A brief Danse-Macabre.
Nearly abutting l’Église Saint-Maclou you can find the euphemistically named Aître Saint-Maclou. A more precise name would be Ossuaire Saint-Maclou or the Saint Maclou Ossuary. There are a few reasons for this linguistic diversion. Derived from the Latin atrio (that comes to us as atrium in English), it originally meant the central square enclosure at the entrance to a Roman villa. Over time, it came to include the entrance to churches as well. In medieval times it came to be synonymous with cemetery.
Why would that be? Think of the period from 1347-1351 and recall that over these four years the plague known as the Black Death swept over Europe killing perhaps as many as 50,000,000 people. Cemeteries, including the one for Saint-Maclou parish became too small to hold the dead. Instead, they had to find a new location where victims of the plague were buried in large communal graves.
Today, the courtyard is surrounded by four wings of half-timbered and stone houses. Three of the sides were built between 1526 and 1533 when a second pandemic was again ravaging Europe. Because the medieval church preached bodily resurrection, Christian bones couldn’t be destroyed and the Church needed creative ways to preserve them.
Thus, as the recurrence of the Black Death killed two thirds of Saint-Maclou’s residents the old bones were exhumed and placed in the rooms above of the cloister while the newly deceased were buried in the pit.
The fourth side of the square was completed in 1651 to create a school for poor boys. The school was taken over by Christian Brothers but the bones remained until 1779 when urban burial sites were banned in France and in 1780 the lifeless tenants of Saint-Maclou were moved en masse to the Mont Gargan cemetery on Côte Sainte-Catherine.
The Christian Brothers school remained at the site until 1907 and, facing declining enrollment, added a boarding school for girls in 1911. That addition failed to produce the necessary boost in the number of students and by 1927 they abandoned l’Aître Saint-Maclou. Over the next decade, the City of Rouen took control of the site and restored the crumbling and neglected buildings. In 1940, the School of Fine Arts relocated there when their own building, Halle aux Toiles, was destroyed by fire. That school left for more practical if less romantic accommodations in 2014.
(I know that it’s unrealistic to expect any guide to draw attention to every detail on a general orientation tour and perhaps I simply happened to have once again been partnered with one of the less informative guides but my group’s guide neglected to point out a unique feature of the ossuary that appeared on at least two websites I visited looking for information to supplement my notes. One of my favorite sites, Atlas Obscura notes, “For curious corpse-seekers looking for remains, there is a mummified cat under glass in the wall near the entrance. The cat was found in the wall and it is assumed that this was a black cat used to ward off all manner of evil.”
As I write this journal and recalling my report that approximately 6,000 Jews were expelled from Rouen in 1306, I have to pick at another sore omission by our guide since she failed to mention it at all. {I understand that guides generally don’t want to discuss aspects of their city or country that portray it in a poor light but, given that the expulsion of Jews from not merely cities but from entire countries was common in medieval Europe and that this one happened more than 700 years ago, it certainly doesn’t reflect poorly on Rouen’s citizens today.}
But this omission or oversight led to one much more relevant. Not only did Rouen have a large Jewish community through the 13th-century but it was prosperous and lively. A recent discovery demonstrates the possible relevance of this to today’s tourists.
Here is how it’s described by the website jguideeurope.org:
“In medieval times there was an intense intellectual life around the synagogue’s Talmudic school in what was called “Le Clos aux Juifs” (the Jews’ Enclosure). Contrary to what its name suggests, the enclosure in question was never a closed space. There were Jews living elsewhere in the town and Christians living in the Clos. All this disappeared in 1306, when the community was expelled. After that, only very few were able to identify Rouen as the brilliant and lively “Rodom” described in ancient texts.
In 1976, repaving work in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice brought to light an extraordinary archaeological find: the walls of an eleventh-century Jewish building, the oldest Jewish monument in Western Europe! Since then, it has been the object of endless debate between specialists. The home of a wealthy merchant, a Talmudic school, a synagogue- what exactly was it? The following fragment from the divine words spoken to Solomon (1 Kings 9:8) were clumsily engraved into the walls three times: “this house, which is high”. No doubt they were hastily inscribed at the moment of the expulsion.”
While I’ve chosen to eschew Jewish religious practice, I maintain an interest in Jewish history in part because of my genetic ties to this religious group and in part because my travels have confirmed that seemingly unrelated events sometimes separated by vast chronological or geographical distance can connect. The oldest Jewish monument in Western Europe? Located between our ship and the site of Jeanne’s execution? It’s something I might have wanted to have seen. Had I but known.)
I still have lots to write about Rouen but, for now, I’ll provide you a brief respite. However, you might be interested in looking at some of the photos from the morning and some appropriate to Jeanne.