“With regard to that with which it is your will to upbraid me, that I prefer the houses of Tours, sordid with smoke, to the gilded citadels of the Romans, I know that your prudence has read that elogium of Solomon’s, ‘it is better to dwell in a corner of the house-top, than with a brawling woman in a wide house’.[198]
“And, if I may be pardoned for saying it, the sword hurts the eyes more than smoke does. For Tours, content in its smoky houses, by the gift of God through the providence of your goodness dwells in peace. But Rome, which is given up to fraternal strife, ceases not to hold the implanted venom of dissension, and now compels the power of your venerated dignity to hasten from the sweet dwellings of Germany to restrain this pernicious plague.”
From the foundation of the School of Tours, the students paid fees. The great endowments of the abbey, much enlarged by Karl in 774 when he granted to Abbat Wulfhard a large amount of property in the neighbourhood of Pavia, do not appear to have been applied to the maintenance of the School. A change was made about forty years after Alcuin, and then the education of the school was given free. We learn that after Alcuin’s death the school continued to flourish under Abbats Wulfhard II, Fridugisus, and Adalard, the masters of the school receiving stipends from the fees of the students. This “mercantile” arrangement was hateful to Abbat Adalard, and the change came in his time, and by his order; but it was not financed from the regular income of the abbey. The master at the time was Amalric, who afterwards became Archbishop of Tours, dying in 855. He gave to the abbey from his own private property certain funds for the payment of the teachers, and in August, 841, it was decreed that the schooling should be free. Amalric had many students under his tuition who rose to important positions, of whom Paul the Archbishop of Rouen, and Joseph the Chancellor of Aquitaine, are specially mentioned. He was a good example of the “school master bishops” with whom the Church of England was well stocked a generation ago.
Plate I
The Abbey Church of St. Martin of Tours, before the pillage. To face p. 210.
Plate II
St. Martin’s, Tours; the Horloge. To face p. 211.
The church of St. Martin, so magnificent in the times of the historian Archbishop Gregory of Tours (573-94), became more and more magnificent after several destructions by fire. It had reached its greatest splendour when it was pillaged by the Huguenots. Tours claims to have originated the name of those destructive people, who in the beginning used to steal out for secret meetings at night beyond the walls of the city, flitting about like the local bogey le roi Hugon.[199] And Tours possesses to this day in the name of one of its streets a reminiscence of the early hunting down of the Huguenots as a highly enjoyable form of the chasse aux renards. When their time came, they wreaked a savage revenge, and practically destroyed the noble Abbey Church. A reproduction of its appearance in the perfection of symmetry has been prepared from plans and drawings, and is shown in [Plate I]. The only remains left by the Revolution and by the necessity for new streets are the south-west tower, called of St. Martin,[200] or of the Horloge, and a tower of the north transept, called of Charlemagne.[201] They are of 12th-century foundation, but the latter has a capital of earlier date still clinging to it. Louis XI had surrounded the shrine of St. Martin with a rich and very massive gallery of solid silver, but his needy successor Francis was beforehand with the Huguenots and coined it into crown pieces.