When William Rufus captured Le Mans in 1097, he exacted the demolition of the cathedral's towers on the charge that they dominated his residence. Annoyed that Hildebert had been elected bishop without his deciding voice, he pillaged his palace, confiscated his possessions, and kept him chained in prison for a year. The bishop was imprisoned as well by Maine's designing neighbor to the south, the Count of Anjou, and once while in the south of France he almost met death at the hands of Saracen pirates. Despite vicissitudes, he found time for writing poetry and for building. He obtained a monk-architect named Jean from the noted Geoffrey, abbot of Vendôme,[165] author, writer, and the intimate of many popes. Later, when Abbot Geoffrey asked for the return of his architect, Hildebert retained him, and a tart letter of the abbot to the bishop exists; it appears that monk Jean was sent, in consequence, on a penitential pilgrimage to Palestine. Bishop Hildebert's part in Le Mans' actual cathedral is the semicircular pier arches discernible in all the bays of the nave save the two touching the transept, the alternate circular piers, and the west façade, wherein were retained older portions, and against which leans a big menhir of immemorial age: "_Il y a dans la cathédrale toute la simple beauté du menhir qui l'annonce_," is one of Rodin's vivifying phrases. Bishop Hildebert consecrated his new cathedral in 1120, and it is related how, on that day, Fulk V of Anjou, the widower of the heiress of Maine, about to start for the Holy Land, set his little son of seven, Geoffrey, on the high altar of Le Mans Cathedral, and said with emotion: "O holy Julian, to thee I commend my child and my lands. Defend and protect them both." His prowess in Palestine was eventually to win for him the heiress of Jerusalem, so that when he had married his son Geoffrey to a woman of great fortune, he sensibly left him as sole ruler in Maine and Anjou, contenting himself with his Oriental kingdom. Two fires in quick succession damaged the Romanesque cathedral of Le Mans. Ordericus Vitalis tells how "in the first week of September, 1134, the hand of God punished many sins by fire, for the ancient and wealthy cities of Le Mans and Chartres were burned." In the necessary changes that followed practically all the central nave was redone by Bishop Guillaume de Passavant (1145-86). The triforium, the clearstory, and the masonry roof are his, and he constructed the pointed arches under the semicircular ones of Bishop Hildebert's pier arcade. The four immense square vault sections (c. 1150) over Le Mans' nave are of the heavy rib Plantagenet type, like the so-called domical vaults of Angers Cathedral. Their crown, or keystone, being ten feet higher than their framing arches, a pronounced concave shape results. The addition of a heavy stone roof necessitated the englobing of each alternate monolithic column by a square pier cantoned with shafts.