Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe by Sabine Baring-Gould (books to read to improve english TXT) 📖

now extremely scarce. Two vases of this ware may be seen on the altar of the chapel. The principal potters there were Pierre Fournier, Joseph Olery, Paul Rouse, and Feraud. They usually signed their work with their initials. Maximus was just a century later than Martin; the fever for imitating the lives of the Fathers of the Deserts of Egypt was then in full heat. His master, Honoratus, had been wont to escape from his island monastery and hide in a cave in the glowing red porphyry rocks of the Esterelle. I can understand his retiring thither, above a sea blue as the neck of a peacock, among glowing red rocks, and masses of pines, and heather, and arbutus, and every kind of fragrant herb, and where, when only snowdrops are appearing in England, the spires of white asphodel are basking in the sun.

The primitive rock monastery of S. Martin. It was abandoned later when the monks moved to the further side of the river; but Felix, a disciple of S. Martin, remained and died in the cave, now inaccessible, below the cross.]

Near Nottingham are the "Popish Holes," close to the river Lene. They are thus described by Stukeley. "One may easily guess Nottingham to have been an ancient town of the Britons; as soon as they had proper tools they fell to work upon the rocks, which everywhere offer themselves so commodiously to make houses in, and I doubt not first was a considerable collection of this sort. What is visible at present is not so old a date as their time, yet I see no reason to doubt but it is formed upon theirs. There is a ledge of perpendicular rock hewn out into a church, houses, chambers, dove-houses, &c. The church is like those in the rocks of Bethlehem and other places in the Holy Land; the altar is natural rock, and there has been painting upon the wall, a steeple, I suppose, where a bell hung, and regular pillars. The river winding about makes a fortification to it, for it comes at both ends of the cliff, leaving a plain in the middle. The way into it was by a gate cut out of the rock, and with an oblique entrance for more safety. Without is a plain with three niches, which I fancy their place of judicature, or the like. Between this and the castle is a hermitage of like workmanship."

These remains pertain to a cell called S. Mary le Rock, a quarter of a mile west of the Castle, and belonged to Lenton priory. It was abandoned after the time of Edward IV., and is supposed to have come down in a perfect form to the time of the Civil War, when it was much injured by the Puritans as Papists' holes. A good many illustrations exist of it after the Civil Wars, as a large folding plate in Throsby's and Thoroton's "History of Nottinghamshire," 1797, but there is none to show what it was before.

It possesses a pigeonry much like that at Brantome, but on a smaller scale, that wiseacres have pronounced to be a Columbarium, not for doves, but for the reception of jars containing the ashes of the dead, and have attributed this dovecote to Roman times. Mr. William Stetton, a local antiquary, writing in 1806, stated that the excavation "appeared to have been made in the earliest ages of Christianity, when the converts resorted for secrecy and security to grottoes or caves, and similar places of retirement and seclusion. The style is evidently Roman. The whole interior appears to have been invested with a thin plastering, or perhaps, only a wash, which has been painted in various colours in mosaic devices. The altar still remains pretty perfect notwithstanding the ravages of time and wanton depredation. A Roman column still adorns the north side of it, but its corresponding one on the south side has long been destroyed."

An architect, John Carter, in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1860, stated that the "arrangements of the excavations are monastical; and we, with much satisfaction, trace out the infirmary, refectory, dormitory, chapter-house, and the chapel. The latter place gives two aisles, divided by perforated arches, with headways in the manner of groins, and at the east end an altar."

There can be no question now that although the original excavations were possibly enough Roman-British, the Papists' holes, as we have them now, are truly, as Mr. Carter says, monastical.

How absurd old fashioned antiquaries were may be proved by the fact that the chimney that warmed the monks, and up which went the smoke from their kitchen, was pronounced to be a _bustum_, a flue employed for the cremation of the dead. As to the "Roman" column, that also is mediaeval.

Curzon, in his "Monasteries of the Levant," 1849, says "the scenery of Meteora (Mt. Pindus in Albania) is of a very singular kind. The end of a range of rocky hills seems to have been broken off by some earthquake, or washed away by the Deluge, leaving only a series of twenty or thirty tall, thin, smooth, needle-like rocks, many hundred feet in height; some like gigantic tusks, some shaped like sugar- loaves, and some like vast stalagmites. These rocks are surrounded by a beautiful grassy plain, on three sides of which grow groups of detached trees, like those of an English park. Some of these rocks shoot up quite clean and perpendicularly from the smooth green grass, some are in clusters, some stand alone like obelisks. Nothing can be more strange and wonderful than this romantic region, which is unlike anything I have ever seen before or since. In Switzerland, Savoy, the Tyrol, is nothing at all to be compared to these extraordinary peaks. At the foot of many of these rocks there are numerous caves and holes, some of which appear to be natural, but most of them are artificial; for in the dark and wild ages of monastic fanaticism, whole flocks of hermits roosted in these pigeonholes. Some of these caves are so high up in the rocks that one wonders how the poor old gentlemen could ever get up to them, whilst others are below the surface, and the anchorites who burrowed in them, like rabbits, frequently afforded rare sport to parties of roving Saracens; indeed, hermit-hunting scenes seem to have been a fashionable amusement previous to the twelfth century. In early Greek frescoes and in small stiff pictures with gold backgrounds, we see many frightful representations of men on horseback in Roman armour, with long spears, who are torturing and slaying Christian devotees. In these pictures the monks and hermits are represented in gowns made of a kind of coarse matting, and they have long beards, and some of them are covered with hair; these, I take it, were the ones most to be admired, as in the Greek Church sanctity is always in the inverse ratio to beauty. All Greek saints are painfully ugly, but the hermits are much uglier, dirtier, and older than the rest. They must have been very fusty people beside, eating roots and living in holes like rats and mice."

On the summit of these needles of rock are monasteries. Of these there were twenty-four, but now seven alone remain tenanted by monks. The sole access to them is by nets let down by ropes and hauled up by a windlass, or as an alternative in the case of that of S. Barlaam, by a succession of ladders.

As an example of a rock monastery and church in Egypt, I may quote the same author's description of that of Der el Adra, or of the Pully, situated on the top of Gebel el Ferr, where a precipice about 200 feet in height rises out of the waters of the Nile.

The access to it is by a cave or fissure in the rock, the opening being about the size of the inside of a capacious chimney. "The abbot crept in at a hole at the bottom, and telling me to observe where he placed his feet, he began to climb up the cleft with considerable agility. A few preliminary lessons from a chimney-sweep would have been of the greatest service to me, but in this branch of art my education had been neglected, and it was with no small difficulty that I climbed up after the abbot, whom I saw striding and sprawling in the attitude of a spread eagle above my head. My slippers soon fell off upon the head of a man under me. At least twenty men were scrambling and puffing underneath him. Arms and legs were stretched out in all manner of attitudes, the forms of the more distant climbers being lost in the gloom of the narrow cavern up which we were advancing. Thence the climb proceeded up a path. At the summit beside the monastic habitations was the church cut out of the rock, to which descent is made by a narrow flight of steps."

Mr. Curzon gives a plan of this church as half catacomb or cave, and one of the earliest Christian buildings which has preserved its originality.

The caves of Inkermann in the Crimea have been already alluded to. Here is a description of a subterranean abandoned monastery and church.

"Having traversed a passage about fifty feet long, we reached a church, or rather the remains of one; for a portion of the living rock in which these works were cut had fallen and carried with it half of this curious crypt. Its semicircular vaulted roof, and the pillars in its corners, indicated it to be of Byzantine origin; while a Greek sculptured cross, in the centre of the roof, told that it was a temple dedicated to that religion. The altar, and any sculpture which might have existed near it, are gone, and have long since been burnt into lime, or built into some work at Sevastopol. Beyond the church we found a large square apartment, entered by another passage, and looking over the valley of Inkermann. A few more cells, resembling those on the stairs, composed the whole of this series of excavated chambers, the arrangements of which at once proclaimed them to have been a monastery. These were the cells, the refectory, and the church. There is nothing in their construction as a work of art; yet there is an absence of that roughness and simplicity which exist in many caverns of the opposite mountain, and which indicate their being of a much earlier date than these." [Footnote: Scott (C. H.), "The Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Crimea," Lond. 1854, p. 280.]


CHAPTER X


CAVE ORACLES

Standing upon the pinnacle upon which is planted the marvellous Romanesque cathedral of Le Puy, and looking north, is seen in the distance the basaltic mass of Polignac crowned by a lofty donjon.

That mass of columnar basalt was occupied and held sacred in Roman times, and was dedicated to Apollo. In the courtyard of the castle is a well, l'Albime it is called, that descends to the depth of 260 feet, and there still exists an enormous stone mask of the solar god that closed it, and from the mouth of which oracles were given. How these were produced is now made clear. In the side of the well is a chamber cut out of the rock that concealed a confederate who uttered the response to the questioner, and the voice came up hollow and with reverberation betwixt the gaping lips of stone, to overawe and satisfy the inquirer.

"Before the old tribes of Hellas created temples to the divinities," says Porphyry in his treatise 'On the Cave of the Nymphs,' "they consecrated caverns and grottoes to their service in the island of Crete to Zeus,