Basilic-atious!

In which Sid and Doris get to marvel at some really high Gothic.

From 1145 onwards there was an arms war in Northern France.  Called “My cathedral is taller than your cathedral”, people vied to build the tallest most beautifully breathtakingly vaulted and window-pierced and chapel-lined and buttress-propped cathedrals.  The arms war came to an abrupt end in 1248 when Beauvais cathedral, the highest of them all at 47m internally, collapsed.  A council of master masons (which I now can’t find a reference to, irritatingly) decided that enough was enough and that in future cathedrals could be lacier and fancier and have more facades and statues and gargoyles and painted decoration, but 150′ was tall enough thank you.

The Basilica in St Quentin was started in the middle of this period, in 1195.  These buildings took a long time to fund and build, and were often actually completed over hundreds of years with pauses for war, plague, dark ages etc etc and of course additional fund-raising.

There are seven of these cathedrals all within 60km of each other in Picardy, the nearest bit of France to the UK.  Salisbury Cathedral was being built at the same time in the south of the UK, just a few miles across the Channel, and work was also going on in Paris and Reims.  Master masons were highly sought-after and someone must already have written a thrilling tale of the travelling and secret-guarding and plan-nobbling that went on over this time, and if I find it I will tell you about it.  If I don’t find it, I am tempted to write it.  Let Doris do for masons what Guy Gavriel Kay did for mosaicists, I say.

   Some genius had decided to put on a display comparing the seven cathedrals of Picardy, and indeed to write a book about them which you will be unsurprised to learn that I now own, as it was for sale in only the fourth bookstore that I visited in town after reading the note “this is available in local bookstores”.  (In their defence, the other three were closed as it was still relatively early in the French morning.)

And look! They even have pictures inside the roofs, standing above the vaulted stone ceilings and under the timbers that hold the external roof up.  (What do you mean, you thought the roof rested on the vaults?  Me too, actually.)  Ha ha you wooden boat people, call that historic?  These roofs are over 800 years old!

Enough of my blah blah.  Time to walk round the Basilica which is silent, clean, uncluttered, calm and absolutely, fascinatingly breathtaking.

I haven’t included pictures of the Amazing Stained Glass Windows because although they were, they felt very subordinate to the architecture.  Do add this place to your bucket list.

We left the Basilica in that satisfied trance-like state you have from a really good museum (cf anthropology museum of Mexico City) and the slightly shocking re-connect with the modern world, to play the game of “Where’s My Mini? Oh, it’s behind another blue and white-roofed Mini.”

After Doris’ extended bookshop dash, a final bit of non-motorway driving through the roads of Picardy and a few minutes to dwell on the UK government’s over-optimistic reliance on wind power to deliver a Cop26-proof green budget saw us in the vast and slow-moving queue for the This Is No Longer A Seamless Border Eurotunnel Experience.  Sweat on, Brits, you have not made this easy for yourselves.

But Sid and Doris are cool as cucumbers and with the one-hour gain from the French/UK timezones we have loads of time to wash the Mini and back him into place in our two-and-a-half-car garage.

And gosh, is that this journey over?  Seems like a complete age since we left for France and had the fuel pump expire in Calais.  Thank you for reading this, if indeed you are still reading this and haven’t clicked away towards the fascination of mediaeval cathedral construction, I wouldn’t blame you for a second.

PS If you are still here, Mr Wiki’s entry on Gothic architecture does contain some historical narrative, if you’d like to read more before my blockbuster novel, “Chisels!”, is released.

PPS The replacement starter motor is still somewhere in Italian customs.  I know you were worrying about that.  Sid is going to start the long and tedious process of getting it back tomorrow.