THE CARTI STORY

Druids and Romans: The Crypt

BUILT half on the slope and half on the strath in a depression of calcareous soil, Chartres lies along the banks of the gliding Eure, breaking the long levels of La Beauce.

La Beauce, indeed, is still the waterless, shadeless, woodless plain that the Bishop of Poitiers described in the sixth century, but it is now also one immense field of corn in which man has planted a few scattered farms and pleasure houses.[1] It is the granary of France. Le blé c'est la Beauce et la Beauce c'est Chartres.[2]

And on every side of it, spread out in the summer time like a many-coloured carpet under the great dome of the sky, stretch the cornfields, cut by the black lines of the railway, or by the straight, disheartening lengths of roads which run beyond the distant horizon of monotonous level, to Dreux, to Orléans, to Paris. The twin spires of Chartres are the only landmark. The sole beauty in this country must be found in its fecundity; in the fields of standing corn, which the passing breezes curve into travelling waves, and in the endless perspective of sameness which inspires the same emotions of mingled pleasure and sadness as the sight of the vast and melancholy ocean. And, like a ship for ever a-sail in the distance, everywhere the great Church of Chartres is visible, with the passing light or shadow upon its grey, weather-beaten surfaces, or, as it seemed to Lowell:-

'Silent and grey as forest-leaguered cliff

Left inland by the ocean's slow retreat.'

Chartres is no place for an Atheist.[3] The exclamation of Napoleon on first entering the Cathedral of Notre-Dame is the keynote and summary of the town. For from the earliest dawn of its history down to the present day Chartres has preserved, almost unbroken, the tradition of a religious centre. Other notes have indeed been struck here and died away in the distance of ages. There have been discords in the score of her worldly history. The armies of C?sar and of Hastings have come and gone; the armies of England, of France, of Germany, have marched through the narrow, tortuous streets of this ancient city and left scarce a trace behind. Medi?valism with all its charm and all its vileness has disappeared before the excesses of that Revolution which sowed the seed of modern French civilisation. The thick forests which were once the glory of the Druids have vanished and given place to innumerable acres of tillage, whilst the sound of the woodman's axe has been replaced by the swish of the scythe and the hum of the threshing machine. But through all these changes Chartres has remained true to her heritage. She has been always the first town of Our Lady, the chosen citadel of the Virgin. The friars of the Middle Ages, who obtained the right of coining money, stamped on their coins the legend Prima Sedes Francie, and Charles-le-Chauve, when he presented to the town the Veil of the Blessed Mary, chose the Church of Chartres as the earliest and most august sanctuary of the cult of the Virgin. And even before the Christian era it was so. For, by a strange coincidence, in which there has been found something more than a coincidence, or nothing more than a reflection of Isis worship, or, again, merely a monkish invention, but by a strange coincidence, at any rate, the grotto, above which, in after years, the medi?val masons were to rear the superb superstructure of their Cathedral, was dedicated by the ancient Druids: 'To the Virgin who shall bear a son'-Virgini Paritur?.-There, upon the very spot in the dim vast crypt which is to-day the most famous and the most frequented shrine in the world, they worshipped an image which was the forerunner of the statue of Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre.

Were they moved by some echo of those most ancient Eastern rites which include the cult of a virgin mother and child, or had they heard, these wise and inscrutable priests, some echo of Isaiah's prophecy: A virgin shall conceive and bear a son? Possibly. At any rate, we know that a hundred years before the coming of Christ the Messianic idea had grown familiar to the Gentile world. The works of Greek and Roman writers are eloquent of this fact. Plato, in a passage which seems to echo the very words of Scripture, had long ago foretold what would be the fate of the perfectly just man upon earth; and Vergil, voicing the prevailing belief that the world's great age was soon to begin anew, and referring to an oracle of the Sybil, prayed for the speedy coming of the promised Saviour in language strikingly like that in which the prophets of the Old Testament speak of the Messiah. The Magi, the wise men and watchful astrologers of the East, waited impatiently for the coming of God upon earth, till they beheld a new star which rose over Bethlehem and announced His Nativity. And these ancient Druids also gave expression to the yearning of all Creation. Virgini Paritur?-To the Virgin who shall bear a son, they dedicated a wooden statue in the mysterious sanctuary hidden in the depths of their sacred forest, beneath the shade of which was the meeting-place of the Carnutes.

Thus it comes about that with the dawn of history we see, through the mist of the ages as it were, a solemn procession winding amongst the trees of the primeval forest.

At the head are two white bulls and the sacrificial priests, and in their train follow bards and novices chanting anthems, and a herald clad in white. The Druids follow. One of them is carrying bread, another a vase full of water, the third an ivory hand, the emblem of Justice. The high priest closes the procession, and about him cluster the other priests of the Oak and the chiefs of the local tribes. For the oak, Pliny tells us in his Natural History, is the Druid's sacred tree, and the mistletoe that grows thereon they regard as sent from Heaven and as the sign of a tree chosen by God. This golden bough of mistletoe, which they call All-Heal, the high priest is now about to cull from the chosen oak with his golden hook. As it falls, the sacred plant is caught beneath in a white mantle; the victims are slain, and the mistletoe is distributed whilst God is besought to prosper His gift to them unto whom He has vouchsafed it.

Such rites, so it may appear to the least imaginative of us as we behold to-day the pilgrims crowding to the shrine of Our Lady, or the long processions of priests and choristers winding their way from the sculptured portals of the Cathedral to visit the Abbey of S. Père, or the Chapel of Notre-Dame-de-la-Brèche, or through the crypt to the shrine of Notre-Dame-de-Sous-Terre,[4] are curiously prophetic of the history of the place. So thinking, we shall look at the western towers and note, like Gaston Latour, the bigness of the actual stones of the masonry, contrary to the usual Gothic manner, as if in reminiscence of those old Druidic piles amid which the Virgin of Chartres had been adored, long before the birth of Christ, by a mystic race, possessed of some prophetic sense of the grace in store for them.

Who then were these Druids and who the Carnutes? From the Carnutes the modern name of this their town is derived, and philologists assure us that the root of the name is to be found in the word for oak, which, in Celtic, bears some resemblance to the Latin quercus. Similarly évreux is derived from the word ebvre = forest. All Central Gaul in those days was covered with oak forests as with a garment. Hence, it is suggested, the name of Carnutes was applied as a generic term to the dwellers in those forests, and was specialised as the title of the Chartrains par excellence on account of the choice of this spot by the Druids for their deliberations and their sacrifices. It may be so. Philology is one of the most amusing diversions. It is quite as intellectual as most other parlour games, and often much more entertaining. Human as heraldry and more profitable than pedigree hunting it certainly is, but somehow it is less convincing. Therefore if anyone prefer to derive this word Carnutes from cairn-the stone which formed the Druidical altar and equally with oaks seems to have played an important part in their ceremonies, he may be as much right as anybody else.

The condition of the Gauls at the time of the Roman conquest has been described by their conqueror. C?sar in his Commentaries states that the Gauls were divided into three classes-priests, nobles and nobodies. The priests, who enjoyed complete immunity from military service, insisted on oral tradition in the teaching of their tenets. Their object in so doing, as C?sar conjectured, was to prevent the memory from being weakened and their doctrines from being vulgarised; but the result has been that, apart from the few facts I shall mention and a vast superstructure of theory and legend which has been built upon them, they have faded from the ken of mankind. Chief among their tenets C?sar mentions the belief in the immortality and the transmigration of the soul. The Druids were properly the highest of three orders of priests-Bards, Soothsayers and Druids, the latter being philosophers who, to the natural science studied by the soothsayers, added the study of ethics. There would seem to have been much of the Pythagorean and something also of the Brahman in these philosophers, whose teaching was once expounded by the Arch-Druid Divitiacus, in Rome, to the sympathetic ears of Marcus Tullius Cicero and his brother Quintus.

That teaching, alas! has not been enshrined in Cicero's sonorous page, but Lucan in his Pharsalia corroborates C?sar:-

'The Druids now, while arms are heard no more,

Old mysteries and barbarous rites restore:

A tribe who singular religion love,

And haunt the lonely coverts of the grove.

If dying mortals' doom they sing aright

No ghosts descend to dwell in dreadful night,

No parting souls to grisly Pluto go,

Nor seek the dreary silent shades below:

But forth they fly immortal in their kind

And other bodies in new worlds they find.

Thus life forever runs its endless race,

And like a line death but divides the space.

A stop which can but for a moment last,

A point between the future and the past.

Thrice happy they beneath their northern skies

Who that worst fear, the fear of death, despise!'

In another passage the same poet describes in dark colours the gloomy rites of the barbarous priests; their rude, misshapen images, and the scene of their ritual in the sacred wood, smeared with human blood.

But of their ritual we really know nothing, apart from the fact of human sacrifices, which, in extreme cases, they justified by the dogma that 'unless for the life of a man man's life be rendered the wrath of the immortal gods cannot be appeased,' and excepting their veneration for the mistletoe.[5]

The power of this priesthood was not confined to things spiritual. The Druids acted as a court of public arbitration, and the most important private suits, especially cases of murder and homicide, were submitted to their judgment. Now Britain was the headquarters of Druidism, but once a year, it is recorded by C?sar, a general assembly of the order was held within the territories of the Carnutes, and there the sacred rites were celebrated, the young priests, after a prolonged course of training, initiated, and the Arch-Druid annually elected. It is probable that these ceremonies took place at Chartres-although it is possible that the claim of Dreux, of Senantes, of Alluyes, or of other neighbouring places which can boast Druidical remains, may be as well grounded.

But, at least, it is evident that the Pays Chartrain was a stronghold of priests rather than of fighters, and, perhaps, it was for this reason that in the early years of the Gallic War, the Carnutes, who among the Celtic Gauls were subject to the Remi (Reims), took but little part in the active resistance to C?sar's arms. They had, in fact, welcomed rather than resisted the Proconsul, regarding him as their champion and liberator from the invasion of the Helvetii and the threatened dominion of the Germans. But when he began to meddle with their institutions they grew restive, and determined to throw off the Roman yoke. For, before

C?sar's time, there had been, apparently, a general movement against monarchical government throughout Gaul, with the result that most of the tribes were free, but with a constitution decidedly aristocratical or theocratic. Thus at Chartres-Autricum was its Latin name-fifty years before the coming of the Romans, Priscus had been reigning.

A pious legend recounts that, during the lifetime of this King the son of one of the great chieftains was drawn lifeless from a deep well into which he had fallen. The father took in his arms the body of his child, already cold in death, mounted his charger, and, riding at a gallop for twenty leagues, approached the altar of the Virgin, whom the Druids worshipped, and laid the boy at her feet. Then life came back to the lad, he opened his eyes and smiled at the sacred statue. King Priscus, the legend adds, on hearing of this miracle, summoned a great assembly of priests and nobles, and appointed the Lady of Miracles his heiress and the Queen of his realms.

Thus legend. In fact we know that after the days of Priscus monarchy no longer obtained among the Carnutes.

But there was a certain Tasgetius, a descendant of the old royal house of the Carnutes. As a reward for his services to the Romans C?sar restored him to his hereditary throne. The theocracy felt itself attacked; the Druids roused the republican spirit of the people. The doubtful success of C?sar's second expedition to Britain seemed to offer a good opportunity for successful revolt. The people rose and assassinated their King, who was also the Roman nominee. C?sar immediately ordered a legion under Lucius Plancus to advance upon Chartres, punish the conspirators, and take up its winter quarters there.

When the railway was being constructed in 1846, it was necessary to remove a vast mound which lay to the west of the town between the Portes des épars and Porte Chastelet. Many Roman, Gallic and Carlovingian coins[6] were found in it, and it is supposed that this mound represented in part the material dug out when the foundations of the crypt and of the Cathedral were sunk, and in part the remains of the camp of Plancus.

The threatening aspect of affairs in Gaul called for prompt action on the part of C?sar. Before the end of the winter (53 B.C.) he made a dash into the country of the Nervii, and then in the early spring held his usual Council of Gaul, probably at Amiens. The Carnutes, Senones and Treveri, omitted to send their representatives. C?sar took this as a declaration of war. He immediately broke up the Council and ordered it to meet again at Paris, which was a convenient point for operating against the Senones at Sens, and thereafter against their neighbours the Carnutes at Chartres. The brilliant rapidity of his movements terrified these tribes. Acco, the leader of the conspiracy, summoned his supporters to the towns. But whilst they were endeavouring to obey the summons, news came that the Romans were already in their midst. Through the ?dui and Remi, who acted as mediators, the Carnutes and Senones sent to make submission and beg for pardon. C?sar granted it for the time, and then devoted his energies to the destruction of Ambiorix, and the chastisement of the Treveri and the tribes on the Rhine.

But it was only a short respite, not pardon, that they were granted. Returning at the end of the year from his hunt for Ambiorix and taking his revenge upon the Eburones, C?sar brought his army back to Reims and then convened the Council of Gaul. An inquiry was held into the conspiracy among the Senones and Carnutes. Acco was condemned to suffer death after the cruel old fashion of the Romans. He was stripped, his neck was thrust into a fork, and he was then flogged to death. But the flames of rebellion thus rudely repressed were not destroyed. They broke out again the same winter with redoubled fury when the absence of C?sar in Italy afforded an opportunity. The murder of Clodius and the reported anarchy at Rome fanned into a flame the slumbering embers of discontent. The death of Acco was discussed by the Gallic chieftains when they held their councils in their secret woodland retreats, perhaps, indeed, at Chartres itself, and the bitterness of the Roman yoke began to seem intolerable. To regain their lost liberty all were eager for a general revolt. It was decided to begin at once in order to cut C?sar off from his army in Gaul. When the question rose as to who should incur the danger of leading the way, the Carnutes undertook this duty. They first exacted a solemn pledge of support from their countrymen by the Gallic custom of mingling their standards, then, on the appointed day, under the leadership of Gutruatus and Conconnetodumnus, they gave the signal for the great revolt by murdering every Roman citizen they could find in their chief trading town on the Loire, Orléans. With the terrible struggle that ensued between the brilliant energy of C?sar and the noble patriotism of Vercingetorix we are not here concerned. Suffice it to say that among his first acts of revenge C?sar sacked and burned Orléans, the town of the Carnutes. Nothing daunted, the Carnutes furnished 12,000 men to the army raised to deliver Vercingetorix, who was holding Alise with desperate valour. On the fall of that town the Carnutes, in obedience to the advice of their leader, Gutruatus, entered into yet another league for their common deliverance from the yoke of their oppressor. They joined the Bituriges and other peoples of Gaul, but when C?sar himself marched against them with his sixth and seventh legion they fled with their cattle into the woods. Yet, even in the secret retreats of their mighty forests, they were not safe from the hand of the Roman general. They were compelled to submit and to pass under the yoke, and their chief, Gutruatus, was beaten with rods until he died.

Thus the country of the Chartrains was absorbed into the Roman Empire, and it remained under the domination of Rome, reaping the fruits of that strong administration in the form of roads and good order and the minimum of oppression, until the coming, at the end of the fifth century, of Clovis, the Frankish hero.