CHALUS

There are places in Europe of great interest to English history, of which most of us have read in the text-books, and which not many Englishmen know. Either they are too small or too remote or they lie off the great line of steam travel—from which modern petrol has not yet learned to go—or they are taken for granted as names and no more; but for whatever reason, such they are, and numerous. The battlefield of Crécy is but a mile or two off the track of everyone who motors down into France from Boulogne, every yard of which is known. It is to-day what it was when the battle was fought nearly six hundred years ago. But it is almost unknown; and the same is true of Taillebourg and the same of Agincourt.

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Now there is one spot which I had always desired to visit, and yet I had only managed to gratify that desire this year: that spot is Chalus, where Richard the Lion-Heart was killed. It was a death which was in keeping with his life. The kind of death which a contemporary might have been certain he would have died, for with all his ill health and continuous travel, he could hardly have died save under arms. It was in the Limousin just where the hills of that province sink into the western plain. There had been treasure-trove. The Viscount of Limoges claimed it; King Richard as his overlord counter-claimed. The vassal shut up the treasure in his castle of Chalus, there to defend it and defy his lord. Richard came against it with his small, trained mercenary force and laid siege. A plain arrow with a square iron tip—what was called in the French of his day a _quarrel_—struck him down from the walls as he was riding around inspecting those defences. He did not die immediately. He died because the wound was ill dressed and only after a few days. He lived to see the place fall, and the man who had shot him down captured. But although pardoned, after the king’s death the bowman was flayed alive by the family.

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The place where the greatest man of his time in Europe fell is to-day a small, half-neglected little country town—for it has a market—yet half village; and what is left of that stronghold, in the capture of which Richard met his death, is still exceedingly impressive. One sees upon visiting it why Limoges had made it the test of his power and gave his challenge there to the man who controlled all the resources of England and half those of France. Not that it was very large. It was the better for being restricted in space and needing no great garrison to feed. Nor was it so very difficult of general approach, but it was exactly suited for a fortress of that day, chosen as were all Richard’s fortified sites (Château Gaillard is the best known) with the skill of the master. Unlike Château Gaillard, however, there is no height nearby from which it can be dominated by the eye, nor is the mount of Chalus connected, as is Château Gaillard, by a neck or isthmus with higher land—as of necessity were the greater part of these keeps. It stood upon a low, conical hill, steep enough to break the attack, yet spread out enough to allow sallies to some distance from the walls. At its foot runs a stream which was something of an obstacle, and beyond that stream, as a sort of bastion, those who planned the castle had built an outer ward covering the only bridge. The bridge still stands, or rather, after much patching and changing, the bridge of to-day is still on the site of the old one. Of the outer walls, the main tower still dominates the village; and within the remains of its walls, some few houses are huddled. The gateway into the outer yard under this main tower is intact. The outline of the main stronghold upon the hill over the river can everywhere be traced, though it has lost its height. A farm-house of perhaps the fifteenth or sixteenth century has been built, backed against its walls. The old keep tower on the summit reaches to its full height, but is half ruined; at the side next it a gateway and perhaps a chapel, of a much later date toward the end of the Middle Ages, retain an arch or two and half a roof. The rest is without habitation and is a ruin.

Nevertheless, the aspect of the place is still in the highest degree impressive, and its purpose as a fortress is insistent to the eye when one stands in the meadows to the west, looking toward the distant foothills of the Limousin. Those two towers, the lower one of the outer ward, and the higher hill of the main keep on the far side of the stream, stand up at the main outlines of the place. Even the spire of the church is subservient to them, and the lines of the roofs of the little market towns have all the effect of something created by the original strength of a stronghold, something which existed under the protection of that lordship and which had been created by it.

Whether as tradition, or because some one had wandered there and spoken of the story of the place, I found the memory of the king alive. In that remote inn which pretends to nothing, and is therefore comfortable and good, they knew so much. But there was no full tradition with which to compare, for instance, the tradition of Falaise, where the Conqueror colours the whole town, or with the tradition of Mauperthuis Farm and the Battle of Poitiers. All they knew was that Richard the Lion-Heart, whose name I suppose will always live in western Europe, had been killed under their walls: but they thought of him as a foreigner. Yet when he fell there under those walls, he fell as Duke of Aquitaine, he was Angevin, a Plantagenet who spoke the language of their lords and could even understand perhaps the southern dialect of the populace round about. Happily enough, I found the memory of this most attractive son in the great brood of Mélisande more remembered in Agen, far off on the Garonne, than here in the place where he should be most famous. For at Agen I found a street named after him, and at the end of the bridge over the Garonne a tablet proudly inscribed with the legend that Richard, King of England, Duke of Aquitaine, had been the first to span the river, and that they owed their first bridge to him. Many wars have since destroyed it, and in its place—of all things in the world—there is now a rickety suspension bridge, built in the days when these hideous contrivances were thought marvellous.

If I were mayor of Chalus, I would erect a monument to Richard. It is not a small thing, the site where a great man dies; and yet, if you will consider it, all up and down Europe, the places where men have achieved this or that action are rather noted, but rarely the place where they came by some great death: that which was chief in their own experience, and the closing of that experience, posterity forgets. At Chinon they remember Joan of Arc and Rabelais, but not Henry of Anjou, who died within the walls above the town mourning that he was a conquered king. There is nothing to mark, in the suburbs of Nancy, the place where Charles the Bold was dragged from his horse. There is a stone in the New Forest for the detestable Rufus, but nothing, I believe, in the rough fields which mark the site of the Hall of Fotheringay. And so it is with the place where Richard of England died. Yet I think he himself would rather have a memorial here even than at Acre, or at Jaffa, or in that village where he lay ill, despairing of seeing Jerusalem which lay not a day’s march away.

Irony fills all history—and it has given the Lion-Heart a statue in front of the Victorian House of Lords in London and made him look like an English gentleman of the Albert period: but in Chalus there is not a bronze or a stone.