However it may have been, the church was once more destroyed, and, as was happening all over Italy and France at this period, it was destroyed only to rise from its ashes more beautiful than ever. So Angers, Poitiers, Beauvais, Cambrai, Rouen were rebuilt almost as soon as burnt, in the enthusiastic rivalry of the Christian builders of the day. ‘Humanity,’ in the fine phrase of Raoul Glaber, ‘rose from its long agony and set itself to build, and to shake off the rags of its old age in order to put on the white robe of the churches.’
The great bishop with whose name the new Cathedral at Chartres was to be indissolubly connected, the Fulbert of Fulbert’s Cathedral, had been the favourite pupil of Gerbert of Reims and had practised medicine in the Monastery of S. Père, where that art was long held in high honour. But Fulbert was more than a mere doctor. He was a poet, a mathematician, a theologian, grammarian and skilful musician as well. When, therefore, he became the head of the School of Chartres (from which a few years later John, called the Deaf, was to issue, doctor of Henry I. and chief of the sect of Nominalists, whose pupil was Rosselin, whose pupil Abeilard) scholars flocked from England, Germany, Denmark and all parts of France to listen to the teachings of the French Socrates, and to receive from his eloquent lips the precepts of wisdom and the counsel of friendship. For his knowledge was immense and his learning encyclopædic, ranging from the minutest details of the exact sciences to the most daring speculations of metaphysics. Fulbert, we are told, like a modern Plato, would often withdraw to a garden near the bishop’s palace, watered by the clear stream (it _was_ clear in those days), and there, surrounded by his chosen pupils, expound with mingled sweetness and force the tenets of philosophy and the doctrines of faith. ‘The teacher of philosophers, the marvel of his age, the sun whose rays gave life,’ his pupil Adelmann called him. And among the philosophers he taught, and the rare flowers of intellect which in this age of brute force expanded beneath the quickening rays of his mind, Adelmann enumerates Lanfranc, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Walter of Burgundy, Lambert and Engelbert of Paris and Orléans, Hildier, wise as Socrates and learned as Pythagoras, and Sigo, the musician of the delicate ear. Fulbert’s letters,[37] which place him among the most interesting historians of this obscure period, reveal him as a theologian firm and decided, as a statesman eager to enforce order and to secure the administration of justice, as a man broad-minded, charming, enthusiastic, humane.