If one would enjoy, without critical comparison, the Gothic of Normandy, her churches should be visited before the taste has become sensitized by loiterings in the Ile-de-France. In that classic region of the national art is found a simplicity, a purity, a restraint, a something of imaginative genius that makes of its work the touchstone by which all other manifestations of Gothic are judged. Of the Norman churches, the Trinité, at Fécamp, is most closely related to the Primary Gothic work of the royal domain. Its architect must certainly have come from the Ile-de-France. Monks trained in the Celtic rule by St. Wandrille founded Fécamp, which was wrecked by Norse pirates in 876. William Longsword, the first duke’s son, built his palace here, and his son, Richard I the Fearless (d. 996), began a new monastery. In his will Richard ordered: “Bury not my body within the church, but deposit it on the outside, immediately under the eaves, that the dripping of the rain from the holy roof may wash my bones as I lie and may cleanse them of the spots of impurity contracted during a negligent and neglected life.” He desired that on every Friday a sarcophagus be filled with wheat and grain for the poor. His son, Richard II the Good (d. 1020), finished Fécamp abbatial, and was laid to rest beside his father. The dukes of Rollo’s line especially favored Fécamp, which held a front rank among Normandy’s institutions, and was the richest of her monasteries down to the Revolution. Henry Plantagenet presented Fécamp town to the monastery.
After Duke Richard the Good had brought that man of administrative genius, William of Volpiano, into his duchy to reorganize its spiritual life, architectural activities took on new vigor. William himself directed the construction of Bernay’s[329] church; the abbatial of Mont-Saint-Michel rose when he reformed that house; and the church of Jumièges followed immediately after his reformation there. The Blessed William, in his thirst for souls, used to loiter at the crossroads to gather in the stricken of body or spirit. He passed away in Fécamp in 1031, and his ashes are still preserved in a chapel of the present Gothic abbatial. In 1034, in the Romanesque Trinité, Robert the Magnificent gathered the chief men of Normandy to have them swear allegiance to his sturdy little bastard son of seven, who was to be known in history as William the Conqueror, after which Duke Robert started on his pilgrimage to the East, from which he was never to return. The abbey church of Fécamp long consisted of the nave begun by Richard I, and a choir built by Abbot Guillaume de Ros (1082-1108), under whose rule the Trinité won the admiration of Europe. He is said to have introduced into Normandy the ambulatory and its radiating chapels. Two of the radial chapels which he constructed at Fécamp have survived. While they were building, there lived in the Trinité convent, as prior, Herbert de Lozinga, who, obtaining the bishopric of Norwich, erected on the Norfolk downs a stately Norman cathedral (1096-1119). Abbot Guillaume de Ros carried out the instructions of Richard I to give a loaf of bread to every beggar asking it, and when Fécamp was dissolved at the Revolution its abbot was distributing daily some twelve thousand free loaves of bread.
In 1169 fire wrecked the Romanesque Trinité, whereupon the present Gothic edifice was begun immediately, and in it two of the groin-vaulted chapels from the choir of Guillaume de Ros were incorporated. Abbot Henri de Soullay (1139-87) built the Primary Gothic choir, transept, and half of the nave. After the fifth bay of the nave a new architect took up the work, as is shown by differences in the pier profiles, but the cessation of activities must have been of short duration, as the church is homogeneous. The nave was finished under Abbot Raoul d’Argence (1190-1220), who organized Normandy’s first literary academy—a confraternity of jongleurs. Its character was more Norman than the choir, though regional traits had early appeared in the turrets at the birth of the apse and the square central lantern.
To increase the impression of length in the nave its side walls were marked by double the number of arcades that divide the middle church from the aisles. This was accomplished by introducing a fifth rib into each vault section of those side corridors, which rib fell on a shaft engaged in the side walls. Like the minsters of England, Fécamp is more remarkable in its length than in its height.
Abbot Thomas de Saint-Benoît (1297-1307) decided to suppress the deep gallery over the choir’s ambulatory, making the chapels that open on the curving aisle of exceptional height. He changed the southern aisle, giving it a coldly elegant Rayonnant aspect, but happily not that to the north, or we would have lost the two interesting Romanesque chapels of Abbot Guillaume de Ros. Some of Fécamp’s later abbots were Clement VI, builder of the palace of the popes at Avignon and of the Chaise Dieu in the mountains of Auvergne, and an abbot of the patriotic Estouteville family, who was driven out by the English when Fécamp was besieged in 1415. The tool who succeeded him sat in judgment on Jeanne d’Arc.
The abbot of Fécamp during the transitional Flamboyant Renaissance day was Cardinal Antoine Boyer (1492-1519), a Mæcenas who adorned his beautiful church with Italian marbles. He had sculptured, in the same studio at Genoa that provided Louis XII with the Orléans tombs for St. Denis, an Entombment more spectacular in character than the famous one at Solesmes. Girolamo Viscardo made for him a tabernacle (for the choir’s procession path), after the style of Mino da Fiesole. The lovely marble screens that close the side chapels are due to this generous prelate. For him Jacques Le Roux, the noted architect of Rouen, lengthened the Lady chapel. The only later change of importance in the Trinité was the erection of its neo-classic façade.
THE GOTHIC ABBATIAL AT EU[330]
La Nature a bien des manières de sourire. La Normandie est le plus beau sourire de la nature temperée.—O. Reclus.
The tutelary of Eu is St. Laurence O’Toole, archbishop of Dublin, son of a prince in Leinster, an active continuer of the reforms begun by St. Malachy of Armagh, who died in St. Bernard’s arms at Clairvaux. St. Laurence had crossed the Channel to plead with Henry Plantagenet for certain of his flock in disgrace (1180). Arriving at Eu’s convent, then belonging to the congregation of St. Victor, he felt a premonition of his approaching death, and exclaimed, as he crossed the threshold, “Here is my abode of rest forever.” He was worn out in the struggle to uphold the weak against the strong in those difficult years of the Anglo-Norman seizure of the eastern coast of Ireland. As his end drew near a monk suggested that he make his testament. “I thank God that I have nothing to bequeath,” he said.
So impressive was the death of Archbishop Laurence in Eu monastery that the little people of the Lord soon began to pray beside his tomb. When the monks reconstructed their church they placed the saintly man’s relics in the new crypt. From 1186 to 1226 the choir, transept, and one bay of the nave were built without interruption, in a Gothic more of the Ile-de-France than regional, though the placing of towers between transept and choir and the central lantern followed the Norman tradition.