Ch. 9 - The Legendary Windows

One's first visit to a great cathedral is like one's first visit to
the British Museum; the only intelligent idea is to follow the order
of time, but the museum is a chaos in time, and the cathedral is
generally all of one and the same time. At Chartres, after finishing
with the twelfth century, everything is of the thirteenth. To catch
even an order in time, one must first know what part of the
thirteenth-century church was oldest. The books say it was the
choir. After the fire of 1194, the pilgrims used the great crypt as
a church where services were maintained; but the builders must have
begun with the central piers and the choir, because the choir was
the only essential part of the church. Nave and transepts might be
suppressed, but without a choir the church was useless, and in a
shrine, such as Chartres, the choir was the whole church. Toward the
choir, then, the priest or artist looks first; and, since dates are
useful, the choir must be dated. The same popular enthusiasm, which
had broken out in 1145, revived in 1195 to help the rebuilding; and
the work was pressed forward with the same feverish haste, so that
ten years should have been ample to provide for the choir, if for
nothing more; and services may have been resumed there as early as
the year 1206; certainly in 1210. Probably the windows were designed
and put in hand as soon as the architect gave the measurements, and
any one who intended to give a window would have been apt to choose
one of the spaces in the apse, in Mary's own presence, next the
sanctuary.

The first of the choir windows to demand a date is the Belle-
Verriere, which is commonly classed as early thirteenth-century, and
may go with the two windows next it, one of which--the so-called
Zodiac window--bears a singularly interesting inscription: "COMES
TEOBALDUS DAT...AD PRECES COMIXIS PTICENSIS." If Shakespeare could
write the tragedy of "King John," we cannot admit ourselves not to
have read it, and this inscription might be a part of the play. The
"pagus perticensis" lies a short drive to the west, some fifteen or
twenty miles on the road to Le Mans, and in history is known as the
Comte du Perche, although its memory is now preserved chiefly by its
famous breed of Percheron horses. Probably the horse also dates from
the crusades, and may have carried Richard Coeur-de-Lion, but in any
case the count of that day was a vassal of Richard, and one of his
intimate friends, whose memory is preserved forever by a single line
in Richard's prison-song:--

Mes compaignons cui j'amoie et cui j'aim,
Ces dou Caheu et ces dou Percherain.

In 1194, when Richard Coeur-de-Lion wrote these verses, the Comte du
Perche was Geoffrey III, who had