Chapter 12

Close above the church we take a road up the hill-side. It is well to turn presently, to take in the strange grouping of the tower and the tall choir, as seen from a point a little above them. But our object now is that which is historically the central, physically the loftiest, point at Beaumont, the castle on the _Bellus Mons_ itself. We soon begin to see fragments of masonry rising above us on the left hand. Here, then, is the castle; and so in a sense it is. That is, it is part of its works, within its precincts; but it is not the head work of all. We go on a little further, and we see signs of mound and ditch plainly enough. But we do not take in their full grandeur, till we are kindly admitted within the gate of one of the small holdings into which the site of the fortress of Roger's rearing is now cut up. Then we see, indeed, why it was that "Rogerius de Vetulis" was changed into "Rogerius de Bello Monte."

It is, indeed, a "_bellus mons_" in the sense of commanding a wide and pleasant outlook. The town and church of Beaumont, from some points the abbey close below, the wide vale of the Rille and the hills beyond, make up a cheerful landscape. But if by the "_bellus mons_" we were to understand a fair natural hill, we should be led astray. The actual site of Roger's keep is neither a natural hill nor an artificial mound. It is a piece of the natural hill artificially cut off from the general mass. The founder chose a point of the hill-side which suited his objects. Its southern face, towards the open country, was steep enough for purposes of defence; for the rest, he cut off the piece of ground that was to be fortified by a gigantic ditch in the form of a horse-shoe. It is a ditch indeed, one that gladdens the eye that is looking out for such things. There is not so much of it, but what there is seems as grand as anything at Arques or Old Sarum. Lilybæum stands apart; Roger must have had plenty of labour at his command; but he had not, like the engineers of Carthage, to dig through the solid rock. It is a ditch to look down on from above, and also to walk along in its depth, and to look up on each side. The ground is not absolutely open all round; some obstructions of farm-buildings, and the like, hinder one from stepping out the horse-shoe quite as far as it goes; but the top of the mound--if mound is the right word--is perfectly free. There are fragments of masonry left everywhere, _but_ there is no continuous wall anywhere, nor any scrap of detail by which we could fix a date. Still, enough is left for all purposes of historical association, enough to show in what kind of a place Roger of _Les Vieilles_ fixed his home. It is not exactly an eagle's nest; for that kind of dwelling Normandy supplies fewer opportunities than some other lands. But it comes much more nearly to an eagle's nest than the home of any lord of Laigle who dwelled at Laigle. The exact ground-plan Mr. Clark, and few besides Mr. Clark, could make out. But without making out the exact ground-plan, we learn enough to teach us not a little about both Roger's Beaumont and Beaumont's Roger.

Was the lord of Beaumont-le-Roger entitled to a _sainte chapelle_ in his castle? Perhaps he might seem to be so when he was also Count of Meulan and Earl of Leicester. Perhaps it might seem so still more when Beaumont had come into the hands of French kings, and had begun to be granted out as a _comté-pairie_ for their sons. But, seemingly before that time, which did not come till the fourteenth century, a building arose which is not exactly a _sainte chapelle_ within the castle, but which is very near to the castle, and which has very much the air of a _sainte chapelle_. When we speak of a _sainte chapelle_ we, of course, mean a _sainte chapelle_ anywhere, whether at Riom, Paris, or anywhere else. This building is the abbey church of Beaumont, which stands just below the castle on the hill-side, a building once evidently of remarkable beauty. Perhaps the most notable feature about it is the ascent from the road below to the abbey buildings, a covered passage lighted by large early Geometrical windows. We make our way up and presently reach the abbey itself. It is plain that on this narrow ledge on the hill-side it was no more possible than it was on the steep of Saint Michael's Mount to put the several buildings of the monastery in their accustomed relation to the church and to one another. Too much has perished for any one but a specialist in monastic arrangements to attempt to spell out the buildings of the monastery in detail; but it seems that a good deal lay to the westward of the church which in ordinary cases would have been placed to the north or south. The church is but a fragment; the north and east walls are there, and from them we can reconstruct it. "East Wall" is here a phrase that may be used; for we are a little amazed to find that the church had no apse, but an English-looking flat end. The large east window has lost its tracery, which should have been something of the pattern of the Angels' Choir at Lincoln. The whole of the work that remains is of the best French Early Gothic. Seen from below, from the bridge across the Rille at no great distance, there is something wonderfully striking in this single side of the church, an inside seen from outside, with its sheltered windows and vaulting-shafts, standing against the side of the castle-hill. How was it when both abbey and castle were perfect? As it is, the abbey is the more prominent of the two. We can see at least a piece of it, while we have to guess at the castle; none of its fragments stand out at any distance. Yet, even looking thus, the abbey seems something subordinate, something dependent; it seems crowded into an unnatural position in order to be an appendage to something else. The parish church stands out boldly enough. It has a right to do so; it came in the order of nature. It proclaims the separate being of the town of Beaumont. The town of Beaumont doubtless sprang up because of the presence of the castle; but it sprang up by an independent growth; it was not the personal creation of any of its lords. The abbey, on the other hand, placed on so strange a site, was clearly the personal device of its own founder, who may have felt a number of very different feelings gratified, as he saw an abbey of his own making at his feet.

The result is an abbatial church unlike all other abbatial churches. The abbey of Beaumont is very beautiful, while the abbey of Almenèches is very ugly; yet Almenèches comes one degree nearer than Beaumont to one's ordinary notion of an abbey church. The abbey of Beaumont must have been a lovely chapel, but only a chapel. If it stood in its perfect state at Caen, among that wonderful group of noble minsters and great parish churches, it would strike us as a beautiful, but a small thing. This is not the usual position of the church of an abbey. It was, in fact, a pious and artistic fancy; while not, in strictness of description, a _sainte chapelle_ or other chapel of a castle, it has all the effect of being such. Or in its position against the hill-side, it may call up the memory of Brantôme far away in Périgord;[60] it has nothing in common with a typical abbey church like Saint-Evroul, except the accident of being much of the same date and style.

One building still remains to be noticed in the Beaumont of Roger. That is the church of his earliest home at Les Vieilles. It had, or was meant to have, a pretty thirteenth-century tower. But the church is a mere fragment, mutilated, desecrated, shut up. A decently kept ruin is far less offensive than a church in such a state as this. But the thought again comes, as at Saint-Evroul, how short a time has passed since the parish church of Les Vieilles and the abbey church of Beaumont were both living things. No man now alive can remember them such; but not so many years back many could. In 1861 we talked with one who remembered the abbey church of Bernay in the full extent of its choir and Lady-chapel. We go back after thirty years to find the church of the Conqueror's grandmother in other things much as it was, still desecrated, but with no more of actual destruction. But we find that the one genuine Roman shaft that was there, one of the very few such north of Loire, has either perished or has been so covered up with timber framework as to be quite out of sight. And one later, but still early capital, had been knocked away to make a convenient resting-place for a wooden beam. One would think that such a building as this, even if it cannot be restored to divine worship, might at least be made _monument historique_ and taken care of. Only then the State would some day come and take away every real shaft and every real capital, and put imitation shafts and capitals in their stead. And that might be even worse than the wooden beams.

JUBLAINS

1876

We know not how far the name of Silchester may be known among Frenchmen, but we suspect that the name of Jublains is very little known among Englishmen. The two places certainly very nearly answer to one another in the two countries. Both alike are buried Roman towns whose sites had been forsaken, or occupied only by small villages; both have supplied modern inquirers with endless stores both of walls and foundations and of movable relics; and the two spots further agree in this, that both at Silchester and at Jublains the history of the place has to be made out from the place itself; all that we can do is to make out the Roman names; we have no record of the history of either.[61] The names which the two places now bear respectively illustrate the rules of French and English nomenclature. Silchester proclaims itself by its English name to have been a Roman _castrum_, but it keeps no trace of its Roman name of Calleva. But Næodunum of the Diablintes follows the same rule as Lutetia of the Parisii. The old name of the town itself is forgotten, but the name of the tribe still lives. The case is not quite so clear as that of Paris; some unlucky etymologists have seen in the name Jublains traces of _Jules_ and of _bains_; but a moment's thought will show that the name is a natural corruption of _Diablintes_. The name is spelled several ways, of which _Jublains_ is now the one in vogue; but another form, _Jublent_, better brings out its origin. As for the two places themselves, Jublains and Silchester, each of them has its points in which it surpasses the other. At Silchester there is the town-wall, nearly perfect throughout the whole of its circuit. Jublains fails here; but, on the other hand, Silchester has no one object to set against the magnificent remains of the fortress or citadel, the traditional camp of Cæsar. Silchester again has the great advantage of being systematically and skilfully dug out, while Jublains has been examined only piecemeal. This again illustrates the difference between the state of ownership in England and in France. Silchester is at the command of a single will, which happily is in the present generation wisely guided. Jublains must fare as may seem good to a multitude of separate wills, of which it is too much to expect that all will at any time be wisely guided. But it is worth while to remember on the other hand that a single foolish Duke may easily do more mischief than several wise Dukes can do good, and that out of the many owners of Jublains, if we cannot expect all at any time to be wise, there is a fair chance that at no moment will every one of them be foolish.

At the present moment most certainly several of the owners of Jublains are the opposite of foolish, and the most important monument of all is placed beyond the individual caprice of any man. The great fortress is diligently taken care of under the authority of the local Archæological Society; the theatre is the property of M. Henri Barbe, a zealous resident antiquary and the historian of the place; and the other chief remains are easily accessible, and, as far as we can see, stand in no danger. But it is of course impossible to dig up the whole place in the same way as Silchester has been dug up. The modern Diablintes must live somewhere; no power short of that of an Eastern despot can expel them all from the sites of their predecessors, even to make the ways and works of those predecessors more clearly known.

But we have as yet hardly said what and where Jublains is. It lies in the old county and diocese of Maine, in the modern department of Mayenne, on the road between the towns of Mayenne and Evron. The site was, as the local historian well points out, one admirably chosen for the site of a town, standing as it does at the point of junction of the roads from various parts of Central and Northern Gaul and from the Constantine and Armorican peninsulas. It stands on a gently sloping height, with a wide view over the flatter land to the south, and over the Cenomannian hills more to the east, the peak of Montaigu, namesake of our own Montacute, forming a prominent object. The traveller coming along the road from Mayenne, the most likely point of approach, will hardly notice anything remarkable till he reaches the parish church, a building of no special importance, but which has a bell-gable of a type more familiar in Britain than in Gaul. Here, if he has any eyes at all, he will see that the church is built on the foundations of some much larger and earlier building. The masses of Roman masonry are clear enough, with two round projections near the two western angles of the church. These are the remains of the _thermæ_ of Næodunum, and the traveller has in fact passed through the greater part of the ancient city to reach them. There are plenty of other and far greater remains; but this is the only one which lies immediately on the road by which the traveller is likely to come. The enclosed space of the town was an irregular four-sided figure, with no distinct four streets of a _chester_, but rather with a greater number of ways meeting together, like our Godmanchester. The whole eastern side of the town is full of remains among the fields and gardens; not far from the northern entrance, a field or two away from the road, are the very distinct foundations of a temple locally known as that of Fortune. A walk over two or three more fields, crossed by traces of foundations at almost every step, brings the traveller to a more singular object, known locally as _La Tonnelle_, which looks very much like the foundation of a round temple, such as that of Hercules (late Vesta) at Rome. And something like the effect of such a temple is accidentally preserved. A line of trees follows the circular sweep of the foundations, and their trunks really make no bad representatives of the columns of the temple. In short, when the traveller is once put upon the scent, he finds scraps of ancient Næodunum at every step of his walk through Jublains and its fields.

But the most important remains of all lie in the south-western part of the old enclosure. To the extreme south of the city lies the theatre. This is happily the property of M. Barbe, who lives and carries on his researches within its precinct. Its general plan has been made out, and, as diggings go on, the rows of seats are gradually becoming visible. It differs from the shape of most other theatres, as its curved line occupies more than a semicircle, like the shape of a Saracenic horse-shoe arch. It seems that no signs of an amphitheatre had been found at Jublains; so M. Barbe is driven to the conclusion that the same building must have been used for both purposes. How far this is archæologically sound we must leave to those who are specially learned in amphitheatres to determine. But we cannot forget the dissatisfied audience in Horace who, between the acts, or even during the performance itself, called for "aut ursum aut pugiles." The position, sloping away to the south, is indeed a lovely one, and we may congratulate the man who has found at once his home and his work on such a spot.

But the great sight of all at Jublains, that which gives its special character to the place, but which has also a history of its own distinct from the place, has yet to be spoken of. We have kept it for the last, both because of its special history and because it seems to be the only thing which is locally recognised as a place of pilgrimage. Tell your driver to take you to Jublains, and he will at once take you to "le camp de Jules César." He knows the other objects perfectly well; but, unless he is specially asked, he assumes that this one point is the object of the journey. Nor is this wonderful; for the camp, fortress, citadel, whatever it is to be called, though most assuredly not the work of the great Dictator, is after all the great object at Jublains, which gives Jublains its special place among Gaulish and Roman cities. More than this, it is the one object which stands out before all eyes, and which must fix on itself the notice of the most careless passer-by. Suddenly, by the roadside, we come on massive Roman walls, preserved to an unusual proportion of their height. Their circuit may in everyday speech be called a square, though strict mathematical accuracy must pronounce it to be a trapezium. Near the entrance we mark some fragments gathered together, and the eye is regaled, as it so often is in Italy and so seldom in Britain and Northern Gaul, with the sight of the Corinthian acanthus leaf. The wall itself, on the other hand, is of that construction of which we see so much in Britain and in Northern Gaul, but which is unknown in Rome itself. Here are the familiar layers of small stones with the alternate ranges of bricks. We enter where the eastern gate has been, and find a second line of defence, a wall of earth, square, or nearly so, but with its angles rounded off, with its single entrance near the south-east angle carefully kept away from either of the approaches in the outer wall. Within this again is the fortress itself, again quadrangular, with projections at the angles. The more finished parts of its walls, the gateways, and the parts adjoining them, give us specimens of Roman masonry whose vast stones carry us back, be it to the wall of _Roma Quadrata_ at one end or to the Black Gate of Trier at the other, and which specially call back the latter in the marks of the metal clamps which have been torn away. Details must be studied on the spot or in the works of M. Barbe, which is nearly the same thing, as they seem to be had only on the spot. But there are not many remains of Roman work more striking than this, and it is more striking still if we try to make out its probable history from the internal evidence, which is all that we have to guide us.

That this fortress does not belong to any early period of the Roman occupation is clear from its construction, the alternate layers of brick and stone, and the bricks with wide joints of masonry between them, as in all the later Roman work. And again, the fact that among the materials of the fortress have been found pieces of other buildings used up again might suggest that it was not built till after some time of change, perhaps of destruction, had come over the city. But it is the numismatic evidence which clearly parts off the history of the fortress from the general history of the city. Jublains has no inscriptions to show, but its numismatic wealth is great. Among the many coins found, not many are earlier than the time of Nero, and those which there are are chiefly coins of Germanicus. From Nero to Constantine coins of all dates are common. It is M. Barbe's inference that it was in Nero's reign that the place began to be of importance, and that its great temple was built. But the numismatic stores of the fortress taken by itself tell quite another story. There, not a coin has been found earlier than Domitian, nor one later than Aurelian, saving a chance find of two Carolingian pieces of Charles the Bald and a modern French piece of Charles the Sixth. Again, though coins are found from Domitian onwards, it is only with Valerian and Gallienus that they become at all common, while the great mass belong to Tetricus and his son. One alone is of Aurelian. That is to say, of 169 coins found in the fortress, 151 come in the twenty years from 258 to 273, while 110 belong to the single reign of the Tetrici. After Aurelian there is nothing earlier than Charles the Bald. It is clear then that the fortress must have been deserted in the reign of Aurelian; it is clear that the time of its chief importance must have been just before, in the time of Tetricus. It looks as if the fortress had had but a very short life. The conclusion of the local antiquaries is that it was most likely raised by Postumus, and that it perished in some revolt or sedition, or merely as the result of the overthrow of Tetricus by Aurelian. A mere glance at the building would have tempted us to put it a little later, to have set it down as part of the defences of Probus, or even of some Emperor much later than Probus. But the numismatic evidence seems irresistible; it seems impossible to escape the conclusion that this splendid piece of Roman military work belongs to the middle of the third century, and that it was forsaken, most likely slighted, within a very few years after its first building.

This is as curious and conclusive a piece of internal evidence as we often light upon; but it must be remembered that all this applies only to the fortress, and not to the town of Næodunum. That had a much longer life. It began long before the fortress, and it went on long after. The diggings at Jublains have brought to light a great number of Christian Frankish objects, which shows that the place kept on some measure of importance long after the Teutonic conquest of Gaul. It seems also to be looked upon as a kind of secondary seat of the Cenomannian bishopric. But it must either have died out bit by bit, or else have perished in some later convulsion. The local inquirers seem to incline to attribute the final destruction of Næodunum, the City of the Diablintes in the nomenclature of the time, to the incursions of the Northmen in the ninth century. That they did a great deal of mischief in Maine is certain; and is a likely enough time for the city to have been finally swept away as a city, and to have left only the insignificant modern village which has grown up amongst its ruins.