Cliff Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe Part 9

Archibald paid not the slightest regard to the summons or to the sentence p.r.o.nounced against him _in contumaciam_. The law could not enforce its judgment, and six years later in 1397 he died. The King refused to recognise his son Archibald VI. as Count of Perigord, but Archibald disregarded the refusal, and openly sided with the English.

He successfully resisted the troops sent against him, and continued in the same courses as his father. At last he was brought to bay in Montignac, where he was constrained to capitulate. He was sent to Charles VI., but effected his escape and fled to London in 1399. Thence he returned in 1404, and captured Auberoche, much about the time of the English victory at Agincourt. He died in undisturbed possession of his county of Perigord in 1430.

Few portions of France so lent itself to the requirements of the feudal tyrants of the Middle Ages, as they did also to those of the _routiers_, as the volcanic district of Auvergne. There the floods of lava that flowed from the volcanoes have formed caps to hills, with precipices on every side, cut through by the streams, that have separated portions from the main current. Every such peak or fragment of plateau was laid hold of by the seigneurs of old, as sites for their fortresses. From the number of these strongholds and the almost impregnable nature of most of them, the feudal tyrants of Auvergne were able to hold their own, long after the rest had been brought to their knees; and it was not until Richelieu with iron hand moved against them that their career of rapine and violence was curbed. Beginning in 1626, Richelieu ordered the demolition of all feudal fortresses that were not necessary for the defence of the frontiers, and which were a permanent menace to the King's authority, and an object of terror to town and country, and to the n.o.bles afforded reminiscence of past lawlessness.

The demolition was entrusted to the communes themselves. And in order to bring the culprits to speedy judgment, he renewed the inst.i.tution of the _Grand Jours_; that of Poitiers in 1634 condemned over two hundred n.o.bles convicted of exactions and crimes.

But it was impossible in many places, notably in Auvergne, for the communes to get hold of the castles and blow them up. There, for some thirty years longer, the seigneurs defied justice, and it was much the same elsewhere. On the 31st August 1665, the _Grand Jours_ were announced for all the centre of France, but notice that they were to be held had been given so long before that the guilty were allowed plenty of time to escape out of the country, go into hiding or come to terms.

Great were the expectations of the people. Right was at length to prevail over Might. The Day of Judgment was coming on the oppressors.

The Mighty would be put down from their seat and the humble would be exalted in their room. A peasant wearing his cap before a n.o.ble, the latter knocked it off his head "Pick it up," said the peasant, "or the King will cut off your head." The seigneur obeyed.

But the result was disappointing. Only one n.o.ble had his head cut off.

Few executions were carried into effect, many were on paper. One of the latter, a ruffian steeped in blood, defied the sentence and was banished. Flechier in his amusing and instructive book, _Les grands Jours d'Auvergne_, has given us a dramatic account of the trial.

Every description of intrigue was had recourse to, in order to neutralise the effect of justice. The fair ladies of Clermont, _les chats fourres_, as Flechier calls them, did their utmost to reduce the severity of the judges. The Great Days lasted three months, and ended in disappointment. Many of the worst offenders, convicted of atrocious crimes, entered the Royal service and fought in the armies of the King.

But if justice spared the culprits, the opportunity was accorded to destroy their strongholds, and now little remains of these Towers of Iniquity but the foundations, and some fragments of their ma.s.sive walls, which were generally constructed of basaltic prisms taken from the rock that sustained the castles, laid horizontally. "Puzzolana was mixed with the mortar used in these constructions, and without the binding quality communicated by this ingredient, probably no cement would have taken effect on the smooth a rid iron surfaces of the prisms." [Footnote: Poulette Scrope, "The Extinct Volcanoes of Central France," Lond. 1858.]

The King had indeed desired that greater severity should be used. He wrote to the judges: "You must manage to banish oppression and violence out of the provinces. You have begun well, and you must finish well."

At the conclusion he had a medal struck representing a slave rising from the ground, under the protection of the sword of royalty, and with the expressive device, _Salus provinciarum repressa potentorum audacia_.

It was, however, rather the destruction of the nests than the punishment of the Vultures that effected the work.

The Marquis de Canillac, one of the worst, escaped into Spain. He had maintained twelve ruffians, whom he called his Apostles, who catechised with sword and rod all who rebelled against his exactions. He levied taxes on necessary articles of food, and when his va.s.sals abstained from food he fined them for not eating. He allowed none to marry without paying into his hands half the _dot_ of the bride. His kinsman, the Vicomte Lamotte-Canillac, was the one culprit executed.

The river Vezere, opposite to the prehistoric caves of Moustier, makes a sudden bend about a wall of chalk 300 feet high and 1500 feet long.

"Of all the rocks that have served for the habitation of man, this is the most striking for its dimensions and for the number of habitations it contained, if one may give that name to the excavations which the hand of man has appropriated to his use. Staircases were carved in the rock, carried half-way up the height, to where the cliff has been excavated, its recesses enlarged and divided into compartments."

[Footnote: De Roumejoux, _Bulletin de la Soc. Hist. de Perigord._ T. xix. 1892.]

This bluff is called La Roche S. Christophe. It arrests attention at once, for half-way up it is furrowed horizontally as though worked by a giant's tool. If the visitor approaches the cliff, he will find that the ma.s.ses of rock that have fallen from above, as well as others that have formed spurs, have been extensively worked to form town walls, gateways, a church, a monastery, and dwelling-houses.

One gateway, bored through the rock, has a guard-room or sentinel's watch-chamber scooped out of a pinnacle. But not a roof remains, not a living soul is to be seen in the street, not a huxter's stall in the market-place, only tiles strewn about and white rocks blackened with smoke show that man lived there.

By a flight of stairs cut in the rock, the visitor can ascend to the furrow in the face of the cliff, and there he finds that the whole has been elaborately utilised. There are chambers excavated in the chalk that were formerly closed by wood part.i.tions, with recesses for beds, cupboards, seats--clearly the bedrooms of ladies. The grooves into which the planks were fitted can be made out. Doors were fitted into rocky rebates to move on their hinges, the hinges being round prolongations of the door frame turning in holes sunk in floor and roof. The kitchen is there, the bakehouse with its oven; the guard-room with its benches for the troopers, cisterns, store-chambers, closets, cellars, a chapel, and the latrines. All but the last are on a level in one long row, with the cliff descending precipitately from the gallery that precedes the apartments and gave communication between them and which, in part, had been widened by means of a wooden balcony and railing. The chapel, if that be the walled structure in a hole of the rock, is now inaccessible. Its destination is uncertain. The peasants so designate it.

Fragments of earthenware vessels and of tiles lie on the floors. I could find nothing else.

Above the princ.i.p.al gallery are others of less importance that can only be reached from the top of the cliff.

This Roche Saint Christophe has a history. It was first fortified by Frotarius de Gourdon to resist the incursions of the Northmen. He was a.s.sa.s.sinated at Mourcinez in Coursac in 991. There was a priory in the town below, mention of which is found in a charter of 1187.

The remarkable range of chambers and structures in the face of the precipice formed the castle of the family of Laroque. It was a worthy family, greatly respected in the neighbourhood, and loyal to the crown of France. The seigneur was the protector of the little town that lay below.

On Pa.s.sion Sunday, 1401, the townsfolk and the occupants of the castle were gathered in the church, when a cry was raised that the enemy had swarmed over the walls and were in the town. Adhemar de Laroque was the seigneur at the time. He hastened from the church, but already the street was full of English, and escape to his castle was cut off, as they had secured the stair.

Adhemar had a personal enemy, one Jean Ducos, a kinsman of the Baron de Limeuil. These men, calculating that the garrison of La Roque would be off its guard on that holy day, arranged with the English garrison of the Rock of Tayac to surprise the town.

They came upon it un.o.bserved, and breaking in, ma.s.sacred the people and the guards; then ensued a general pillage, and a conflagration. Every house was fired after it had been ransacked, and the English Ribauds running along the platform with torches in their hands, applied the flame to everything combustible--doors, galleries, part.i.tions, rafters --all blazed, and the only portion of the castle and town that was left unconsumed were the latrines, to which they did not consider it worth their pains to apply their torches.

From that day to this the town of La Roche Saint Christophe has been abandoned. No cottager has ventured to repair the ruined habitations for his own use; as the place is esteemed haunted, notably on the night of Pa.s.sion Sunday, when a ghostly train of the dead is seen flickering in and out of the rocks and ruins by the light of the Easter moon.

But the castle was again tenanted for awhile by a band of Huguenots, who committed such depredations in the neighbourhood that on 30th March 1588, the Viscount of Aubeterre, Governor of Perigord issued orders-- "as the enemies of the King occupying this Castle are doing incredible mischief to the poor folk of the neighbourhood," that they should be expelled and the castle be utterly destroyed. [Footnote: La Roche S.

Christophe is mentioned in the letters of Petrarch. Labbe. Frag. Bp.

Petrarchi.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: KRONMETZ. This cave castle was nominally held by n.o.bles in feof to the Bishop of Trent, but it actually became a den of robbers. It was taken by storm in 1210. Count v. Firmian, to whom it belongs, has built for himself a more convenient residence at the foot of the rock.]

Quite as curious, and with a less tragic history is La Roche Gageac on the Dordogne, below Sarlat. "Ma chere patrie," wrote the old chronicler, Jean Tarde, "une pet.i.te ville bien close et tres forte dependant de la temporalite de l'evesque de Sarlet, _la quelle ne fut jamais prinse par les Anglais_."

The white Jura.s.sic limestone dappled orange, fawn colour, and silver grey, rises 250 feet above the river, the lower portion is in terraces, very narrow, on which are the houses clinging to the rock, cramped between the Dordogne and the cliff which rises 140 to 160 feet above.

The old houses are echeloned along the face of the rock, superposed the one on the other, calcined by the sun as they face south, and the rock behind cuts off all northern winds and reflects the glare of the southern sun. This explains the vegetable precocity of the spot, where wallflowers, cactus, roses, luxuriate. It would be too hot were it not for the abundant springs, and the proximity to the Dordogne down which a cool air is wafted.

The habitations are either partly or wholly caves, they do not reach half-way up the rock which overhangs to the west. In the face of the cliff are two castles built into its recesses, one pertained to the Bishop of Sarlat, and the other to the Fenelon family. Both were ideals of a stronghold in the Middle Ages, impossible to escalade or to undermine. In the fifteenth century La Roche Gageac was a walled town containing five chateaux of n.o.ble families, juxtaposed and independent of each other, although comprised within the same enclosure. Originally indeed all were under the Bishop of Sarlat, but the Popes had set the example of jobbery for the benefit of their sons and nephews, and the Bishops were not slow to follow the lead. One Bishop made over the princ.i.p.al castle to his brother as a hereditary feof, and others disposed of the rest for money down, so that by the second half of the sixteenth century the town had been dismembered. Although it had held out against the English, when thus broken up among several, it could not defend itself against the Calvinists, who took, burned and sacked it in 1574. They killed three Sarlat priests. It was retaken by the Royal troops in 1575, but it again fell into the hands of the Calvinists in 1588, and the wreckage of its ecclesiastical buildings dates from those two captures.

The princ.i.p.al castle, that which belonged to the Bishop of Sarlat, occupies one of the profound horizontal furrows in the face of the rock, that are so common in the limestone and chalk formations. It consists of three towers, two of which are square and one round, with curtains uniting them, and a gate-tower, to which a flight of steps cut in the rock gives access for a part of the way. But to reach this flight one has to mount by a series of posts serving as steps driven into sockets in the rock, with only here and there a sustaining iron bar. Below the structure are chambers, possibly prisons, but more probably store rooms dug out of the rock. In this castle one of the Bishops of Sarlat, in stormy times, lived continuously, and there died.

How was his body carried down the stair? Probably it was lowered by ropes.

I cannot quit La Roche Gageac without a word on one of its most ill.u.s.trious natives, Jean Tarde, born there in 1561 the friend of Galileo, and who, the first in France, five years after the great Florentine had begun to search the skies with his telescope, invented one year previously, erected his tube here at one of the openings of this eagle's nest, and during ten consecutive years pursued his astronomic studies. He was a remarkable man in many ways. He was the first to map his native Perigord, and the first to write a chronicle of the diocese of Sarlat, a valuable work for any who would compile a history of the Hundred Years' War, the first also to repudiate the accepted attribution of the dolmens as altars of sacrifice, and to indicate their true character as sepulchres. His account of the ravages committed by the Huguenots is also valuable. The year before his birth, in 1560, at Lalande, the Calvinists got into the town through a hole in the wall, killed the first Consul, the Vicar, and six other priests, and ma.s.sacred a hundred of the inoffensive citizens. Sixty took refuge in the church. The Calvinists forced such as could to ransom their lives, and slaughtered such as were too poor to do this. He was but six or seven years old when the Huguenot captain, the Sieur d'a.s.sier, took La Roque, "killing the priests and burning the churches." He was aged twelve when Captain Vivant took Sarlat, suppressed the bishopric, and killed three of the canons and several of the citizens. At La Chapelle- Faucher in 1569 the heretics drove 260 peasants into the castle and ma.s.sacred them all. He was made Vicar-General to the Bishop of Sarlat, and it was after having made a tour of the diocese in 1594 that the idea occurred to him to write the history of his country and repair as far as possible the loss of so many of the archives that had been burnt. In 1599 he was made honorary chaplain to Henry IV., and in 1626 was published his _Description du pais de Quercy_. His history of Sarlat, after remaining in MS. was at length published in 1887, but only 150 copies were printed. Happily one is in the British Museum, and I possess another.

Gluges is on the Dordogne near Martel, where high up in the cliff, difficult of access, is the fortified cave-castle of Guillaume Taillefer, son of Raymond IV., Count of Toulouse, who was created Lord of Quercy in 972. Nearly on the level of the river is a cave half walled up, with traces of fresco on the walls, of course much later than the time of Taillefer. A modern house has been built on the platform that has been levelled, and much of the wall demolished; the upper fortified cave has an opening in the wall, pointed, of the thirteenth or fourteenth century. In much the same condition is another cliff castle in the rocks of the valley of the Alzou, between Grammat and Rocamadour, a little above the cascade of the mill Du Saut.

I have elsewhere [Footnote: "A Book of the Cevennes," Lond., J. Long.]

given an account of the curious castle of La Roche Lambert at Borne in Haute Loire, built in a basaltic cleft through which roars the river.

It is the theatre of George Sand's novel, Jean de la Roche. "I may say without exaggeration that I was reared in a rock. The castle of my fathers is strangely incrusted into an excavation in a wall of basalt 500 feet high. The base of this wall, with that face to face with it, identically the same rock, forms a narrow and sinuous valley, through which winds and leaps an inoffensive torrent in impetuous cascades. The Chateau de la Roche is a nest of troglodytes, inasmuch as the whole flank of the rock we occupy is riddled with holes and irregular chambers which tradition points out as the residence of ancient savages, and which antiquaries do not hesitate to attribute to a prehistoric people.

"The castle of my fathers is planted high up on a ledge of rock, but so that the conical roofs of the tower just reach above the level of the plain. My mother having poor health, and having no other place to walk save one tiny platform before the castle on the edge of the abyss, took it into her head to create for herself a garden at the summit of the crag on which we were perched midway."

In Cantal at Roqueville are the remains of a castle excavated out of the rocks. Between Jung-Bunzlau and Bohm-Leipa in Bohemia is the rock- castle of Habichstein. Two lakes lie in a basin of the hills that are well-wooded up their sides, but have bare turfy crowns. The upper lake is studded with islands. Between this and the lower lake stands an extraordinary hump of sandstone, on a sloping _talus_. This hump has much resemblance to a Noah's Ark stranded on a diminutive Ararat.

The rock is perforated in all directions with galleries and chambers, and contains a stable for horses and for cattle, which, however, is no longer accessible. On the summit of the rock rises a keep very much resembling a Pictish broch. Habichstein belongs to the Wallenstein family that possesses a stately schloss at the head of the upper lake.

It has been abandoned for, probably, two hundred years, as it can never have been a comfortable residence; moreover, the sandstone is continually breaking away. Below the hill and castle is the village. In 1811 there was a fall of the rock, and again in 1815, when it crushed three of the houses beneath.

[ILl.u.s.tRATION: THE PUXER LOCH, STYRIA. Supposed to have been occupied by a shadowless man. It was still inhabited last century by an old mason.]

Another and still more curious cliff castle in Bohemia is that of Burgstein. There are several on the frontier of the Wargau and the Hardt in North Bohemia, where the German and Czech languages meet, but it is not possible here to describe them all. Burgstein is the most curious. It consists of an isolated ma.s.s of sandstone springing out of level land, an outlying block of the Schwoik chain. Formerly it rose out of a lake or marsh, but this is now drained. The entrance is through a narrow gap in the rock by a flight of steps that lead into a court on all sides surrounded by sheer precipices except towards the North-west, where a gap was closed by a wall. Out of this court open caves, one was formerly the smithy, another the guard-room, a third the stable, and in a recess is the well. From the court access to the main structure is obtained by a rift in the sandstone commanded by the guard-room, and up which ascends a stair of 15 steps that leads to a second rift at right angles, up which leads a further stair of 76 steps, and from the landing 37 descend to a lower portion of the rock, a platform with a breastwork of wall, important for defence of the entrance.

The steps lead to various chambers, and to an open court that looks out over the precipice, and has on one side scooped out of the rock a watchman's chamber, and on the other an armoury, where pilasters on each side supported shelves on which helmets and breastplates were laid; and beyond this is a guard-room. The summit of the rock has on it a lantern that lights an underground chapel, and formerly contained a bell, also a modern summer-house. As the rock was commanded from the south by a spur of the Schwoik range, when cannon were introduced, a new mode of access was devised on the north side, a pa.s.sage in loops was constructed leading to the upper court. The castle called in Czech, Stolpna, or the pillar, is first mentioned in the fourteenth century.

The great highroad to and from Bohmisch-Leipa pa.s.sed near it, and it became the stronghold of a Raubritter, Mikisch Pa.s.szer of Smoyn, who became such a terror to the neighbourhood that the Sixtowns league of Lausitz in 1444 attacked it with 9000 men, broke down the dam that held back the water, and made of the rock an islet in a lake and constrained Mikisch to surrender. Soon after, however, he recommenced his lawless proceedings, and was again attacked in 1445, and after a siege that lasted five weeks, forced to quit his fortress. At the end of the seventeenth century Burgstein was converted into a hermitage and Brother Constantine, the first hermit, either enlarged or dug out the present chapel and built the lantern above, through which it obtains light. He did more, he carved a figure of himself looking through a telescope, life size, and planted on the summit of the rock. On the occasion of the Prussian invasion of Bohemia the image was a.s.sumed to be a spy, and the Germans fired at it and greatly damaged the figure, and were much puzzled at being unable to prostrate the dauntless spy.

The present possessor of the rock castle has had the figure restored.

Burgstein remained the abode of a hermit till 1785, when the reforming Joseph II. abolished all hermitages, and turned out every hermit in his dominions. And now, back to the Jura limestone again. A few words must be given to Kronmetz in Tirol, at the mouth of the Val di Non, opening into the Etschthal.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HABICHSTEIN BOHEMIA. A castle belonging to Count Wallenstein now abandoned owing to the falling away of portions of the rock. It contains stable for horses and cattle, now inaccessible without ladders.]

This castle belonged to the Bishops of Trient, and was intended by them to serve as a place of "ward and custody" against invading or marauding bands.

But _quis custodiet custodies_? It was granted in fief to two brothers Von Leo, who turned it into a robbers' nest, so that the neighbourhood rose in arms in 1210 and stormed it. Then the bishops confided it to the Herren von Metz, and they carried on a feud with their overlord, the bishop.

At last it came to the Counts von Firmian, who, in 1480, built a more convenient mansion at the foot of the cliff, and turned the old castle into a hermitage.

The castle, that is in a fair condition, occupies a broad cleft in the rock, only accessible by a narrow path cut in the rocks on the west side. It consists of an outer court and an inner court, protected on the side of the precipice by a stout wall, behind which were originally chambers, as windows in the wall and beamholes show to have been the case. There is a donjon that reaches to the overhanging rock and a ruinous chapel with apsidal east end. The cleft runs further east, but is blocked with a wall.

Another cliff castle, of which Merian, in his Topographia, 1640-88, gave a picture to arouse interest and wonder, is that of Covolo, at one time in Tirol, now over the Italian border. His description of it is as little accurate as his ill.u.s.tration. As a matter of fact, although it is certainly a cliff castle, constructed in a cave, it is accessible on foot, and it is by no means necessary to be conveyed to it by a windla.s.s. Indeed it would not be easy to erect a crane on the platform of the castle that could haul up men and provisions from below.