The Crucifix, the Eternal Warning,
Built into the Very Walls of the Old Courtroom
in the Town Hall of Rouen.
In the Low Countries they built city halls at an early date, but the French towns did not need them, for there the cathedrals lent pomp and circumstance to all municipal assemblages. The first States General was held in Notre Dame of Paris.
The early Church had endeared itself to the people in many ways. It entertained the traveler, and it was well that it did, for the public houses were of a very low order; it instructed the children; it ministered to the sick, and, if it was a crazy physician, it was a gentle nurse. The modern hospital, the fairest monument of humanity, is directly descended from the old Hotels-Dieu, where monks and nuns tended the sick. In the cathedral sat the Bishops’ Courts which, the people felt, were more just than the seigneurs. From these old Bishops’ Courts the beautiful French custom has descended of hanging a [crucifix] back of the judge’s seat in the courts of common law where the symbol, recalling a politic judge washing his hands of the blood of a just man, seems more than a human warning.
Within the consecrated walls of the church was that ever-blessed privilege of the temple—Christian, Pagan, or Jewish—sanctuary, the right of the hunted. Of course it was abused, mercy expects to be; therein it is more divine than human; but in a lawless day sanctuary was an unconscious protest against lynching. We do read of accidents arising from it; a Christian Church at Seez was burned down in an attempt to dislodge a band of thieves, but this embarrassing circumstance reflects on the management of those who burned it rather than upon the church.
A complaint comes down to us from the Thirteenth Century of the would-be popular clergy who allowed their parishioners to dance in their churches and even assisted at these dances and at shows peu convenable given by jugglers and clowns, they themselves playing at chess, all of which goes to show that we must regard these immense churches as meeting houses in the literal sense of the term and allow for the coarseness of the age in considering its amusements. Among other buffooneries, at Laon particularly, which seems to have been very “low church,” we read of the annual fête des innocents, in which the choir boys dressed up as priests and went through various antics in the church, which was given up to them for the night, the chapter giving them a supper after. At Laon again there is public complaint of a change having been made in the hour of mass and vespers on account of a miracle play that was given in the church. Lovers of the drama may look leniently upon this arrangement, whereas I suppose the stricter churchmen, when the ecclesiastical supremacy came to be questioned, even in the bishop’s own church, both at Rheims and Laon, said, “I told you so.” By such concessions the clergy induced the citizens to go in with them in building[1] such churches that succeeding generations have called them mad.
Though the evolution of the Gothic is one of the most interesting chapters in the history of architecture, the history of the builders themselves, if we could only have it, might be still more fascinating. Indeed,
“Who builds a church to God and not to fame, Will never mark the marble with his name.”
Hence we do not know who designed some of the noblest monuments of Gothic architecture, but we do catch charming psychological glimpses as we watch the mystical and the practical unconsciously working together for the beautiful in these old cathedrals, which make us wonder how such spiritual designs arose and how the artists who conceived them were able to carry them out. How could an age when kings could hardly read and write, when artists drew like children, evolve such works of art? How could an age so ignorant of physics and the abstract principles of mechanics erect such buildings?