CHAPTER III

THE CARLOVINGIANS—THE GREAT SIEGE OF PARIS BY THE NORMANS—THE GERMS OF FEUDALISM

In 622, when Dagobert became king of Austrasia, one Pepin of Landen, known as Pepin le Vieux, was made mayor of the palace and, associated with St. Arnoulf, bishop of Metz, was appointed ward of the young king. A marriage between Pepin’s daughter and the son of St. Arnoulf resulted in the birth of Pepin of Heristal, who in the anarchy that followed on Dagobert’s death succeeded in crushing Ebroin,[27] the king-maker, mayor of the palace of Neustria. Pepin then seized the royal treasury, installed Thierry III. as king of the Franks and himself as mayor of the palace. Pepin’s successor, for the office of mayor had now become hereditary, was Charles Martel, his son by Alfaide, a fair and noble concubine. He it was, who by his valour and address saved Western Europe from the Mussulman at Tours, and made glorious his name in Christendom. At his death, when crossing the Alps to defend the Pope against the Arian Lombards, the leadership of the Franks passed to his sons Carloman and Pepin the Short, of whom the latter, on his brother’s retirement to the cloister at the famous Italian Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino, held undivided sway.

Charles Martel, although buried with the Frankish kings at St. Denis, was content with the title of Duke of the Franks, and hesitated to proclaim himself king. He, like the other mayors of the palace, ruled through feeble and pensioned puppets when they did not contemptuously leave the throne vacant. In 751 Pepin sent two prelates to sound Pope Zacchary, who, being hard pressed by the Lombards, lent a willing ear to their suit, agreed that he who was king in fact should be made so in name, and authorised Pepin to assume the title of king. Chilperic III., like a discarded toy, was relegated to a monastery at St. Omer, and Pepin the Short anointed at Soissons by St. Boniface, bishop of Mayence, from that sacred “ampul full of chrism” which an angel of Paradise had brought to St. Rémi wherewith to anoint Clovis at Rheims. In the year 754 Stephen III., the first pope who had honoured Paris by his presence, came to ask the reward of his predecessor’s favour and was lodged at St. Denis. There he anointed Pepin anew, with his sons Charles and Carloman, and compelled the Frankish chieftains, under pain of excommunication, to swear allegiance to them and their descendants.

The city of Lutetia had much changed since the messengers of Pope Fabianus entered five centuries before. On that southern hill where formerly stood the Roman camp and cemetery were now the great basilica and abbey of St. Genevieve. The amphitheatre and probably much of the palace of the Cæsars were in ruins, all stripped of their marbles to adorn the new Christian churches. Extensive abbatial buildings and a church resplendent with marble and gold, on the west, were dedicated to St. Vincent, and were henceforth to be known as St. Germain of the Meadows (des Prés), for the saint’s body had been translated from the chapel of St. Symphorien in the vestibule to the high altar of the abbey church a few weeks before the pope’s arrival at St. Denis. The Cité[28] was still held within the decayed Roman walls, and a wooden bridge, the Petit Pont, crossed the south arm of the Seine. On the site of the old pagan temple to Jupiter by the market-place stood a new and magnificent basilica to Our Lady. The devotion of the Nautæ had been transferred from Apollo to St. Nicholas, patron of shipmen, and Mercury had given place to St. Michael, and to each of those saints oratories were erected. Other churches and oratories adorned the island, dedicated to St. Stephen, St. Gervais, and St. Denis of the Prison (de la chartre), built where the saint was imprisoned by the north wall and where, abandoned by his followers, he was visited by his divine Lord, who Himself administered the sacred Host. A nunnery dedicated to St. Eloy, where three hundred pious nuns diffused the odour of Jesus Christ through the whole city, occupied a large site opposite the west front of Notre Dame. Near by stood a hospital, founded and endowed a century before by St. Landry, bishop of Paris, for the sick poor, which soon became known as the Hostel of God (Hôtel Dieu). The old Roman palace and basilica had been transformed into the official residence and tribunal of justice of the Frankish kings. On the south bank stood the church and monastery of St. Julien le Pauvre. A new Frankish city was growing on the north bank, bounded on the west by the abbey of St. Vincent le Rond, later known as St. Germain l’Auxerrois, and on the east by the abbey of St. Lawrence. Houses clustered around the four great monasteries, and suburbs were in course of formation. The Cité was still largely inhabited by opulent merchants of Gallo-Roman descent, who were seen riding along the streets in richly-decorated chariots drawn by oxen.

ST. JULIEN LE PAUVRE.
ST. JULIEN LE PAUVRE.

King Pepin, after proving himself a valiant champion of orthodoxy by defeating the Arian Lombards, and bestowing Ravenna on the pope in perpetual sovereignty, died at Paris in 768. The kingdom of France was then shared by his sons, Charles and Carloman, and on the latter’s death in 771 Charles, surnamed the Great, began his tremendous career during which the interest of the French Monarchy shifts from Paris to Aix-la-Chapelle. Charlemagne during his long reign of nearly half a century was too preoccupied with his noble but ineffectual purpose of cementing by blood and iron the warring races of Europe into a united populus Christianus, and establishing, under the dual lordship of emperor and pope, a city of God on earth, to give much attention to Paris. He did, however, spend a few Christmases there, and was present at the dedication of the new church of St. Denis, completed in 775 under Abbot Fulrad. It was a typical Frankish prince whom the Parisians saw enthroned at St. Denis. He had the abundant fair hair, shaven chin and long moustache we see in the traditional pictures of Clovis. Above middle height, with bright piercing eyes and short neck, he impressed all by the majesty of his bearing in spite of a rather shrill and feeble voice and a certain asymmetrical rotundity below the belt. Abbot Fulrad was a sturdy prince and for long disputed the possession of some lands at Plessis with the bishop of Paris. The decision of the case is characteristic of the times. Two champions were deputed to act for the litigants, and met before the Count of Paris[29] in the king’s chapel of St. Nicholas in the Palace of the Cité, and a solemn judgment by the Cross was held. While the royal chaplain recited psalms and prayers, the two champions stood forth and held their arms outstretched in the form of a cross. In this trial of endurance the bishop’s deputy was the first to succumb. His fainting arms drooped and the abbot won his cause.

Paris grew but slowly under the Frankish kings. They lived ill at ease within city walls. Children of the fields and the forest, whose delight was in the chase or in war, they were glad to escape from Paris to their villas at Chelles or Compiègne.

But the civil power of the Church grew apace. In the early sixth century one-third of the land of France was held and administered by the monasteries. The abbots of St. Germain des Prés held possession of nearly 90,000 acres of land, mostly arable, in various provinces of France. Their annual revenue amounted to about £24,000 of our money: they ruled over more than 10,000 serfs. From a list of the lands held in the ninth century by the abbey of St. Pierre des Fossés,[30] founded by Clovis II. about eight miles from Paris, and published in the Trésor des pièces rares ou inédites, we are able to form some idea of the vast extent of monastic possessions in the city. The names of the various properties whose boundaries touch those of the abbey lands are given. Private owners are mentioned only four times, whereas to ecclesiastical and monastic domains there are no less than ninety references.

These monastic settlements were veritable garden cities, where most of our modern fruits, flowers and vegetables were cultivated; where flocks and herds were bred and all kinds of poultry, including pheasants and peacocks, reared. Guilds of craftsmen worked and flourished; markets were held generally on saints’ days, and pilgrimages were fostered. Charlemagne was an honest coiner and a protector of foreign traders; he was tolerant of the Jews, the only capitalists of the time, and under him Paris became the “market of the peoples,” and Venetian and Syrian merchants sought her shores.

In Gallo-Roman days few were the churches outside the cities, but in the great emperor’s time every villa[31] is said to have had its chapel or oratory served by a priest. Charlemagne was a zealous patron of such learning as the epoch afforded, and sought out scholars in every land. English, Irish, Scotch, Italian, Goth and Bavarian—all were welcomed. The English scholar Alcuin, master of the Cloister School at York, became his chief adviser and tutor. He would have every child in his empire to know at least his paternoster. Every abbot on election was required to endow the monastery with some books. The choice of authors was not a wide one: the Old and New Testaments; the writings of the Fathers, especially St. Augustine, the emperor’s favourite author; Josephus; the works of Bede; some Latin authors, chiefly Virgil; some scraps of Plato translated into Latin—a somewhat exiguous and austere library, but one which reared a noble and valiant line of scholars and statesmen to rule the minds and bridle the savage lusts of the coming generations of men. Under Irish and Anglo-Saxon influences the cramped, minute script of the Merovingian scribes grew in beauty and lucidity: gold and silver and colour illuminated the pages of their books. The golden age of the Roman peace seemed dawning again in a new Imperium Christianorum.

Towards the end of his reign the old emperor was dining with his court in a seaport town in the south of France, when news came that some strange, black, piratical craft had dared to attack the harbour. They were soon scattered, but the emperor was seen to rise from the table and go to a window, where he stood gazing fixedly at the retreating pirates. Tears trickled down his cheeks and none dared to approach him. At length he turned and said: “Know ye, my faithful servants, wherefore I weep thus bitterly? I fear not these wretched pirates, but I am afflicted that they should dare to approach these shores, and sorely do grieve when I foresee what evil they will work on my sons and on my people.” His courtiers deemed they were Breton or Saracen pirates, but the emperor knew better. They were the terrible Northmen, soon to prove a bloodier scourge to Gaul than Hun or Goth or Saracen; and to meet them Charlemagne left an empire distracted by civil war and a nerveless, feeble prince, Louis the Pious, Louis the Forgiving, fitter for the hermit’s cell than for the throne and sword of an emperor.

In 841 the black boats of the sea-rovers for the first time entered the Seine, and burnt Rouen and Fontenelle. In 845 a fleet of one hundred and twenty vessels swept up its higher waters and on Easter Eve captured, plundered and burnt Paris, sacked its monasteries and churches and butchered their monks and priests. The futile Emperor Charles the Bald bought them off at St. Denis with seven thousand livres of silver, and they went back to their Scandinavian homes gorged with plunder—only to return year by year, increased in numbers and ferocity. Words cannot picture the terror of the citizens and monks when the dread squadrons, with the monstrous dragons carved on their prows, their great sails and three-fold serried ranks of men-of-prey, were sighted. Everyone left his home and sought refuge in flight. The monks hurried off with the bodies of the saints, the relics and treasures of the sanctuary, to hide them in far-away cities. In 852 Charles the Bald’s soldiers refused to fight, and for two hundred and eighty-seven days the pirates ravaged the valley of the Seine at their will. Never within memory or tradition were such things known. Rouen, Bayeux, Beauvais, Paris, Meaux, Melun, Chartres, Evreux, were devastated. The islands of the Seine were whitened by the bones of the victims. Similar horrors were wrought along the other rivers of France. Whole districts reverted to paganism. In 858 a body of the freebooters settled on the island of Oissel, below Rouen, and issued forth en excursion to spoil and slay and burn at their pleasure. They made of the once rich city of Paris a cinder heap; the cathedrals of St. Germain des Prés and of St. Denis alone escaped at the cost of immense bribes. Charles ordered two fortresses to be built for the defence of the approaches to the bridges, and continued his feeble policy of paying blackmail.

Port des Ormes.
Port des Ormes.

In 866 Robert the Strong, Count of Paris, had won the title of the Maccabeus of France, by daring to stand against the fury of the Northmen and to defeat them; but having in the heat of battle with the terrible Hastings taken off his cuirass, he was killed. In 876 began a second period of raids of even greater ferocity under the Norwegian Rollo the Gangr[32] (the walker), a colossus so huge that no horse could be found to bear him. In 884 the whole Christian people seemed doomed to perish. Flourishing cities and monasteries became heaps of smoking ruins; along the roads lay the bodies of priests and laymen, noble and peasant, freeman and serf, women and children and babes at the breast to be devoured of wolves and vultures. The very sanctuaries[33] were become the dens of wild beasts, the haunt of serpents and creeping things. Packs of wolves, three hundred strong, harried Aquitaine.

In 885 a great league of pirates—Danes, Normans, Saxons, Britons and renegade French—on their way to ravage the rich cities of Burgundy drew up before Paris; and their leader, Siegfroy, demanded passage to the higher waters. For Paris had now been put in a state of defence, the Roman walls repaired, the bridges fortified and protected by towers on the north and south banks. Bishop Gozlin, in whom great learning was wedded to incomparable fortitude, defied the pirates, warning them that the citizens were determined to resist and to hold Paris for a bulwark to the other cities of France.

Paris, forsaken by her kings and emperors for more than a century, scarred and bled by three sieges, was now to become a beacon of hope to the wretched land of France. Of the fourth and most terrible of the Norman sieges of Paris, we have fuller record. A certain monk of St. Germain des Prés, Abbo by name, had endured the siege and was one day sitting in his cell reading his Virgil. Desiring to exercise his Latin, and give an example to other cities, he determined to sing of a great siege with happier issue than that of Troy.[34] Abbo saw the black hulls and horrid prows of the pirates’ boats as they turned the arm of the Seine below Paris, seven hundred strong vessels, and many more of lighter build. For two leagues and a half the very waters of the Seine were covered with them, and men asked into what mysterious caves the river had retreated. On November 26th, the attack began at the unfinished tower on the north bank. Three leaders stand eminent among the defenders of the city. Bishop Gozlin, the great warrior priest; his nephew, Abbot Ebles of St. Denis; and Count Eudes (Hugh) of Paris, son of Robert the Strong. The air is darkened with javelins and arrows. The abbot with one shaft spits seven of the besiegers, and mockingly bids their fellows take them to the kitchen to be cooked. Bishop Gozlin is wounded by a javelin early in the attack. On the morrow, reinforced by fresh troops, the assault is renewed, stones are hurled, arrows whistle: the air is filled with groans and cries. The defenders pour down boiling oil and melted wax and pitch. The hair of some of the Normans takes fire: they burn and the Parisians shout—“Jump into the Seine to cool yourselves.” One well-aimed millstone, says Abbo, sends the souls of six to hell. The baffled Northmen retire, entrench a camp at St. Germain l’Auxerrois, and prepare rams and other siege artillery.

ST. GERMAIN L’AUXERROIS.
ST. GERMAIN L’AUXERROIS.

Abbo now pauses to bewail the state of France: no lord to rule her, everywhere devastation wrought by fire and sword, God’s people paralysed at the advancing phalanx of death, Paris alone tranquil, erect and steadfast in the midst of all their thunderbolts, polis ut regina micans omnes super urbes, like a queenly city resplendent above all towns. The second attack begins with redoubled fury. After battering the walls of the north tower, monstrous machines on sixteen wheels are advanced and the besiegers strive to fill the fosse. Trees, shrubs, slaughtered cattle, wounded horses, the very captives slain before the eyes of the besieged, are cast in to fill the void. Bishop Gozlin brings down a Norman chieftain by a well-aimed arrow: his body, too, is flung into the fosse. The enemy cover the plain with their swords and the river with their bucklers. Fireships are loosed against the bridge. In the city women fly to the sanctuaries: they roll their hair in the dust, beat their breasts and rend their faces. They call on St. Germain: “Blessed St. Germain, succour thy servants.” The fighters on the walls take up the cry. Bishop Gozlin invokes the Virgin, Mother of the Redeemer, Star of the Sea, bright above all other stars, to save them from the cruel Danes.

On February 6th, 886, a sudden flood sweeps away the Petit Pont, and its tower, with twelve defenders, is isolated. With shouts of triumph the Northmen cross the river and surround it. The twelve refuse to yield, and fire is brought. The warriors (a touching detail) fearing lest their falcons be stifled, cut them loose. There is but one vessel wherewith to quench the flames and that soon drops from their hands. The little band rush forth, place themselves against the ruins of the bridge, and prepare to sell their lives dearly—terrible against terrible foes. The walls of the city are lined with their kinsmen and friends impotent to help. The enemies of God, doomed one day to dine at Pluto’s cauldron, press upon them. They fight till Phœbus sinks to the depths of the sea, so great is the courage of despair. They are promised their lives if they will yield, are disarmed, then treacherously slain, and their souls fly to heaven. But one, Hervé, of noble bearing and of great beauty, deemed a prince, is spared for ransom. With thunderous voice he refuses to bargain his life for gold, falls unarmed on his foes and is cut to pieces. “These things,” writes Monk Abbo, “I saw with mine eyes.” He gives the names of the heroic twelve who went to receive the palm of martyrdom. They were exemplars to France and helped to save her by their desperate courage and noble self-sacrifice. Their names are inscribed on a tablet on the wing of the Hôtel Dieu in the Place au Petit Pont: Ermenfroi, Hervé, Herland, Ouacre, Hervi, Arnaud, Seuil, Jobert, Hardre, Guy, Aimard, Gossouin.

A temporary relief is afforded by the arrival of Henry of Saxony, sent with supplies by the emperor. Count Eudes sallies forth to meet him, and in his ardent courage outstrips his men, is surrounded and almost slain. The little city is revictualled. Henry returns whence he came, and again the Parisians are left to themselves. On the sixth of April Bishop Gozlin, their shield, their two-edged axe, whose shaft and bow were terrible, passes to the Lord. On May 12th, Eudes steals away to implore further help from the emperor, and as soon as he sees the imperialists on the march returns and cuts his way into Paris, to share the terrors of the siege. Henry the Saxon again appears, but is ambushed and slain and his army melts away. Yet again Paris is abandoned by her emperor and seeks help of heaven. For the waters are low, the besiegers are able to get footing on the island, they set fire to the gates and attack the walls. The body of St. Genevieve is borne about the city, and at night the ghostly figure of St. Germain is seen by the sentinels to pass along the ramparts, sprinkling them with holy water and promising salvation. Charles the Fat, the Lord’s anointed, at length appears with a multitude of a hundred tongues and encamps on Montmartre. While the Parisians are preparing to second him in crushing their foes, they learn that the cowardly emperor has bought them off with a bribe and permission to winter in Burgundy, and for the first time they ravage that opulent province. Next year, as Gozlin’s successor, Bishop Antheric, was sitting at table with Abbot Ebles, a fearful messenger brought news that the acephali[35] were again in sight. Forgetting the repast, the two churchmen seized their weapons, called the city to arms, hastened to the ramparts, and the abbot slew their pilot with a well-aimed shaft. The Normans are terrified, and at length a treaty is made with their leaders, who promised not to ravage the Marne and some even entered Paris. But the ill-disciplined hordes were hard to hold in and bands of brigands, as soon as the ramparts were passed, began to plunder and slew a score of Christian men. The Parisians in their indignation sought out and—Evax! Hurrah!—found five hundred Normans in the city and slew them. But the bishop protected those that took refuge in his palace, instead of killing them as he ought to have done—potius concidere debens. For a time Paris had respite. Cowardly Charles the Fat was deposed, and in 887 Count Eudes was acclaimed king of France after his return from Aquitaine, whose duke he had brought to subjection. He counselled a gathering of all the peoples near Paris to make common cause against the Normans. Abbo saw the proud Franks march in with heads erect, the skilful and polished Aquitaines, the Burgundians too prone to flight. But nothing came of it.

At the extreme north-east of Paris the Rue du Crimée leads to a group of once barren hills, part of which is now made into the Park of the Buttes Chaumont. Here, by the Mount of the Falcon (Montfaucon[36]) in 892 King Eudes fell upon an army of Northmen, who had come against Paris, and utterly routed them. Antheric, the noble pastor, with his virgin-like face, led three hundred footmen into the fight and slew six hundred of the acephali. But Abbo’s muse now fails him. Eudes, noble Eudes, is no more worthy of his office, and Christ’s sheep are perishing. Where is the ancient prowess of France? Three vices are working her destruction: pride, the sinful charms of Venus (fœda venustas veneris) and love of sumptuous garments. Her people are arrayed in purple vesture, and wear cloaks of gold; their loins are cinctured with girdles rich with precious stones. Monk Abbo wearies not of singing, but the deeds of noble Eudes are wanting. All the poet craves is another victory to rejoice Heaven; another defeat of the black host of the enemy.

But the noble Eudes was now a king with rebellious vassals. Paris was never captured again, but the acephali were devouring the land. The grim spectres of Famine and Plague made a charnel-house of whole regions of France, while Eudes was fighting the Count of Flanders, a rival king, and the ineffectual emperor, Charles the Simple. He it was who after Eudes’ death, by the treaty of St. Claire-sur-Epte in 902, surrendered to the barbarians the fair province, subsequently to be known as Normandy. The new prayer in the Litany, “From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord deliver us,” was heard. The dread name of Rollo now vanishes from history to live again in song, and under the title of Robert, assumed from his god-father, he reappears to win a dukedom and a king’s daughter. The Normans are broken in to Christianity, law and order; their land becomes one of the most civilized regions of France; the fiercest of church levellers are known as the greatest of church builders in Christendom. They gave their name to a style of Christian architecture in Europe and a line of kings to England,[37] Naples and Sicily.

L’Institut de France.
L’Institut de France.

The new empire of Charlemagne had endured less than three generations; from its wreck were formed the seven kingdoms of France, Navarre, the two Burgundies, Lorraine, Italy and Germany. The people of France never forgot the lesson of the dark century of the invasions. A subtle change had been operating. The empire had decomposed into kingdoms; the kingdoms were segregating into lordships. Men in their need were attracted to the few strong and dominant lords whose courage and resource afforded them a rallying point and shelter against disintegrating forces: the poor and defenceless huddled for protection to the seigneurs of strongholds which had withstood the floods of barbarians that were devastating the land. The seeds of feudalism were sown in the long winter of the Norman terror.

CHAPTER IV

THE RISE OF THE CAPETIAN KINGS AND THE GROWTH OF PARIS

FROM 936 to the coronation of Hugh Capet at Noyon in 987, the Carlovingians exercised a slowly decaying power. The real rulers of France were Hugh the Tall and Hugh Capet,[38] grandson and great-grandson of Robert the Strong. Lay abbots of St. Martin of Tours, St. Denis, and St. Germain, Counts of Paris and Dukes of France, they pursued the policy of the mayors of the palace in Merovingian times, accepting the nominal kingship of the degenerate Carlovingians—Louis from overseas, Lothaire, and Louis the Lazy—until the time was ripe to pick up the fallen sceptre. They founded a new line of kings of France which stretches onward through history for a thousand years until the guillotine of the Revolution cut it in twain. It is Hugh Capet whom Dante, following a legend of his time, calls the son of a butcher of Paris, and whom he hears among the weeping souls cleaving to the dust and purging their avarice in the fifth cornice of Purgatory.

Their patrimony was a small one—the provinces of the Isle de France, La Brie, La Beauce, Beauvais and Valois; but their sway extended over the land of the Langue d’oil, with its strenuous northern life, le doux royaume de la France, the sweet realm of France, cradle of the great French Monarchy and home of art, learning and chivalry. The globe of the earth, symbol of universal empire, gives way to the hand of justice as the emblem of kingship. They were, it is true, little more than seigneurs over other seigneurs, some of whom were almost as powerful as they; but that little, the drop of holy chrism by which they were consecrated of the Church, contained within it a potency of future grandeur. They were the Lord’s anointed, supported by the Lord’s Vicar on earth: to disobey them was to disobey God. Tribal sovereignty had now given way to territorial sovereignty. Feudal lords and abbots were supreme within their own domains. The people, long forsaken by their emperors, had in their turn forsaken them. In order “not to be at the mercy of all the great ones they surrendered themselves to one of the great ones” and in exchange for protection gave troth and service. Cities, churches and monasteries now assumed a new aspect. Paris had demonstrated the value of a walled city, for the dread Rollo himself had three times assaulted it in vain. During the latter part of the Norman terror, from all parts of North France, monks and nuns and priests had brought their holy relics within its walls as to a city of refuge. Gone were the lines of villas from Gallo-Roman times extending freely into the country. Fortifications were everywhere raised around the dwelling-places of men. The ample spaces within cities were soon to give place to crowded houses and narrow streets. The might of the archbishops, bishops and abbots increased: they sat in the councils of kings and dominated the administration of justice; the moral, social and political life of the country centred around them. Armed with the sword and the cross they held almost absolute sway over their little republics; coined money, levied taxes, disposed of small armies and went to the chase in almost regal state. The land bristled with castles and fortified towns and abbeys, and was parcelled out into territories of varying extent, from great duchies equal to a dozen modern departments, to the small domain just enough to maintain a single knight.

The advent of the year 1000 was regarded with universal terror in Christendom. A fear, based on a supposed apocalyptic prophecy that the end of the world was at hand, paralysed all political and social life. Churches were too small to contain the immense throngs of fearful penitents: legacies and donations from conscience-stricken worshippers poured wealth into their treasuries. But once the awe-inspiring night of the vernal equinox that began the year 1000 had passed, and the bright March sun rose again on the fair earth, unconsumed by the wrath of God, the old world “seemed to thrill with new life; the earth cast off her out-worn garments and clothed herself in a rich and white vesture of new churches.” Everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, men strove in emulation to build the finest temples to God. The wooden roofs of the Merovingian and Carlovingian basilicas had ill withstood the ravage of war and fire. Stone took the place of wood, the heavy thrust of the roof led to increased mural strength, walls were buttressed, columns thickened. Massive towers of defence, at first round, then polygonal, then square, flanked the west fronts, veritable keeps, where the sacred vessels and relics might be preserved and defended in case of attack. Soon spaces are clamant for decoration, the stone soars into the beauty of Gothic vaulting and tracery, “the solid and lofty shafts ascend and press onward in agile files, and in the sacred gloom are like unto an army of giants that meditate war with invisible powers.”[39]

The Capets are more intimately associated with the growth of Paris than any of the earlier dynasties, and at no period in French history is the ecclesiastical expansion more marked. Under the long reign of Hugh’s son, King Robert the Pious, no less than fourteen monasteries and seven churches were built or rebuilt in or around the city. A new and magnificent palace and hall of Justice, with its royal chapel dedicated to St. Nicholas, rose on the site of the old Roman basilica and palace in the Cité. The king was no less charitable than pious. Troops of the poor and afflicted followed him when he went abroad, and he fed a thousand daily at his table. But notwithstanding his munificent piety, he was early made to feel the power of the Church. His union with Queen Bertha, a cousin of the fourth degree, whom he had married a year before his accession, was condemned by the pope as incestuous, and he was summoned to repudiate her. Robert, who loved his wife dearly, resisted the papal authority, and excommunication and interdict followed.[40] Everyone fled from him; only the servants are said to have remained, who purged with fire all the vessels which were contaminated by the guilty couple’s touch. The misery of his people at length subdued the king’s spirit, and he cast off his faithful and beloved queen.

The beautiful and imperious Constance of Aquitaine, her successor, proved a penitential infliction second only in severity to the anathemas of the Church. Troops of vain and frivolous troubadours from her southern home, in all kinds of foreign and fantastic costumes, invaded the court and shocked the austere piety of the king. He perceived the corrupting influence on the simple manners of the Franks of their licentious songs, lascivious music and dissolute lives, but was powerless to dismiss them. The tyrannous temper of his new consort became the torment of his life. He was forced even to conceal his acts of charity. One day, on returning from prayers, he perceived that his lance by the queen’s orders had been adorned with richly chased silver. He looked around his palace and was not long in finding a poor, tattered wretch whom he ordered to search for a tool, and the pair locked themselves in a room. The silver was soon stripped from the lance and the king hastily thrust it into the beggar’s wallet and bade him escape before the queen discovered the loss. The poor whom he admitted to his table, despite the angry protests of the queen, at times ill repaid his charity. On one occasion a tassel of gold was cut from his robe, and on the thief being discovered the king simply remarked: “Well, perhaps he has greater need of it than I, may God bless its service to him.” The very fringe was sometimes stripped from his cloak as he walked abroad, but he never could be induced to punish any of these poor spoilers of his person. There is, however, an obverse to this ardent piety and noble enthusiasm:—the merciless persecution and spoliation of the Jews and the first executions of heretics[41] recorded in France.

In 1022 two priests, one of whom had been the queen’s confessor, and eleven laymen were condemned to be burnt at the stake at Orleans for heresy. The king spent nine hours wrestling with them in prayer and argument, but in vain. As the unhappy wretches were being led to execution, Constance leaned forward, savagely struck at her old confessor and gouged out one of his eyes. She was applauded for her zeal.

The economic condition of the people was far from satisfactory. Famine and pestilence claimed their victims with appalling frequency, and between 970 and 1040, forty-eight famines and plagues are known to historians; that of 1033 is recounted by the chronicler, Raoul Glaber, with details so ghastly that the heart sickens and the hand faints at their transcription. Slavery existed everywhere: it was regarded as an integral part of the divine order of things. The Church aimed at alleviating the lot of the slave, not at abolishing slavery. At a division of serfs, held in common between the priors of two abbeys in 1087, the children were shared, male and female, without any reference to their parents. Archbishops fulminated against serfs who tried to escape from their lords, quoting the words of the apostle: “Serfs be subject in all things to your masters.” A serf was valued at so much money, like a horse or an ox. The serfs of the Church at Paris were sent to the law courts to give evidence for their bishop or prior, or to do battle for them in the event of a judicial duel. The freemen in the eleventh century began to rebel against fighting with a despised serf, and refused the duel, whereupon early in the next century the king and his court decided that the serfs might lawfully testify and fight against freemen, and whoso refused the trial by battle should lose his suit and suffer excommunication. The prelates exchanged serfs, used them as substitutes in times of war, allowed them to marry outside their church or abbey only by special permission and on condition that all children were equally divided between the two proprietors. If a female serf married a freeman he and their children became serfs. Serfs were only permitted to make a will by consent of their master; every favour was paid for and liberty bought at a great price. Whole bourgades were often in a state of serfdom. Merchants even and artizans in towns owed part of their produce to the seigneur. In the eleventh century burgesses as well as serfs and Jews were given to churches, exchanged, sold or left in wills by their seigneurs. The story of mediæval France is the story of the efforts of serf and burgess to win their economic freedom[42] and of her kings to tame the insolence of disobedient vassals and to make their shadowy kingship a real thing. And the story of mediæval France is closed only by the great Revolution.

Hotel Gerouilhac
Hotel Gerouilhac

The declining years of King Robert were embittered by the impiety of rebellious sons, who were reduced to submission only at the price of a protracted and bloody campaign in Burgundy. The broken-hearted father did not long survive his victory. He died in his palace at Melun in 1031, and the benisons and lamentations of the poor and lowly winged his spirit to its rest. If we may believe some writers, pious King Robert’s memory is enshrined in the hymnology of the Church, which he enriched with some beautiful compositions: he was often seen to enter St. Denis in regal habit to lead the choir at matins, and would sometimes challenge the monks to a singing contest; once, it is said, when importuned by his queen to immortalise her name in song, he began, “O Constantia Martyrum!” The delighted Constance heard no further and was satisfied.

Scarcely had the grave closed over the dead king at St. Denis when Constance plotted with some of the nobles to place Robert, her youngest and favourite son, on the throne in place of Henry, the rightful heir, who fled to Normandy to implore the aid of Duke Robert. The cultivation of the arts of peace had not enfeebled the fighting powers of the Normans. Robert fell upon the queen’s supporters with reckless[43] bravery and crushed them in three decisive battles. Henry gained his crown but at the cost of a big slice of territory which advanced the Norman boundary to within twenty leagues of Paris. The queen survived her humiliation but a short time, and her death at Melun in 1032 and Henry’s generosity to his enemies gave peace to the kingdom.

In 1053, towards the end of Henry’s almost unchronicled reign, an alarming rumour came to Paris. The priests of St. Ermeran at Ratisbon claimed to have possession of the body of St. Denis, which they alleged had been stolen from the abbey in 892 by one Gisalbert. The loss of a province would not have evoked livelier emotion, and Henry at once took measures to convince France and Christendom that the true body was still at St. Denis. Before an immense concourse of bishops, abbots, princes and people, presided over by the king, his brother and the archbishops of Rheims and of Canterbury, the remains of St. Denis and his two companions were solemnly drawn out of the silver coffers in which they had been placed, by Dagobert, together with a nail from the cross and part of the crown of thorns, all locked with two keys in a kind of cupboard richly adorned with gold and precious stones, and preserved in a vault under the high altar. After having been borne in procession they were exposed on the high altar for fifteen days and then restored to their resting-place. The stiff-necked priests of Ratisbon, fortified with a papal bull of 1052, still maintained their claim to the possession of the body, but no diminution was experienced in the devotion either of the French peoples or of strangers of all nations to the relics at St. Denis.

The chief architectural event of Henry’s reign at Paris was the rebuilding on a more magnificent scale of the Merovingian church and abbey of St. Martin in the Fields (des Champs), whose blackened walls and desolate lands were eloquent of the Norman terror. The buildings stood outside Paris about a mile beyond the Cité on the great Roman road to the north, where St. Martin on his way to Paris healed a leper. The foundation, which soon grew to be one of the wealthiest in France, included a hostel for poor pilgrims endowed by Philip I. with a mill on the Grand Pont, to which the monks added the revenue from an oven.[44]

In the eighteenth century, when the monastery was secularised, the abbot was patron of twenty-nine priories, three vicarates and thirty-five parishes, five of which were in Paris. Some of the old building has been incorporated in the existing Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. The Gothic priory chapel, with its fine twelfth-century choir, is used as a machinery-room, and the refectory, one of the most precious and beautiful creations attributed to Pierre de Montereau, is now a library.

Philip I. brought to the indolent habit inherited from his father a depraved and vicious nature. After a regency of eight years he became king at the age of fifteen, and lived to defile his youth and dishonour his manhood by debauchery and adultery, simony and brigandage. Early in his career he followed the evil counsels of his provost Etienne, and purposed the spoliation of the treasury of St. Germain des Prés to pay for his dissolute pleasures. “As the sacrilegious pair,” says the chronicler, “drew near the relics, Etienne was smitten with blindness and the terrified Philip fled.” Simony filled his gaping purse; bishoprics and other preferments were openly sold to the highest bidder, and one day when an abbot complained that he had been kept waiting while a rich competitor for a bishopric had been admitted, the king answered: “Wait a while until I have made my money of him; I will then accuse him of simony, and you shall have the reversion.”

Regal irresponsibility led in 1092 to a greater crime. Most popular of the twelfth-century stories sung by the trouvères of North France was that of Tortulf, the Breton outlaw, the Robin Hood of his day, who won by his prowess against the Normans the lordship of rich lands by the Loire, and with his son, Ingelar, founded the famous house of Anjou. In 1092 Foulques de Réchin, lord of Anjou—whose handsome grandson Geoffrey, surnamed Plantagenet from the sprig of broom (genêt) he wore in his helmet, was to father a race of English kings—had to wife Bertrarde, fairest of the ladies of France, whose two predecessors had been cast off like vile courtesans. Philip, when on a visit to the count at Tours became inflamed with passion at beholding her, and she was easily induced to elope with him under the promise that she should share his throne. His queen, Bertha, mother of his two children, was pitilessly driven from his bed and imprisoned at Montreuil, and two of his venal bishops were found to bestow the blessings of the Church on the new union. But the thunder of Rome came swift and terrible. Philip laid aside his crown and sceptre, grovelled before the pontiff, and implored forgiveness, but continued to live with his mistress. Next year a new pope excommunicated the guilty pair and laid their kingdom under the ban. The same Council, however, of Clermont, which fulminated against Philip, stirred Christendom to the first crusade, and in the magnificent enthusiasm of the moment Philip was permitted to live outwardly submissive but secretly rebellious. He crowned Bertrarde at Troyes, and lived on his vicious life, while Bertha was dying of a broken heart in her prison at Montreuil. Monkish legends tell of the excommunicated king languishing, a scrofulous wretch, in a deserted court; but there is little doubt that the impious monarch died, tardily repentant, at his palace at Melun, after a reign of nearly half a century. It was a reign void of honour or profit to France. He left his son Louis VI. (the Lusty) a heritage of shame, a kingdom reduced to little more than a baronage over a few comtés, whose cities of Paris, Etampes, Orleans and Sens were isolated from royal jurisdiction by insolent and rebellious vassals, one of whom, the Seigneur de Puisset, had inflicted a disgraceful defeat on Philip in 1081. Many of the great seigneurs were but freebooters, living by plunder. The violence and lawlessness of these and other smaller scoundrels, who levied blackmail on merchants and travellers, made commerce almost impossible. Corruption, too, had invaded many of the monasteries and fouled the thrones of bishops, and a dual effort was made by king and Church to remedy the evils of the times. The hierarchy strove to centralise power at Rome that the Church might be purged of wolves in sheep’s clothing: the Capetian monarchs to increase their might at Paris in order to subdue insolent and powerful vassals to law and obedience.

In 1097 the Duke of Burgundy learned that Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury was about to pass through his territory with a rich escort on his way to Rome. The usual ambush was laid and the party were held up. As the duke hastened to spoil his victims, crying out—“Where is the archbishop?” he turned and saw Anselm, impassive on his horse, gazing sternly at him. In a moment the savage and lawless duke was transformed to a pallid, stammering wretch with downcast eyes, begging permission to kiss the old man’s hand and to offer him a noble escort to safeguard him through his territory. It was the moral influence of prelates such as this and monks such as St. Bernard that enabled the hierarchy to enforce the celibacy of the clergy, to cleanse the bishoprics and abbeys, to wrest the privilege of conferring benefices from lay potentates and feudal seigneurs who bartered them for money, and to make and unmake kings.

The end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth centuries saw the culmination of the power of the reformed orders. All over France, religious houses—the Grande Chartreuse, Fontevrault, Cîteaux, Clairvaux—sprang up as if by enchantment. Men and women of all stations and classes flocked to them, a veritable host of the Lord, “adorning the deserts with their holy perfection and solitudes by their purity and righteousness.” “How fair a thing it is,” exclaims St. Bernard, “to live in perfect unity! One weeps for his sins; another sings praises to the Lord. One teaches the sciences; another prays. One leads the active; another the contemplative, life. One burns with charity; another is prone in humility. Nought is here but the house of God and the very gate of heaven.”

St. Bernard was the terror of mothers and of wives. His austerity, his loving-kindness,[45] his impetuous will and masterful activity, his absolute faith and remorseless logic, his lyric and passionate eloquence, carried all before him. St. Bernard was the dictator of Christendom; he it was who with pitying gesture as of a kind father, his eyes suffused with tender joy, received Dante from the hands of Beatrice in the highest of celestial spheres, and after singing the beautiful hymn to the Virgin, led him to the heaven of heavens, to the very ecstasy and culmination of beatitude in the contemplation and comprehension of the triune God Himself. But religious no less than seculars are subdued by what they work in. Already in the tenth century Richer complained that the monks of his time were beginning to wear rich ornaments and flowing sleeves, and with their tight-fitting garments[46] looked like harlots rather than monks.

In the polluting atmosphere of Philip’s reign matters grew worse. St. Bernard denounced the royal abbey of St. Denis as “a house of Satan, a den of thieves.” “The walls of the churches of Christ were resplendent with colour but His poor were naked and left to perish; their stones were gilded with the money of the needy and wretched to charm the eyes of the rich.” “Bishops dressed like women; the successors of St. Peter rode about on white mules, loaded with gold and precious stones, apparelled in fine silk, surrounded with soldiers and followed by a brilliant train. They were rather the successors of Constantine.”

In 1095 the task of cleansing the Abbey of St. Maur des Fossés seemed so hopeless, that the abbot resigned in despair rather than imperil his soul, and a more resolute reformer was sought. In 1107 the bishop of Paris was commanded by Rome to proceed to the abbey of St. Eloy and extirpate the evils there flourishing. The nuns, it was reported, had so declined in grace, owing to the proximity of the court and intercourse with the world, that they had lost all sense of shame and lived in open sin, breaking the bonds of common decency. The scandal was so great that the bishop determined to cut them off from the house of the Lord. The abbey was reduced to a priory and given over to the abbot of the now reformed monastery of St. Maur, and its vast lands were parcelled out into several parishes.[47] The rights of the canons of Notre Dame were to be maintained; on St. Eloy’s day the abbot of St. Maur was to furnish them with six pigs, two and a half measures of wine and three of fine wheat, and on St. Paul’s day with eight sheep, the same quantity of wine, six crowns and one obole. The present Rue de la Cité and the Boulevard du Palais give approximately the east and west boundaries of the suppressed abbey, part of whose site is now occupied by the Prefecture de Police.

But the way of the reformer is a hard one. At the Council of Paris, 1074, the abbot of Pontoise was severely ill-treated for supporting, against the majority of the Council, the pope’s decrees excluding married clerics from the churches. The reform of the canons of Notre Dame led to exciting scenes. Bishop Stephen of Senlis was sent in 1128 to introduce the new discipline, but the archdeacons and canons, supported by royal favour, resisted, and Bishop Stephen was stripped of his revenues and hastened back to his metropolitan, the archbishop of Sens. The archbishop laid Paris under interdict and the influence of St. Bernard himself was needed to compose the quarrel.

On Sunday, August 20, 1133, when returning from a visitation to the abbey of Chelles, the abbot and prior of St. Victor were ambushed and the prior was stabbed. Some years later, in the reign of Louis VII., Pope Eugene III. came to seek refuge in Paris from the troubles excited at Rome by the revolution of Arnold of Brescia. When celebrating mass before the king at the abbey church of St. Genevieve the canons had stretched a rich, silken carpet before the altar on which the pontiff’s knees might rest. When the pope retired to the sacristy to disrobe, his officers claimed the carpet, according to usage; the canons and their servants resisted, and there was a bout of fisticuffs and sticks. The king intervened, and anointed majesty himself was struck. A scuffle ensued, during which the carpet was torn to shreds in a tug-of-war between the claimants. Here was urgent need for reform. The pope decided to introduce the new discipline and appointed a fresh set of canons. The dispossessed canons met them with insults and violence, drowned their voices by howling and other indignities, and only ceased on being threatened with the loss of their eyes and other secular penalties.

Louis the Lusty was the pioneer of the great French Monarchy. He had none of Philip’s indolence, and was ever on the move, hewing his way, sword in hand, through his domains, subduing the violence, and burning and razing the castles of his insolent and disobedient vassals. The famous Suger, abbot of St. Denis, was his wise and firm counsellor, and led the Church to make common cause with him and lend her diocesan militia. It was a poor bald curé who, when all else despaired, led the assault on the keep of the castle of Le Puisset; he seized on a plank of wood, assailed the palisade, calling on the hesitating royal troops to follow him; they were shamed by his bravery and the castle was won.

The social revolution known as the enfranchisement of the commons and the growth of towns begins in the reign of Louis VI. The king would have the peasant to till, the monk to pray, and the pilgrim and merchant to travel in peace. He was an itinerant regal justiciary, destroying the nests of brigands, purging the land with fire and sword from tyranny and oppression. Wise in council, of magnificent courage in battle, he was the first of the Capetians to associate the cause of the people with that of the monarchy. They loved him as a valiant soldier-king, destroyer and tamer of feudal tyrants, the protector of the Church, the vindicator of the oppressed. He lifted the sceptre of France from the mire and made of it a symbol of firm and just government.

It is in Louis VI.’s reign that we have first mention of the Oriflamme (golden flame) of St. Denis, which took the place of St. Martin’s cloak as the royal standard of France. The Emperor Henry V. with a formidable army was menacing France. Louis rallied all his friends to withstand him and went to St. Denis to pray for victory. The abbot took from the altar the standard—famed to have been sent by heaven, and formerly carried by the first liege man of the abbey, the Count de Vexin, when the monastery was in danger of attack—and handed it to the king. The sacred banner was fashioned of silk in the form of a gonfalon, of the colours of fire and gold, and was suspended at the head of a gilded lance.

There was a solemn ceremony, the Remise des corps saints, at the royal abbey when the king returned with his court to give thanks and to restore the banner to the altar. He carried the relics of the holy martyrs on his shoulders in procession, then replaced them whence they were taken and made oblations. A yet more superb spectacle was given to the Parisians when Pope Innocent II., a refugee from the violence of the anti-papal party at Rome, came to celebrate the Easter mass at St. Denis. The pope and his cardinals were mounted on fair steeds, barons and seigneurs on foot led the pope’s white horse by the bridle. As he passed, the Jews presented him with a scroll of the law wrapped in a veil—“May it please God to remove the veil from your hearts,” answered the pope. The solemn mass ended, pope and cardinals repaired to the cloisters where tables were spread with the Easter feast. They first partook of the Paschal lamb, reclining on the carpet in the fashion of the ancients, then, rising, took their places at table. After the repast a magnificent procession went its way to Paris, to be met by the whole city with King Louis and Prince Philip at their head.

The manner of the young prince’s tragic death gives an insight into the state of a mediæval town. He was riding one day for amusement in the streets of Paris, attended by one esquire, when a pig ran between his horse’s feet; the lad was thrown and died before the last sacraments could be administered. He was only fourteen years of age, and all France wept for him.

The strenuous reign of Louis was marked by a great expansion of Paris, which became more than ever the ordinary dwelling-place of the king and the seat of his government. The market, now known as Les Halles, was established at a place called Champeaux, belonging to St. Denis of the Prison. William of Champeaux founded the great abbey of St. Victor,[48] famed for its sanctity and learning, where Abelard taught and St. Thomas of Canterbury and St. Bernard lodged. At the urgent prayer of his wife Adelaide, the king built a nunnery at Montmartre, and lavishly endowed it with lands, ovens, the house of Guerri, a Lombard money-changer, some shops and a slaughter-house in Paris, and a small bourg, still known as Bourg-la-Reine, about five miles south of the city. Certain rights of fishing at Paris, to which Louis VII. added five thousand herrings yearly from the port of Boulogne, were also granted. The churches of Ste. Geneviève la Petite, founded to commemorate the miraculous staying of the plague of the burning sickness (les ardents); of St. Jacques de la Boucherie; and of St. Pierre aux Bœufs, so named from the heads of oxen carved on the portal, were also built.

CHAPTER V

PARIS UNDER PHILIP AUGUSTUS AND ST. LOUIS

When Philip Augustus took up the sceptre at fifteen years of age, the little realm of the Isle de France was throttled by a ring of great and practically independent feudatories, and in extent was no larger than half-a-dozen of the eighty-seven departments into which France is now divided. In thirty years Philip had burst through to the sea, subdued the Duke of Burgundy and the great counts, wrested the sovereignty of Normandy, Brittany and Maine from the English Crown, won Poitou and Aquitaine, crushed the emperor and his vassals in the memorable battle of Bouvines, and become one of the greatest of European monarchs. The English king was humiliated by the invasion of his territory by Prince Louis, afterwards Louis VIII., who overran nearly the whole of the east of England, captured Rochester and Winchester, and received the barons’ homage at London.

The victory of Bouvines evoked that ideal of moral and material and national unity which the later kings of France were to realise. The progress of Philip towards Paris was one long triumph. Peasants and mechanics dropped their tools to gaze on the dread iron Count of Flanders, captive and wounded. The king, who had owed his life to the excellence of his armour,[49] was received in Paris with a frenzy of joy. The whole city came forth to meet him, flowers were strewn in his path, the streets were hung with tapestry, Te Deums sung in all the churches, and for seven days and nights the popular enthusiasm expressed itself in dance, in song and joyous revel. It was the first national event in France. The Count of Flanders was imprisoned in the new fortress of the Louvre, where he lay for thirteen years, with ample leisure to meditate on the fate of rebellious feudatories. “Never after was war waged on King Philip, but he lived in peace.”

Two vast undertakings make the name of Philip Augustus memorable in Paris—the beginning of the paving of the city and the building of its girdle of walls and towers.

St. Etienne du Mont and Tour de Clovis.
St. Etienne du Mont and Tour de Clovis.

One day as Philip stood at the window of his palace, where he was wont to amuse himself by watching the Seine flow by, some carts rattled along the muddy road beneath the window and stirred so foul and overpowering an odour that the king almost fell sick. Next day the provost and the sheriffs and chief citizens were sent for and ordered to set about paving the city with stone. The work was not however completed until the reign of Charles V., a century and a half later. It was done well and lasted till the sixteenth century, when it was replaced by the miserable cobbles, known as the pavement of the League. Whether the city grew much sweeter is doubtful; certainly Paris in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was as evil-smelling as ever. Montaigne, in the second half of the sixteenth century, complains that the acrid smell of the mud of Paris weakened the affection he bore to that fair city, and Howell writes in 1620, “the city is always dirty, and by perpetual motion the mud is beaten into a thick, black and unctuous oil that sticks so that no art can wash it off, and besides the indelible stain it leaves, gives so strong a scent that it may be smelt many miles off, if the wind be in one’s face as one comes from the fresh air of the country.”