How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth CenturiesO'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle
History
How France Built Her Cathedrals: A Study in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
O'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle
Architecture, Gothic; Cathedrals -- France
In 1228 a storm damaged the rising structure, necessitating years of
tiresome repairs. Pope Urban IV, as a native son of Troyes, contributed.
During the last forty years of the XIII century the transept was
building. It showed traces of English feeling derived perhaps from
Edmund Plantagenet, a son of the builder of Westminster Abbey, who had
married the dowager Countess of Champagne. His ward Jeanne, Thibaut the
Singer's granddaughter, inherited the countship of Champagne, the
kingdom of Navarre, and by marriage became the queen of France.
Slowly during the XIV and XV centuries, one bay of the nave was added to
another; the changes from the precise lines of Rayonnant tracery to the
undulating mullions of the Flamboyant day are easy to follow. The long
delays were caused by lack of funds and the repeated need for
consolidating the parts already built. The soil on which the church
stood was unsuitable, and from the first, security was jeopardized by
using the soft, native stone in those parts of the edifice which were
out of sight, in order to economize on the firm stone imported from
Burgundy.
Several times during the difficulties of reconstruction, the cathedral
chapter turned for advice to noted masters--to Raymond du Temple,
Charles V's architect, and to André de Dammartin, patronized by the
king's brothers of Berry and Burgundy. Work ceased altogether during
the English occupancy.
Then in 1429 the city opened its gates to Charles VII on his way to be
crowned at Rheims. Jeanne d'Arc, during her trial in Rouen, told of an
incident of their entry into Troyes. Some of the townspeople were
fearful lest the heroine of Orleans came of the devil, so they had a
holy preacher march out to exorcise her. Scattering holy water and
making repeated signs of the Cross, Brother Richard approached the Maid.
"Draw near without uneasiness," Jeanne assured him, in her pleasant
manner. "I won't fly away."
The city by its reception of the king evinced eagerness to wipe out the
infamy of the Treaty of Troyes, signed here in 1420 by Queen Isabeau of
Bavaria, wherein she repudiated her son Charles VII and gave France over
to the foreign invader. The people's renewed hope and self-respect
expressed itself in some of the most lovely Flamboyant foliage ever
chiseled--the deeply undercut leafage on the gable of the north portal
(1462-68).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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