As I walked up the road leading from the hollow in which the abbey stands, I looked back again and again at the perfect loveliness of the building I was leaving behind. The flying buttresses, the lines upon lines of fretwork edging, the multitude of floreated pinnacles, and the glorious Gothic of the west front, all of the softened hue of old gold, presented in my eyes the perfection of a Gothic building. I have seen the stately grandeur of Amiens, the soaring pride of Cologne, the vast magnificence of Burgos, and the fairy prettiness of Milan, and I have worshipped at the shrines of Ely, Norwich, and Lincoln. Each one in its way is supreme and incomparable; but Batalha, reservedly nestling in its green hollow far from the busy haunts of men, has a charm of its own that I have found in no other Gothic church; and as I finally turned my back upon it, I carried with me a memory which in my life will never fade.
We are soon amongst the pines and heather again, driving along an elevated ridge with a valley and bold mountain ranges beyond upon either side, the effect of the distant hills seen through the perpendicular lines formed by the straight pine trunks that cluster on each side being very beautiful. A sort of light-blue veil seems to cover the far landscape, such an atmosphere as Corot loved to paint; not a mist arising from dampness, but the azure tint of the air itself seen by its clarity to a vast distance through the dark pine copses.
The first sign of systematic begging that I had experienced in Portugal was at Batalha; groups of children, encouraged apparently by the constant visitors to a show place, making a regular business of cadging: for we were getting now into the centre of Portugal where the people are less sturdy and the position of the peasant less prosperous than in the north. Along the road from Batalha to Alcobaça, a new and really charming form of begging was resorted to by the children on the wayside—chubby, well-fed mites they looked most of them, evidently not in abject want. They kneel on the roadside in an attitude of prayer, their hands joined in supplication, their eyes closed reverently and their expression rapt, like little dirty angels. They have before them a few cut flowers, and the moment the carriage passes them they start like a flash of lightning from their devotions, and throw the flowers into the stranger’s lap, whilst they begin to trot by the side of the vehicle in a dogged, persistent way, not articulately asking for alms, but simply trying to win a penny by reproachful glances and disregard of all entreaties to them to stop their dog-trot and go away. Needless to say, such tactics are usually successful, for only a very hard heart could withhold the small coin they covet, when an angelic-looking child of seven has panted half a mile barefooted by the side of a carriage going at a brisk pace.
Half-way to Alcobaça the ridge upon which the road runs narrows to a mere knife edge, and on the left hand a wide valley sweeps down suddenly, a bold long hill rising beyond. This is the battlefield of Aljubarrota, upon which John, the Master of Avis, won his crown, and for the second time asserted the independence of Portugal from Castile on the 14th August 1385. From Thomar he had brought all the power that patriotic Portugal could raise, and upon this ridge awaited the attack of the Castilians, who, if once they could pass it, would have all the seacoast of Portugal at their mercy down almost to the mouth of the Tagus. The position is not very dissimilar from that of Bussaco, but upon a smaller scale. The Portuguese right and left flanks were both defended by projecting spurs; upon one of which the English bowmen were posted, and by standing upon the centre of the position it is easy to see, even to-day, how skilfully John the Great had chosen his ground for the decisive struggle, and how difficult it was for the Castilians to succeed. They dared not proceed along the valley leaving this strong force of enemies upon the heights behind them, able to cut them off from their base, and harass them flank and rear; whilst to swarm up these precipitous slopes in the face of a semicircle of determined opponents, and enfiladed by archers on both flanks, seemed inviting defeat. All was against the Spaniards. A mysterious epidemic was prostrating them, the King of Castile was ill, and had to be carried to the battle in a litter, and, above all, the Portuguese were struggling for the independence of their country, whilst the Spaniards were fighting at the behest of a corrupt and unpopular king. So on that fateful morning in August, five hundred and twenty-three years ago, as the chivalry of Castile struggled up these broken slopes, the men upon the ridge from which I look down now over the smiling plain, stood like a steel wall, and with mace and battle-axe, and double-handed swords, clove and smote them, whilst the cloth-yard arrows pierced and bowled them over by hundreds ere they reached the summit. The hearts of the Spaniards failed them, and down the slope they fled, delivered now to carnage and to capture. Ten thousand of them, the best fighting men in Castile, fell, the king barely escaped by flight, whilst half his court were taken. Aljubarrota was won, the house of Avis fixed upon the throne for two hundred years, and the alliance between England and Portugal cemented so strongly as to have lasted unbroken to this day.
Through the poverty-stricken looking village of Aljubarrota, where some questionable relics of the battle are exhibited for a consideration (though no one offers me wine, as they did to Beckford’s princely cavalcade), a few miles more brings me to a point, whence looking down on the right side of the ridge the town of Alcobaça is seen below, surrounded by miles of vineyards, touched now with bronze and crimson, for the vintage is nearly over, and a big hummock of a building over all, that I know is the famous Cistercian monastery, the sepulchre of so many princes of the ancient royal house of Portugal that I have travelled thus far to see.
The church and monastery stand fronting a very extensive triangular praça, crossed by long avenues of acacias, and the first sight of the edifice is distinctly disappointing. An ordinary façade in the seventeenth-century, Spanish “Jesuit” style of the time of Philip IV., with white walls and yellow stone outlines, and flanked on both sides by monastery buildings of great extent in the same taste, or want of it, did not quite fulfil the hopes which Beckford’s description of the splendours of Alcobaça had aroused. It is true that the west door of the church somewhat redeemed it, for it was evidently the remains of the original front in pure unadorned Gothic. The whole edifice is raised above the surface of the praça upon a platform some ten feet high, and upon this parade the monks in old time were mustered to receive distinguished visitors. Beckford thus describes the reception of his own party—
ON THE PRAÇA AT ALCOBAÇA.
“The first sight of this regal monastery is very imposing, and the picturesque well-wooded and well-watered village out of the quiet bosom of which it seems to rise relieves the mind from the sense of oppression the huge domineering bulk of the conventual buildings inspire. We had no sooner hove in sight, and we loomed large, than a most tremendous ring of bells of extraordinary power announced our speedy arrival. A broad hint from the Secretary of State recommending these magnificent monks to receive the Grand Prior and his companions with peculiar graciousness, the whole community, including fathers, friars and subordinates, at least four hundred strong, were drawn up in grand spiritual array on the vast platform before the monastery to bid us welcome. At their head the Abbot himself, in his costume of High Almoner of Portugal, advanced to give us a cordial embrace.”
All is quiet enough now, for the monks are gone these seventy years, and the huge dilapidated edifice behind, forming a vast square, is partly occupied as a barrack, and the rest falling into ramshackle ruin. Nor is anything stirring in the prim little town, which has grown up around the wealthy foundation, and now lives placidly upon the produce of its vineyards.