Twenty-Five Great Houses of France

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Excerpt from Twenty-Five Great Houses of France: The Story of the Noblest French ChateauxSuch stupendous erections as Mont St. Michel are not so much the work of any individual man, or men, as the accomplished prayer of tens of thousands. That is one reason why the names of so many master-masons are lost, they lived in their completed masonry alone, they were swallowed up in the sincerity and vital strength of a passionate and national religion which expressed itself in the Cathedrals and monasteries of the thirteenth century. It was the Church which alone preserved through the Dark Ages the fundamental principles of art, of civilisation, of architecture. It was the abbey of Cluny which sent forth the first great artists in the school rightly called French Gothic (as opposed to any development of pointed architecture elsewhere) which is here illustrated by Mont St. Michel. That style was equally effective in such great fortress towns as Carcassonne, whose first ramparts were set up by Visigoths in the fifth century, while its final line of external defence was completed towards the close of the thirteenth. What military building had become by the end of the twelfth century can be seen from the massive ruins of Richard Coeur de Lion's saucy castle on the Seine, Chateau Gaillard, and it is most interesting to observe how the very complications of defence which lost Roger de Lacey that famous Plantagenet stronghold were improved and simplified at Pierrefonds, the stronghold built for Louis d'orleans in 1400.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.