St. Pol, as became one who had the interests of his fellow men at heart, forthwith killed the monster, and conveyed the news to the people awaiting his return by rapping on the ground with his baton (batz).
The rise and fall of the tide at the Isle of Batz shows remarkable fluctuations, ten metres, something more than thirty feet, being noted between high and low water.
Its coast-line has great banks of sand, a delight to the bather in salt water, but the rock formations are by no means so remarkable as those on most of the Breton isles. The soil is arid and there is not much luxuriant vegetation. There is a population of over twelve hundred souls, but few apparently have any ambition to migrate to the mainland, scarce a rifle-shot distant. In the island church is preserved the stole of St. Pol, of Byzantine silk. If genuine, it has attained a greater age than most confections of its class. An ancient Roman chapel or temple existed here in former times, and was succeeded by a monastery founded by St. Pol, now in ruins and mostly buried in the sands.
St. Pol’s renown became such that a Breton king made him Archbishop of Léon, giving him special care and control of the city bearing his name. These rights came down to the holy man’s successors, and the place became more religious than politic, as one reads in the old-time chronicles. The riches which had been acquired attracted the Normans, who devastated the cathedral church in 875. In the fourteenth century, Duguesclin occupied the town in the name of Charles V. The religious wars of the sixteenth century diminished the prosperity of the town, and a bloody submission was forced upon the Revolutionary rebels here in 1793.
St. Pol is somewhat doubtfully claimed as the native place of the celebrated sixteenth-century sculptor, Michel Colomb (1512).
The Chapel of Creizker or Creis-ker, with its astonishing bell-tower piercing the sky at a height of nearly 250 feet, owes its origin to a young girl of Léon, whom St. Kirec, Archdeacon of Léon in the sixth century, had cured of paralysis. The present structure is, of course, more modern. Albert le Grand fixes the date in the fourteenth century, and this is probably correct. There are innumerable evidences of the best of Gothic workmen, and there is much decorative embellishment which, though not according to the accepted Gothic forms, is certainly not Renaissance.
The ancient cathedral merits rank with the Chapel of Creizker, and is perhaps even a more consistent piece of work, though it represents three distinct epochs. The two towers are considerably less in height than that of the Creizker, but they are beautifully spired. The interior contains innumerable decorative accessories, making it rank with those cathedrals of France making up that third series, of which Nantes, Coutances, Narbonne, and Angers are the best examples.
In the choir is the tomb of St. Pol, and his skull, an arm bone, and a finger are encased in a little coffer for the veneration of the devout.
There is a series of sixty-nine delicately sculptured choir-stalls dating from 1512, and, although not rivalling such great works of their kind as one sees at their best at Amiens, Albi, or Rodez, they are sufficiently elaborate to deserve attention.
Innumerable tombs are set about the choir, many of them curiously and characteristically sculptured.