Letter XIII.), whom he tried to trick into giving his assent. But S.

Ives would be no party to such a business. Though he could not dissuade the King, he persisted in opposing and condemning his action. He warned his brother bishops not to be mute dogs that know not how to bark. He wrote to the King that he would rather have a millstone round his neck and be cast into the sea than aid and abet by his presence this unrighteous union with Bertrade.

It was a noble letter; but the purpose of the writer was not achieved. The marriage took place. It remained to punish the honest bishop. Perhaps Philippe might have forgiven him, but Bertrade was not the kind of woman to forgive such opposition.

Hugues II. du Puiset, Viscount of Chartres, was her tool. Acting under instructions from the Court, he pillaged the lands of Notre-Dame. Then, profiting by the presence of the bishop in his country house near Fresnay,[47] he seized him and held him prisoner.

When news was brought to Chartres of the seizure of their bishop, people and clergy alike rose to arms to rescue him. But he wrote forbidding them to use violence for his sake. ‘War,’ he said, ‘is for wolves, not for shepherds. I did not obtain my bishopric by arms, and by arms I do not care to recover it.’ In like manner he restrained the nobles who were eager to fight against the King in his defence, and, for fear of stirring up rebellion, he refused for a long time to publish the letters which the Pope had despatched, denouncing the scandalous marriage of Philippe. As a reward, his lands and property were ravaged and sacked, so that, when in obedience to the Pope’s command he was at length set free, he found himself reduced to absolute penury. But his firmness gained him his point in the end. Morality was vindicated. Philippe, excommunicated, made his submission to Pope Urban II., and although he withdrew it under Pascal II., he finally, with Bertrade, made the _amende honorable_ before the assembled bishops in Paris (1104).

S. Ives had taken his part in that famous Council of Clermont, in which, after the Roman Pontiff had hurled from this tribunal in the heart of France his anathemas against the French King, the Church confirmed the Truce of God by which it was determined that (1095) ‘on all days monks, clerks and women, and those with them shall abide in peace; but on three days of the week any injury inflicted by anyone upon another shall not be counted an infringement of the peace; but on the other four days (Thursday-Sunday) anyone who injures another shall be held guilty of breaking the holy peace, and shall be punished accordingly.’ Men who lived by violence were to be violent only three days a week--men who lived by the sword were to keep it sheathed more than half the year. The check upon the unbridled power and wanton cruelty of the barons implied by this moderate enactment constituted one of the greatest steps in the direction of alleviating the distress of the poor, the weak and the educated; of encouraging travelling and trade, and promoting civilisation that was taken in the Middle Ages.

S. Ives proceeded with the utmost vigour to persuade the nobles of his diocese to accept the peace which they were tempted to reject as contrary to their privileges, and also to see that it was observed thereafter by them and by others within the limits of his own jurisdiction. And thus, by helping to deliver the weak from the power of the strong, he contributed towards preparing the way for the movement which was soon to give the people a voice in their own affairs and procure for them their municipal franchise in the form of ‘Communes.’

Meanwhile this same Council of Clermont had provided an outlet for the energies of the knights of Christendom, which were restricted by the Truce of God. The Crusade had been promulgated.

The enthusiasm of the people had been carefully prepared. The fantastic figure of Peter the Hermit, dressed in a woollen tunic and a cloak of coarse cloth, his arms and feet alike bare, and his eyes flashing with magnetic frenzy, had appeared among them and heated their imaginations. At the sound of his eloquence every heart caught fire, and a nation of soldiers was burning to exhibit at once its piety and its valour by the conquest of the Holy Land. The merit and glory of that undertaking had also been preached by the clergy in every diocese. When, therefore, the Pope ascended a lofty scaffold in the market-place of Clermont his eloquence was addressed to a vast concourse of well-prepared and impatient enthusiasts. The answer to the summons to arms was unanimous. The orator was interrupted by the shout of thousands, ‘Diex el volt! Diex el volt!’ For so the popular tongue corrupted the cry of the clergy, ‘God wills it!’ (Deus vult). ‘It is indeed the will of God,’ replied the Pope, and he gave them as a mark of their sacred and irrevocable engagement the symbol of the red, the bloody cross to be worn on their breast or shoulder.

Thus in a paroxysm of religious fervour began that Crusade which was to end in the rapine of a mediæval raid, and in the disastrous _dénouement_ of Nicæa.

The effects of the Crusades were as varied as the motives of the Crusaders. For though all were inspired, one need not doubt, by a genuine religious desire to regain the Holy Sepulchre for Christendom, by the belief of merit, the hope of the reward of plenary indulgence promised by the Pope, and the assurance of divine aid, yet other motives and instincts were present in the breasts of many. Collectively, the Crusading Gaul exhibited a perversion of that instinct of expansion to which French excursions into Britain and Russia, across the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Rhine, to America, India, Madagascar and Algiers, have continually borne witness, and which now survives the population’s power to expand. Individually, the desire to rescue the Church, mingled with the hope of military glory and the prospect of unlimited plunder, were sufficient inducements for the barons to cease from petty wars in their own land, and to gratify, as a penance and against the nations of the East, those passions which, when indulged at home, had involved them in the discipline of penance. And in the case of their followers, among many other motives, the love of freedom prompted. For, under the sign of the Cross, the peasant attached to the servitude of the glebe might escape from a haughty lord and transplant himself and his family to a land of liberty, just as the monk might release himself from the discipline of his convent and the criminal elude the punishment of his crime.

Of the effects of the Crusades I shall only mention those which are directly illustrated by the story of Chartres. They rolled back the tide of Mahometan conquest from Constantinople; they brought together East and West, and led to the awakening of the human intellect which was to put an end to the dark ages; they opened up new markets and stimulated trade to a wonderful degree--these great results they had, but they only affected Chartres indirectly. More directly we see the effect of them in the relations between the powers that were. By weakening the resources and influence of the barons they strengthened the authority of the Kings acting in alliance with the citizens. And this alliance broke up the feudal system, gradually abolished serfdom, and substituted the authority of a common law for the unstable will of chiefs, whose arbitrament was private war. Last and not least permanent of the effects of the Crusades was the influence exercised by the East upon art. The Porche Royal of the Cathedral, and the stained glass windows which are the glory of Chartres, would not have been as they are had Peter the Hermit never led his hundred thousand pilgrims to destruction, or if Bohémond, Prince of Antioch, had not taken the Cross in the sanctuary of Notre-Dame.

The foundation of the Abbey Josaphat-Lès-Chartres, which, like so many other religious foundations rich in lands, in relics and in books, was destroyed in 1789, affords another example of the indirect influence of the Crusades upon the institutions of Chartres. This abbey[48] was situated about two kilometres from Chartres, under the Hill of Lèves, on a site which in its topographical relations resembled that Valley of Jehosaphat to which its founder, Bishop Geoffrey, the successor of S. Ives, had vowed to go, but came into the bishopric instead. Even so S. Bernard recalled the town of Tyre to the memory of all Christians in the name of Tyron, which he gave to the monastery which he founded in Le Perche on lands given to him by S. Ives.

It was to the Abbey of Josaphat that, up to the days of the Revolution, the musicians and choristers of Notre-Dame made yearly, in the vintage season, a strange kind of equestrian promenade, known as the _Chevauchée_. This probably represented the survival of some feudal obligation. The chevaucheurs in a dignified Latin speech obtained leave from the Chapter to perform their functions, and then, before leaving the Cathedral, they used to sing the office of the day. But once _en route_ the cavalcade became as noisy and riotous a scene of carnival as the Feast of Fools. Riding on horses and donkeys, clad in outrageous garments of all colours, armed with swords, wearing absurd hats, and making a deplorable noise with all kinds of instruments, the cacophonous cavalcade made its way through the laughing, boisterous throng, to _déjeûner_ at the Abbey of Josaphat. The Feast of Fools, to which I have referred, like this amazing excursion, was celebrated in the odour of scandal down to the end of the eighteenth century. It was a feast widely popular in France, but much more licentious than religious. It was held at Chartres on the 1st of January. An admirable picture of the Feast of Fools as observed at Notre-Dame-de-Paris five days later is drawn by Victor Hugo in the first chapters of his novel of that name.

Clerks of the choir dressed up in grotesque costumes, elected a _Pape des Fous_ and a college of ridiculous cardinals, and then performed an indecent parody of the sacred offices. They danced in an abandoned fashion in the sanctuary, and ran about the city committing a thousand extravagances and bandying jests with the ribald crowd. There was another Feast of Fools in carnival time, which was authorised in 1300 on the condition that it was celebrated _dévotement_. That condition was not observed, and the feast was abolished in the following year. But that of January 1st continued till the ‘scandals, insolences, turpitudes and abuses’ which attended it led to its being forbidden in 1479 by the Church authorities. But the people preferred their Saturnalia to the danger of ecclesiastical anathemas, and the feast maintained its indecent existence for many years to come.

S. Ives had accompanied Urban preaching the Crusade through France. He returned now to Chartres and preached it there. Numerous were the Crusaders who went from the Chartrain country. It was fitting that, as in Foucher (_historien un peu trop conteur_), Chartres was to boast one of the chief chroniclers of the Crusades, so among her sons there should be many, like Gautier-Sans-Avoir, Raoul de Beaugency, and Gérard de Cherisy, to do knightly deeds worthy to be chronicled. The Battle of Gorgoni was won by the valour of the Count of Chartres and his followers, and Raimbaud Croton, a Chartrain, it was who first scaled the ramparts of Jerusalem. But none among the Chartrain Crusaders exceeded in bravery and brilliant daring Évrard, Viscomte of Chartres and Seigneur du Puiset. It was he who at the passage of the _Orontes_ (El far) stood at the head of the bridge and, like another Horatius Cocles, held it against the enemy. It was he again who, when Jerusalem had just fallen into the hands of the Crusaders, won the admiration of the whole army by a bold feat of arms. A party of Christian soldiers were put to flight by the desperate resistance of a troop of the enemy. Their flight was barred by Évrard, whose anger found vent in a scathing volley of reproaches.

‘Vile troop of cowards,’ he cried, ‘is it to fight you have come here, or to figure in a ballet? Are you children playing at soldiers, or little girls footing it in the chorus of a dance?... Away with fear, take courage, and remember you are Francs and born of brave sires. My ensign,’ he nobly added, ‘shall guide you--follow you me.’ Thus speaking, he rushed into the fray, and, inspired by his example, the Crusaders succeeded in overwhelming the infidels.

The part played by Count Étienne was at first less noble. He had married Adèle, daughter of William the Conqueror, and, like his wife, he was distinguished in this age of the sword by a love of art and letters. He wrote poetry, and Hildebert, Bishop of Le Mans, rashly compared him to Vergil. ‘Gentiz homme, noble barun,’ so Robert Wace describes him.

Summoned from more congenial pursuits, he sailed with Robert, Duke of Normandy, to join the army which was then encamped before Nicæa. In a letter to his wife he described the hospitality with which the Emperor Alexis received him at Constantinople. ‘He treated me with so much distinction,’ he says, ‘that I could only tear myself away from him with tears.’ He proceeded to amass booty both before and after the taking of Nicæa, and his letters acquaint his wife with his increasing wealth and his military preferment, but he grows anxious to return to France with his enormous loot. His cowardly retreat from Antioch and the treacherous representations by which he dissuaded the Emperor Alexis from relieving the Crusaders, who were now pressed by the army of Kerbogha, gained him a poor welcome in France when he returned. The subsequent taking of Jerusalem exposed the deserting Crusaders to unlimited contumely, and filled them with remorse. French irony expressed itself in biting _sirvente_, short satirical poems by fighting troubadours like Bertram de Born, the Provençal nobleman, who gave to Richard Coeur-de-Lion his nickname of Yea-and-Nay. Those faint-hearted knights who had stolen back to their baronial halls were denounced with cutting invective.

‘Marques, li monges de Clunhie Veuilh que fasson de vos capadel O siatz abbas de Cystilh, Pus le cor avetz tan mendic Que mais amatz dos buous et un araire A Montferrat qu’alors estr’ emperuieur.’[49]

Stung by such taunts, Count Étienne seized an opportunity which was given him of making a fresh expedition against the Turks. On this occasion he amply redeemed his reputation, and after many deeds of heroism he laid down his life for the cause whose sign he bore. Before setting out he had secured the blessing of the bishop by two interesting concessions.

It was a long-established custom of the town and a right by usage of the Counts of Chartres that, on the death of a bishop, his palace should be sacked. To S. Ives, when his new palace was finished, Count Étienne now granted a charter renouncing this barbarous practice. But none the less Thibault, his son, sacked the bishop’s palace upon the death of S. Ives. The other concession made by the Count was with regard to the liberty of the cloister, which, the canons maintained, was outside all secular jurisdiction. The quarrel which sprang from this question of the rights of the cloister was destined to last for three centuries. For the present it was forgotten in the more absorbing interest of the Crusades.

From the time of Fulbert onwards, the canons, on one pretext or another, whether by buying houses, claiming jurisdiction, or openly demanding the right of enclosing their cloister by walls and gates, had begun to encroach--so at least it was regarded by Counts and townsmen--upon the domain of Chartres, and to set up by degrees a town within a town, the cloister which stretched from the Rue de Cheval Blanc on the north to the Rue au Lait on the south, and from the Percheronne on the west to the Rue Montonnière, a continuation of the Rue Muret, on the east. The rights claimed by the Chapter were at last acknowledged and established by parliamentary decree, 1470; but only, as we have said, after centuries of bickering with the Counts. They, feeling themselves assailed both as to their pockets and their powers of jurisdiction by the privileges extended by the Church to those who attached themselves to the cloister, expressed their feelings by frequent armed raids into the precincts, pillaging the shops[50] which had sprung up beneath the shade of Notre-Dame and carrying off unfortunate clerks as prisoners to be ransomed from the great Tower. The Church retaliated with its one all-powerful weapon--excommunication.

The cloister[51] was finally enclosed by thick walls and by nine gates--mostly destroyed in the eighteenth century; but of some of them traces may still be seen--the _Porte Neuve_ and the _Porte de l’Étroit-Degré_, giving on the Rue du Cheval Blanc; the _Porte des Changes_ (Rue des Changes), and _Porte aux Herbes_ (Rue au Lait), _Porte Évière_, entrance of Rue Saint-Eman; _Porte Percheronne_ (Rue du Soleil-d’Or), _Porte des Carneaux_ (Rue Sainte-Même), _Porte des Lices_ (Marché-a-la-Filasse), _Porte de l’Évêque_ (Rue Muret).

One of the handsomest of the old houses of the canons that remains is that at the corner of the Rue des Changes, facing the south porch of the Cathedral. Utilitarian France has sadly restored this old thirteenth-century house, and turned it to account as the Post Office, just as she has planted some villainous cavalry barracks on the site of the old monastic buildings of S. Père, and converted into a military bakehouse the interesting old House of Loens.

Attached to the cloister was the Hospital or Hôtel-Dieu of Notre-Dame. It was founded about the tenth century; restored and spoilt in the eighteenth century. The hospital has recently been removed to a more suitable spot, and the old Hôtel-Dieu, with its thirteenth-century chapel, now serves for the École Mutuelle of the town. It stands in the south-west corner of the space which has been cleared in front of the Cathedral, between the Rue Fulbert and the Rue de la Cathédrale.

The departure and death of Etienne left Chartres and its bishop more than ever exposed to the brigandage of the Viscount Hugues, who was always in a state of excommunication, and whose bands of mercenary robbers held the roads, so that S. Ives could not attend the great Council at Sens or at Paris. With his violence, as with the greed and slackness of his own clergy, S. Ives carried on unceasing war, and it was not long before he found himself involved also in a bitter quarrel with the Countess Adèle, widow of Etienne. The Chapter had bound themselves by oath not to admit into their ranks any of those known as _conditionarii_--men, that is, freed from serfdom but still held under servile obligations to the Countess. The Countess exerted herself with extraordinary energy and persistence to advance the claims of certain clients of this description. S. Ives strove to calm her and to support his Chapter. The Countess retorted by violent reprisals and seized the wine of the precentor, Hilduin, in the street des Corroyeurs. S. Ives threatened her with excommunication, and she interdicted the canons from the use of the roads, and of bread and water throughout her domain. It was time to give way, and S. Ives, by a judicious compromise, obtained the Pope’s consent that the Lady Adèle’s men should be admitted to share in the revenues of the Cathedral.

In support of his suzerain the Viscount Hugues had been devastating the diocese. But a new Crusade saved S. Ives from his enemies. Bohémond of Tarentum, Prince of Antioch, came to Chartres to marry Constance, daughter of the King, and to receive the nuptial benediction from the hands of S. Ives, to whose efforts the marriage was due. The Countess Adèle displayed on this occasion a hospitality worthy in its magnificence of the daughter of William the Conqueror and of the noble House of Thibault the Trickster. The marriage ceremony was performed, and thereafter, before a vast assembly standing on the steps of the altar of the _Vierge-aux-Miracles_, the Prince of Antioch related his wonderful adventures, and bore witness to the miraculous protection afforded to him by God in the former Crusade. Men listened and wondered and waxed enthusiastic. When Bohémond concluded his discourse by inviting his listeners to follow the example of the first Crusaders, a crowd of knights rushed forward and then and there took the sign of the Cross. Foremost among them was the excommunicated brigand, Hugues, Viscomte de Chartres.

S. Ives died at the end of the year 1115. But during his busy lifetime there had been springing up the great monument which is his in Chartres, the Western Towers and the Porche Royal of the Cathedral, with its sculptured kings and queens, than which no sculpture in the world is more beautiful. During his lifetime also it had been necessary to rebuild in great part the Church of Fulbert. The rapidity with which it had been built in troublous times of war and famine may account for this necessity. S. Ives increased the length of the building by some twenty-five yards and, whilst carrying the nave and aisles one bay further west, he prolonged the crypt to the foot of his new towers, adorning it with mural paintings, of which traces yet remain. The towers were built at the end of each aisle, and the lower part of the west front, though actually the same now as that then built, lay back at that time on a line within the eastern sides of the towers. It was afterwards brought forward so as to be where it now is, flush with their western sides.

S. Ives also constructed the two new entrances to the crypt, with staircases and passages, through the Cave du Bois on the north and S. Martin’s Chapel on the south. The roof of the apse was also renewed, and an angelot or guardian angel set thereon.[52] But one of the chief works of S. Ives was the construction of the beautiful Jubé,[53] of which we have seen the few remaining fragments in the crypt.[54] Meanwhile the rest of the Cathedral, its chapels and altars, were being adorned by the pious generosity of the people of all classes. The choir was paved with marble and mosaic, and tapestries were hung round it where now runs the sculptured _clôture_. The beautiful glass through which the light still pours its coloured streams were being set up in the lower lights of the western façade, and in the sacristy was accumulating that collection of jewels and relics, of chalices, censers and crucifixes, of liturgies bound in silver, gold and precious stones, and of ecclesiastical ornaments, which was to render the treasury of Chartres one of the richest in the world, till the Vandals of the eighteenth century laid their sacrilegious hands upon it.

In order to obtain funds for the building of his towers and the restoration of his church, S. Ives, like Fulbert before him, begged freely of Kings.

It will be understood that his relations with Philippe were not of the kind to encourage him to ask for aid in that quarter. But he sent two monks to Henry I. of England with a letter, in which, after expressing the pious hope that Henry would continue to walk in the footsteps of his father, and recognise that, as the body ought to be subject to the mind, so ought the civil government to be subject to the ecclesiastical, he tells him that he is the servant of the servants of God, and not their master; their protector, and not their lord; and then adds that the bearers of the letter will explain to His Highness the needs of the Church, which he is conjured to satisfy with the same generosity as his parents showed.

It is scarcely surprising that a letter couched in such terms was not productive of alms from the English King who had taken his spouse from a nunnery; nor was an appeal to Matilda in the following year ‘to show that love for the Queen of the Angels which the Queens of the Angles have always so generously displayed’ any more successful. But a third more likely letter knocked, to borrow S. Ives’s own phrase, at the door of Henry’s generous heart with better result. Queen Matilda was charged with the duty of replying to it, and she made many gifts to the Church, among which were several bells, of which S. Ives writes in acknowledgment that ‘they are doubly dear to us, both on account of your piety and of their own sweet melody. Every time that they are put in motion to indicate certain hours, our ears are soothed with such delicious music that your memory is renewed within our hearts.’ He also reminds her, amid many such graceful sayings, that the roof wants mending; and at her death we find that his words bear fruit, for she made many bequests to the Cathedral, and left money to defray the expenses of a lead roof. But it was not only Kings and Queens who fell under the charm of S. Ives and the love of his Church, and it was not only the great who received his thanks. Such phrases as the following occur again and again in the Necrology of Notre-Dame:--‘On Nov. 24th, died Jean, son of Vital, the clever and faithful carpenter of this Church, who always worked with love and zeal at the work of this Church.’ That is but one name among the thousands, who now, with an extraordinary outburst of enthusiasm, came from far and near to build the superb monument of Chartres Cathedral.