It all makes Sens

2nd Day Wed
Date 30-Aug
Start Fontainbleau
Destination Sens

Kilometres 58
Cum Kms 129
Ave speed 18.6 kph
Max speed 47
Time taken 03:06
Max Height 170 m
Today climb 310 m
Cum.climb ) 595 m

Woke before 07:00 and decided to get up and pack my gear. Everything is packed in plastic bags in case of rain and I have them carefully divided to spread the weight more or less evenly. It seems like another good day weather wise. Breakfast was pretty poor with non descript croissants and coffee, and the coffee machine was leaking.

Set off on the left hand side of the road in green short-sleeved top but soon realised I needed to change sides and that the early morning was colder than it appeared. I added a long sleeved top. Like so many French towns, Fontainbleau has a by-pass that keeps the traffic out of the centre. When I reached the edge of town the traffic was very heavy although I was on the road before 08:00. However after a short distance - indeed my exit from the first roundabout - I was on an excellent minor road and left the traffic behind for the day.

The few commercial vehicles that passed me showed considerable consideration for a cyclist. It was great to hear heavy lorries slowing until they had a clear space to give me plenty of room before passing. The roads were really in the country now - it was exhilarating to be cycling. Lovely rolling countryside. Sunflowers everywhere although all past their bloom- some - many looked brown - and I wondered whether this was usual. There was a strong smell from them too. I wondered, and have not yet found out, whether this had perhaps been a bad year for sunflower growers.

Everywhere was quiet - I put this down to the early hour but it lasted all day. I tried to phone home before Deirdre Sinéad and Andrew left but the phone here only took coins. I stopped in Vallery for coffee. It was just a quiet bar in a tiny village and while I drank my coffee the local dog looked for all the world like Theo while he waited for me to give him some of my biscuits.

During the morning army jeeps and motorbikes rushed past me. Sometimes soldiers dismounted and fixed signs to poles and then rushed on again. They must have been doing some form of competition.

Suddenly at 13:00 I rolled into the town of Sens that commands the valley of the Yonne. This river joins the Seine to flow through Paris to the Channel coast. It provides a natural highway to and from the south‑east of France. It takes its name from the Senones, a Gallic tribe who, under their chieftain Bremmus, joined the invading armies which swarmed into northern Italy around 400 BC and whose shaggy troops all but captured Rome in 390 BC; they were only thwarted by the cackling of the Capitoline geese which kept the garrison awake.

St Savien and St Potentien brought Christianity to Sens in the third century. Both were martyred here, but not before they had evangelised much of the country to the north‑east. The early bishops were men of action, too, and helped to keep at bay marauding bands from the armies of the Merovingian kings. By 732 there were five abbeys within the city walls, and though Sens began slowly to cede political supremacy to Paris it was to remain the religious centre of France for nearly a thousand years. The archbishop, St Ebbon, was described by Odoranne of Sens, a mediaeval chronicler, as 'a second Pope', and into the early years of the seventeenth century the Chapter of St Etienne could boast the acronymic motto CAMPONT signifying the bishoprics of Chartres, Auxerre, Meaux, Paris, Orleans, Nevers and Troyes were subject to its metropolitan authority.

I had rearranged my schedule to be sure of having time in Sens. The cathedrals of Burgundy had been a major influence on the route. I had found myself reading more and more about them. I visited those in Paris and even Chartres before the trip started. Sens was the first cathedral town on the route. Even today the influence of its famous cathedral is as all‑pervasive as it was in the Middle Ages. Contained within a ring of tree‑lined boulevards where the city walls once stood, the town's ancient centre is still dominated by the Cathedral of St‑Etienne.

This was the first Gothic cathedral to be built in France yet it has many elements derived from the Romanesque tradition. It was begun under Archbishop Sanglier‑ not unnaturally known as 'the Boar' ­between 1130 and 1135, and was almost complete at the death of Archbishop Hughes of Toucy in 1168. Among all French prelates of the time Henri Sanglier was the most thorough exponent of the reforms of St Bernard, whose austere regime was spreading through the daughter foundations of Citeaux, the abbey founded by Robert of Molesme in protest at the lax and indulgent practices of Cluny. St Bernard himself was the founder and first abbot of Clairvaux, some fifty miles north of Dijon, having served his noviciate in Citeaux but we will come to that in due course. The early Cistercian abbeys such as Fontenay and Pontigny were a particularly strong influence - more about these later too!

Whereas at Chartres the famous west portal is flanked by two disconcertingly dissimilar towers, at Sens the two towers were planned to match each other, but only the southern one, known as the Tour de Pierre, was finished. This was crowned by a Renaissance campanile to take the big bell with its inscription 'Les borgois de Sens m'ont fait faire l'an M cing cens soixante seize (1566) which gives us its date exactly.

Work on the northern tower, the Tour de Plomb (so called because of the lead sheeting used in its early stages) was halted for good in 1200. The Tour de Pierre collapsed on the Thursday in Holy Week 1267, wrecking parts of the facade, the nave and the Synodal Palace. It was rebuilt in stages up to the end of the fourteenth century.

Inside, the Gothic elements of airiness, space and weightlessness are very much in evdence in the height of the nave, the arcading of the aisles and the great rose window. The architect who completed it, William of Sens, was later to rebuild the choir of Canterbury Cathedral in England, the missing link being Thomas‑a‑Becket. 'Saint Thomas de Canterbury' as the French call him, Henry II's one‑time friend, archbishop and 'turbulent priest', was a close associate of the archbishop of Sens and spent four years of his exile in the town. He is commemorated in one of the windows which light the ambulatory. It takes up the story from the point where Louis Vll of France brings Henry and Becket together in an insincere and inconclusive peace; then it shows Becket returning to England, welcomed by the people of Canterbury, preaching and ministering to them, and finally mur­dered by the four knights. Also making its first appearance on this route was another window and altar dedicated to St. Columba.

It was here that in 1140 a Council of the Church, spurred on by the polemical zeal of St Bernard, condemned Abelard for refusing to set a limit to the activities of human reason. Here too in 1164 that Pope Alexander III confirmed Becket in the Primacy of England and here that they met during his exile. Here in the cathedral in 1234 St Louis married Marguerite of Provence. Here on 30 August 1995 the reception for the traveller was excellent. The staff in the Tourist Office were more than helpful. And the receptionist in the Paris & Post Hotel was very interested in my trip. The bike once again was secured in a locked garage for the night.

Meanwhile back at the cathedral, or rather just to the South of it, is the thirteenth‑century Palais Synodal with its roof of Burgundian glazed tiles, restored like so many other buildings in this region by the "purist" Viollet‑le‑Duc. The vaults of the building, which partly constituted the remains of a Gallo Roman building, including baths heated through the pavement, are now part of a museum, along with displays of Gallo‑Roman metalwork, jewellery and textile crafts, many of which were discovered when the basement was excavated.
Between the cathedral and the Palace and, across from them in Place de la Republique, the old houses now converted into shops, in pedestrian streets with finely carved and timbered houses I spent many hours and also had an excellent dinner. I was footsore and it was getting dark by the time I returned to the Hotel.