that time, which did not come till the fourteenth century, a building arose which is not exactly a sainte chapelle within the castle, but which is very near to the castle, and which has very much the air of a sainte chapelle. When we speak of a sainte chapelle we, of course, mean a sainte chapelle anywhere, whether at Riom, Paris, or anywhere else. This building is the abbey church of Beaumont, which stands just below the castle on the hill-side, a building once evidently of remarkable beauty. Perhaps the most notable feature about it is the ascent from the road below to the abbey buildings, a covered passage lighted by large early Geometrical windows. We make our way up and presently reach the abbey itself. It is plain that on this narrow ledge on the hill-side it was no more possible than it was on the steep of Saint Michael's Mount to put the several buildings of the monastery in their accustomed relation to the church and to one another. Too much has perished for any one but a specialist in monastic arrangements to attempt to spell out the buildings of the monastery in detail; but it seems that a good deal lay to the westward of the church which in ordinary cases would have been placed to the north or south. The church is but a fragment; the north and east walls are there, and from them we can reconstruct it. "East Wall" is here a phrase that may be used; for we are a little amazed to find that the church had no apse, but an English-looking flat end. The large east window has lost its tracery, which should have been something of the pattern of the Angels' Choir at Lincoln. The whole of the work that remains is of the best French Early Gothic. Seen from below, from the bridge across the Rille at no great distance, there is something wonderfully striking in this single side of the church, an inside seen from outside, with its sheltered windows and vaulting-shafts, standing against the side of the castle-hill. How was it when both abbey and castle were perfect? As it is, the abbey is the more prominent of the two. We can see at least a piece of it, while we have to guess at the castle; none of its fragments stand out at any distance. Yet, even looking thus, the abbey seems something subordinate, something dependent; it seems crowded into an unnatural position in order to be an appendage to something else. The parish church stands out boldly enough. It has a right to do so; it came in the order of nature. It proclaims the separate being of the town of Beaumont. The town of Beaumont doubtless sprang up because of the presence of the castle; but it sprang up by an independent growth; it was not the personal creation of any of its lords. The abbey, on the other hand, placed on so strange a site, was clearly the personal device of its own founder, who may have felt a number of very different feelings gratified, as he saw an abbey of his own making at his feet.
The result is an abbatial church unlike all other abbatial churches. The abbey of Beaumont is very beautiful, while the abbey of Almenèches is very ugly; yet Almenèches comes one degree nearer than Beaumont to one's ordinary notion of an abbey church. The abbey of Beaumont must have been a lovely chapel, but only a chapel. If it stood in its perfect state at Caen, among that wonderful group of noble minsters and great parish churches, it would strike us as a beautiful, but a small thing. This is not the usual position of the church of an abbey. It was, in fact, a pious and artistic fancy; while not, in strictness of description, a sainte chapelle or other chapel of a castle, it has all the effect of being such. Or in its position against the hill-side, it may call up the memory of Brantôme far away in Périgord;[60] it has nothing in common with a typical abbey church like Saint-Evroul, except the accident of being much of the same date and style.
One building still remains to be noticed in the Beaumont of Roger. That is the church of his earliest home at Les Vieilles. It had, or was meant to have, a pretty thirteenth-century tower. But the church is a mere fragment, mutilated, desecrated, shut up. A decently kept ruin is far less offensive than a church in such a state as this. But the thought again comes, as at Saint-Evroul, how short a time has passed since the parish church of Les Vieilles and the abbey church of Beaumont were both living things. No man now alive can remember them such; but not so many years back many could. In 1861 we talked with one who remembered the abbey church of Bernay in the full extent of its choir and Lady-chapel. We go back after thirty years to find the church of the Conqueror's grandmother in other things much as it was, still desecrated, but with no more of actual destruction. But we find that the one genuine Roman shaft that was there, one of the very few such north of Loire, has either perished or has been so covered up with timber framework as to be quite out of sight. And one later, but still early capital, had been knocked away to make a convenient resting-place for a wooden beam. One would think that such a building as this, even if it cannot be restored to divine worship, might at least be made monument historique and taken care of. Only then the State would some day come and take away every real shaft and every real capital, and put imitation shafts and capitals in their stead. And that might be even worse than the wooden beams.
JUBLAINS
1876
We know not how far the name of Silchester may be known among Frenchmen, but we suspect that the name of Jublains is very little known among Englishmen. The two places certainly very nearly answer to one another in the two countries. Both alike are buried Roman towns whose sites had been forsaken, or occupied only by small villages; both have supplied modern inquirers with endless stores both of walls and foundations and of movable relics; and the two spots further agree in this, that both at Silchester and at Jublains the history of the place has to be made out from the place itself; all that we can do is to make out the Roman names; we have no record of the history of either.[61] The names which the two places now bear respectively illustrate the rules of French and English nomenclature. Silchester proclaims itself by its English name to have been a Roman castrum, but it keeps no trace of its Roman name of Calleva. But Næodunum of the Diablintes follows the same rule as Lutetia of the Parisii. The old name of the town itself is forgotten, but the name of the tribe still lives. The case is not quite so clear as that of Paris; some unlucky etymologists have seen in the name Jublains traces of Jules and of bains; but a moment's thought will show that the name is a natural corruption of Diablintes. The name is spelled several ways, of which Jublains is now the one in vogue; but another form, Jublent, better brings out its origin. As for the two places themselves, Jublains and Silchester, each of them has its points in which it surpasses the other. At Silchester there is the town-wall, nearly perfect throughout the whole of its circuit. Jublains fails here; but, on the other hand, Silchester has no one object to set against the magnificent remains of the fortress or citadel, the traditional camp of Cæsar. Silchester again has the great advantage of being systematically and skilfully dug out, while Jublains has been examined only piecemeal. This again illustrates the difference between the state of ownership in England and in France. Silchester is at the command of a single will, which happily is in the present generation wisely guided. Jublains must fare as may seem good to a multitude of separate wills, of which it is too much to expect that all will at any time be wisely guided. But it is worth while to remember on the other hand that a single foolish Duke may easily do more mischief than several wise Dukes can do good, and that out of the many owners of Jublains, if we cannot expect all at any time to be wise, there is a fair chance that at no moment will every one of them be foolish.