The next day was market-day at Leiria, and long before dawn the town was busy. This was by far the largest country market I saw in Portugal, and the gathering of peasantry the quaintest and most picturesque. The shops, particularly those in the mosaic-paved praça, are mainly wholesale warehouses for the supply of village traders, and a very extensive distributing trade must be done. The town itself, on this occasion, was one vast emporium, and multitudes of people bargained from early morning till past midday in the acacia avenues under the brilliant dark-blue sky. A gay-looking crowd they were: for the costume here is quite distinct. The women invariably wear a velvet pork-pie hat over a yellow or red head-kerchief, of which the ends hang down the back, and the older women have full black cloaks with hoods, whilst most of them have a broad band, some nine inches wide, of yellow cloth round the bottom of the skirt. The wares exposed for sale were infinite. In the praça great heaps of maize, grapes, potatoes, chestnuts, and beans covered the mosaic pavement, whilst stalls displayed calicoes and cloths of vivid colours. Giant yellow gourds in high piles lined the footpath, and elsewhere under the shade of the trees stacks of grass-fodder and maize-leaves for cattle stood. In another space heaps of salt, and long lines of stalls for the sale of salted sardines and salted pork, were followed by a score of temporary butchers’ shops. Then came stands for the sale of fresh fish, skate, sardines, and cod, with the inevitable bacalhau; and farther on, spread upon the ground, were hundreds of homely crocks, red amphoræ, slender and beautiful in shape, coarse household dishes gaudily decorated, and unglazed jars to keep water cool. Beneath a beautiful picturesque arcade of ancient arches in the praça women were seated before panniers piled with pears, figs, apples, melons, and grapes, such as Covent Garden might glory in; and hard by strings of garlic, onions, and eschalot claimed their purchasers. In a field by the side of the river long lines of oxen, horses, and asses were for sale, and men in red and green nightcaps, and trousers made of two or three different coloured cloths, soberly bargained for the beasts. Over all was the dark-blue arch of the sky, and the brilliant sun, tempered beneath the trees by the light-green of the acacia leaves: but what strikes most an observer who is familiar with the south, is the absence of vociferation and apparent excitement. There was no shouting, no pushing or quarrelling, and every transaction in the chaffering town seemed to be got through with serious deliberation. Even the cluster of gaily-dressed women around the stately sixteenth-century fountain adjoining the hotel, gossiped staidly, and the children playing beneath the trees were as grave as little judges. This is Leiria as I saw it on market-day; but long before sunset the country people trudged homeward again; the ox-wains carried away the produce and merchandise; the stalls and booths folded their canvas sides and disappeared, and the next morning Leiria resumed its habitual sleep, from which it awakens but once a week.
THE ENCARNAÇÃO, LEIRIA.
[1]. I noted with interest that this castle of Ourem, and others of these vast hill-top strongholds, had the outer defences arranged similarly to those I have described in the chapter on the buried city of Citania; namely, that on the side of the hill, where attack was difficult or impracticable, the outer walls dipped far down the slope, whilst at the point where danger might be apprehended the three lines of circumvallation were comparatively close together. This arrangement of hill-top defences was evidently long pre-Roman in the Peninsula, and seems to have been adopted by the Romans and their Gothic successors.
VI
BATALHA AND ALCOBAÇA
I drove out of Leiria in the morning just as the business of the market was in full swing; and for the first half-hour of the upward way amidst a country of vines and olives, we met crowds of country people riding into the town on heavily laden asses. Then, mounting high above the plain, we passed into the region of pines and heather, where the warm but invigorating air came charged with the scent of thyme, lavender, and rosemary. At a point of the road, about eight miles from Leiria, a deep hollow opens to the left, and at the bottom of it, and reached by a downhill road running almost parallel with the way we came, lies the world-famed abbey of Batalha, the wonder and envy of ecclesiastical architects for six centuries, and even now, dismantled and bedevilled as it is, one of the most beautiful Gothic structures in existence.
Before its west front I stand lost in admiration. The whole edifice is built of a marble-like limestone, which time has turned to a beautiful soft yellowish cream colour, similar to that of an old Japanese ivory carving. Like most Portuguese cathedrals the body of the church is somewhat narrow; but in this case a large chapel on the north side extends the apparent width of the exterior west front. How can one hope to convey in written words an adequate impression of this exquisite façade? To the severe perpendicular parallel lines over the door and window, reminiscent of the west front of Lincoln, is added a lace-like elaboration of parapets, pinnacles, and glorious flying buttresses, which almost bewilders by its aerial gaiety and transparent richness. A beautiful Gothic breastrail stands before a double flight of steps leading down to the west door, for the abbey is lower even than the road before it; “the portal,” wrote William Beckford, a hundred and twenty years ago, “full fifty feet in height, surmounted by a window of perforated marble of nearly the same lofty dimensions, deep as a cavern, and enriched with canopies and imagery in a style that would have done honour to William of Wykeham, some of whose disciples or co-disciples in the train of the founder’s consort, Philippa of Lancaster, had probably designed it.”
To me this door presented itself rather more in detail. I saw a portal the whole width of the nave-space, the deep, bevilled sides being occupied by the Twelve Apostles standing under rich Gothic canopies, and from the capitals above them a slightly pointed arch sprang ending in a floreated cross finial, the arch itself being composed of six orders, each occupied by a row of Kings of the House of David under exquisite Gothic canopies. The great window above is full of tracery so intricate and plastic in appearance as almost to banish the impression of a work in stone. The octagonal lantern of the side chapel is supported by flying buttresses of indescribable grace and lightness, and is fronted by a screen pierced with three Gothic windows almost level with the main west front; and upon every point of the building and along each side of the roof of the nave crocketed pinnacles rise, supported by fairy flying buttresses—the effect of the whole exterior from the west front being an exquisite blending of seriousness and exuberant rejoicing.
And these were precisely the feelings that prompted the establishment here of the Dominican abbey at the instance of its English foundress, Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt, married in 1386 John, the Master of Avis, the high-minded and patriotic bastard of the royal house, who had successfully resisted Spanish aggression the year before, and, with the assistance of the English archers at Aljubarrota, had gained for himself the crown of Portugal. Here in the neighbourhood of the battle, at the instance of Philippa, was built this abbey of Dominican monks in devotional thankfulness for the signal victory, and for the rescue of the King from threatened death. All through the older portion of the building the English Plantagenet influence is predominant, and marks the abbey as being entirely different from all other ecclesiastical buildings in Portugal.