The promenoir of Abbot Roger ii has an interest to pilgrims who are going on to the shrine of the Virgin, because the date of the promenoir seems to be exactly the same as the date which the Abbe Bulteau assigns for the western portal of Chartres.  Ordinarily a date is no great matter, but when one has to run forward and back, with the agility of an electric tram, between two or three fixed points, it is convenient to fix them once for all.  The Transition is complete here in the promenoir, which was planned as early as 1115.  The subject of vaulting is far too ambitious for summer travel; it is none too easy for a graduate of the Beaux Arts; and few architectural fields have been so earnestly discussed and disputed.  We must not touch it.  The age of the “Chanson de Roland” itself is not so dangerous a topic.  Our vital needs are met, more or less sufficiently, by taking the promenoir at the Mount, the crypt at Saint-Denis, and the western portal at Chartres, as the trinity of our Transition, and roughly calling their date the years 1115-20, To overload the memory with dates is the vice of every schoolmaster and the passion of every second-rate scholar.  Tourists want as few dates as possible; what they want is poetry.  Yet a singular coincidence, with which every classroom is only too familiar, has made of the years—­15 a curiously convenient group, and the year 1115 is as convenient as any for the beginning of the century of Transition.  That was the year when Saint Bernard laid the foundations of his Abbey of Clairvaux.  Perhaps 1115, or at latest 1117, was the year when Abelard sang love-songs to Heloise in Canon Fulbert’s house in the Rue des Chantres, beside the cloister of Notre Dame in Paris.  The Abbe Suger, the Abbe Bernard, and the Abbe Abelard are the three interesting men of the French Transition.

The promenoir, then, shall pass for the year 1115, and, as such, is an exceedingly beautiful hall, uniting the splendid calm and seriousness of the Romanesque with the exquisite lines of the Gothic.  You will hardly see its equal in the twelfth century.  At Angers the great hall of the Bishop’s Palace survives to give a point of comparison, but commonly the halls of that date were not vaulted; they had timber roofs, and have perished.  The promenoir is about sixty feet long, and divided into two aisles, ten feet wide, by a row of columns.  If it were used on great occasions as a refectory, eighty or a hundred persons could have been seated at table, and perhaps this may have been about the scale of the Abbey’s needs, at that time.  Whatever effort of fancy was needed to place Duke William and Harold in the old refectory of 1058, none whatever is required in order to see his successors in the halls of Roger ii.  With one exception they were not interesting persons.  The exception was Henry ii of England and Anjou, and his wife Eleanor of Guienne, who was for a while Regent of Normandy.  One of their children