Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine

by Edward A. Freeman

1868

It is sometimes curious to see how far the popular fame of buildings is from answering either to their architectural merit or to their historic interest. Take, for instance, the two cathedrals of Chartres and Le Mans, two cities placed within no very great distance of one another, on one of the great French lines of railway, that which leads from Paris to Brest. Chartres is a name which is familiar to every one; its cathedral is counted among the great churches of Christendom; men speak of it in the same breath with Amiens and Ely. Le Mans, on the other hand, is scarcely known; we suspect that many fairly informed persons hardly know where the city itself is; the cathedral is hardly ever spoken of, and, we believe, is scarcely at all known, except to professed architectural students. Yet, except that Chartres is nearer Paris of the two, one is as accessible as the other; the historical associations of Chartres, as far at least as Englishmen are concerned, certainly cannot be compared to those of Le Mans; there is nothing at Chartres to set against the early military and domestic antiquities of Le Mans; the secondary churches of Le Mans distinctly surpass those of Chartres; though between the two cathedral churches the controversy might be more equally waged. Each has great and diverse merits; but for our own part, we have little hesitation in preferring Le Mans even as a work of architecture; that it is a building of higher historic interest there can be no doubt whatever.

Both cities belong to a class of which we have few or none in England. A Celtic hill-fort, crowning a height rising steeply from a river-side, has grown into a Roman city, and the Roman city has remained to our own times the local capital, alike civil and ecclesiastical. It would be hardly possible to find a single town in England whose history has run the same course—a course which is by no means peculiar to Chartres and Le Mans, but which they share with many other cities in all parts of Gaul. And Le Mans especially has a local history of unusual interest, and that history is written with unusual clearness on the site and the earliest remains of the town. But on that history we shall not at present enlarge. Our present object is to compare the churches of the two towns, especially the two great cathedrals, which, as usual, stand within the earliest enclosure, and therefore upon the highest ground in their respective cities.

Two or three events connect the cathedral of Chartres with general and with English history. The first church of which any part survives is that raised by Fulbert, the famous Bishop of Chartres in the early part of the eleventh century, and the most diligent letter-writer of the time. To this work, of which a vast crypt still remains, our great Cnut was a benefactor. The dignity of the Lord of all Northern Europe has so deeply impressed the writer of Murray's Handbook that he cuts him into two, and speaks of the contributions of the Kings of England, France, and Denmark. In the latter part of the next century, John of Salisbury, so famous in the great struggle between Henry and Thomas, held the Bishopric of Chartres. It was the spires of Chartres to which Edward the Third stretched forth his hands when his heart smote him at the sound of the thunder, and he vowed to refuse no honourable terms of peace. In was in this cathedral that Henry of Navarre received the crown of France, a new holy oil of Marmoutiers being extemporized to supply the place of the inaccessible holy oil of Rheims. The history of the city and county in earlier times is closely mixed up with those of France, Normandy, Anjou, and Champagne. The counts of Chartres and Blois in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries were men of importance in their day, and one of them directly connected himself with England by a memorable marriage. Chartres was long the dwelling-place of the excellent Adela, the daughter of the Great William, the mother of King Stephen and of the famous Bishop Henry of Winchester. But, while Chartres was thus closely, though indirectly, connected with our history, it never, like Le Mans, actually formed a part of the dominions of a common sovereign with England and Normandy.

The cathedrals of Chartres and Le Mans are about as unlike as any two great mediæval churches well can be. Well nigh the only point of likeness is that each possesses a magnificent east end of the thirteenth century, of the usual French plan, with the apse, the surrounding chapels, the complicated system of flying buttresses. But at Chartres this east end is part of a whole. The crypt still witnesses to the days of Fulbert, the lower stages of the western towers to those of Adela and to those of John of Salisbury; but all the rest of the church, including of course all the interior, is of an uniform style and design. The church throughout follows the usual type of great French churches; the eye accustomed to the buildings of England or Normandy misses the central towers of Lincoln or of Saint Ouen's, but Chartres is not in England or in Normandy, but in France, and its church is built accordingly. A fairer question of taste is raised by the unequal spires of the west front—a French feature again, but occasionally extending into Normandy and England, as at Rouen, Llandaff, Lynn, and Canterbury as it was. But it is only in so long and varied a front as that of Rouen Cathedral that it is at all satisfactory. At Chartres the great south spire is modern and of iron, but we believe it very well reproduces the outline of the elder one of wood, and it certainly comes down heavily and awkwardly upon the towers and upon the roof of the church. The upper part of the north tower is frittered away with work of a later style. Still, allowing for the diversity of the towers, which of course does not appear inside, Chartres is a whole—a consistent, harmonious whole, of great, though we cannot think of first-rate, excellence. How does such a whole stand as compared with a building of strange, and at first sight, unintelligible outline, formed by the juxtaposition of two parts, each of admirable merit in itself, but which startle by their absolute contrast in every way? Chartres was made, Le Mans eminently grew; and different minds will be differently inclined in the comparison between a single harmonious work of art and a union of two buildings widely differing in date, style, and proportion. But, on the other hand, it must be said that nothing at Chartres equals the parts of Le Mans taken separately, and that, in the inside at least, the incongruity of Le Mans is far from being felt in the unpleasant way that might have been looked for.

Le Mans Cathedral, N.W.

The general effect of Le Mans Cathedral, as seen from any point but the east, is certainly perplexing. From the east indeed, from the open place below the church and the Roman wall, once a marsh, the apse, with its flying buttresses and surrounding chapels, rises in a grandeur before which Chartres is absolutely dwarfed, and which gives Amiens itself a very formidable rival. We here see the main source of our difficulties, namely that the church has but a single tower, and that at the end of the south transept. Viewed from any other point—looking up, for instance, at the old town from the other side of the river—what one sees is a lofty body with a tower at one end of it, which one is inclined rashly to assume to be the nave, with a western tower, and a lower body joining it at right angles. This last is the real nave of the church, and a magnificent building it is. The truth is that, at Le Mans, as in various other churches in France, the Gothic builders, from the thirteenth century onwards, designed a complete rebuilding. They began at the east, they rebuilt the choir and transepts, but they never got any further, so that the ancient nave remains. So it is at Bordeaux and Toulouse; so it is at Beauvais, where the small but precious fragment of early work, which looks like an excrescence against the gigantic transept—the Basse Œuvre, as it is locally called—is really the ancient nave—.[63] So it is in a certain sense at Limoges, where a gap intervenes between the finished choir and transept and the western tower of the original design. But in none of these cases, as far as we can see, can the elder nave have at all approached the grandeur of the noble work at Le Mans. It is a Romanesque building of the eleventh century, reconstructed in the gorgeous style which prevailed towards the end of the twelfth. The outer walls, except in the clerestory, are of the former date, and the contrast in the masonry is very striking. Within, the whole has been recast in the later form of Romanesque, but it has not been wholly rebuilt. Columns with rich and highly classical capitals, supporting arches which are just pointed, have been inserted under the massive round arches of the original church, but the arches are still there and visible. The triforium and clerestory have been wholly reconstructed, or so thoroughly disguised that the old work does not appear. This nave is one of those buildings which, in the infancy of vaulting, their builders found it convenient to vault with one bay of vaulting over two bays of arcade, as in the choir of Boxgrove in the next century. The result is that the piers are alternately columnar and clustered. Setting aside a few of the very grandest buildings of the style—as one would hardly compare this nave with Peterborough, Ely, or Saint Stephen's—this Romanesque nave of Le Mans is one of the finest works of its kind to be found anywhere. And its juxtaposition with the superb Gothic choir is less incongruous than might have been looked for. The only fault is that, as it now stands, the nave ends abruptly to the east with a mere vaulting rib, without any proper choir-arch. But this fault is fully balanced by the glorious view of the choir thus given to the whole church. That any one could compare the inside of Chartres with the inside of Le Mans, thus seen, seems incredible. The height of Le Mans is said to be a few feet greater than that of Chartres. It looks half as high again. At Chartres the height is lost through the great width, and through the use of a low spring for the vaulting arch. At Le Mans everything soars as only a Gothic building, and pre-eminently a French Gothic building, can soar. The pillars, of enormous height, support the clerestory without a triforium. But the effect of the triforium is there still. The aisles are double, and the inner range—itself of the height of the nave of Wells and Exeter—is furnished with a complete triforium and clerestory, which, seen between the pillars of the apses, allow the sort of break which the triforium gives to be combined with the grand effect of the full unbroken columns. Something of the same kind is found at Bourges, and, on a much smaller scale, at Coutances. The effect of the arrangement comes out in perfection at Le Mans. Altogether, little as the building seems to be known, the thirteenth-century work at Le Mans undoubtedly entitles it to rank among the noblest churches of the middle ages. One point more on the Romanesque church of Le Mans. The original design embraced two towers at the end of the transept, like Exeter, Ottery, and seemingly Saint Martin's at Tours. These towers were destroyed by order of William Rufus, who charged the Bishop Hildebert with having used them to shoot at the neighbouring castle.[64] The north tower has never been rebuilt; its ruins are there to this day. The southern tower was again rebuilt at the end of the twelfth century and finished in the fifteenth. This is surely as speaking a bit of architectural history as one often finds.

Interior of Le Mans Cathedral