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
The _abbaye-double_ was favored both by the Angevin rulers and their
Poitevin neighbors, the dukes of Aquitaine. Henry II's father and
mother, Geoffrey the Handsome of Anjou and the ex-empress Matilda of
England, gave generously toward the building of the new church, and so
did Aliénor of Aquitaine's forbears of the illustrious house of
Poitiers; hence it was fitting they both, Henry and Aliénor, should lie
in burial there. When Henry Plantagenet died in 1189 in his castle at
Chinon, which the old chronicler tells us rises steeply from the Vienne
"straight up to heaven"--the Chinon whither Jeanne d'Arc was to come to
give France a new soul--the dead monarch was carried to Fontevrault
church near by, instead of to the Grammont he favored, the mother-house
of a new Order founded by Stephen de Tierney in 1176. The archbishop of
Tours came to Fontevrault to conduct the funeral, and Henry's rebellious
son, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, stood by while they lowered into the tomb
the great administrator who gave us the germs of our jury system, the
man of the same unbridled passions, the same strong leadership in arms
and statecraft, as his ancestor, Fulk Nerra, who had won this strip of
middle France by sheer ability. And well Richard might feel serious, for
the nine generations of increasing prosperity, promised to Fulk I of
Anjou, ended with him.
In 1199 the Lion-hearted himself was brought to Fontevrault for burial;
he had begged to be laid in penitence at the feet of the father he had
defied, like the true Angevin he was. As his elder brother had said: "It
has ever been the way with Plantagenets for brother to hate brother, and
for son to turn against father." The ceremony for Richard in Fontevrault
abbey church was conducted by St. Hugh from Lincoln, where he was
raising a splendid Early-English cathedral. He had come to France to
protest to Richard against further spoliation of his see. At this
'shrouding of a second Angevin among the shrouden women,' Aliénor stood
beside the nuns, and, the ceremony over, St. Hugh, so wise and holy amid
such seething passions, proceeded to comfort the widowed Berengaria.
Richard, like his father, was a cosmopolite. "_Miey hom e miey baron_,
_Angles_, _Norman_, _Peytavin et Gascon_," he sang in his prison lay,
and indeed one would be puzzled to know which of them were the
countrymen of him whom Guizot called "the bravest, most inconsiderate,
most passionate, most ruffianly, most heroic adventurer of the Middle
Ages."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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