The Cathedral began as a little church built over a grotto where the early missionaries from Rome had discovered a statue of the Virgin. It was venerated under the name Notre Dame-de-Sous-Terre. Quirinus, the Roman Governor of the town, then called Autricum, in the time of the Emperor Claudius put a number of the Early Christians to the sword, and had their bodies thrown into a well called the Puits de Saints Forts. This interesting link with Gallo-Roman Chartres was lost in the seventeenth century, and was only rediscovered in 1901. It can be seen in the crypt behind the altar of the Virgin.
This Crypt is the largest in France, and, next to St. Peter’s at Rome and Canterbury Cathedral, it is the largest in the world.
‘The crypt,’ says Mr. Cecil Headlam (in his ‘Story of Chartres,’ which everyone who goes there should procure and read), ‘was not in origin a crypt, or a martyrium, or a meeting-house of prayer dug beneath the level of the soil, but a tiny church set on the crest of the hill and raised above the surface of the earth. It only became a crypt, properly so called, when it had been covered up and the surrounding soil raised by the débris and deposits of succeeding years, so that when the new church was built it was erected naturally upon the top of the old.... The crypt consists of two lateral galleries, which run from the western towers under the aisles of the upper church, and form a horseshoe curve beneath the choir and sanctuary 366 feet long and 17 to 18 feet broad; of two transepts, seven apsidal chapels, and the martyrium, which is under the choir of the upper church.’
APPROACHING CHARTRES ACROSS THE PLAIN OF LA BAUCE.
The cathedral stands out before the roofs of the town appear owing to its great height. The passing of a squall of wind and rain gives great grandeur to the plain. (Page 61.)
Second Church. Burnt by Normans in the ninth century.
Third or Fourth Church:
1020. Constructed under the wise Bishop Fulbert.