Gargoyles, Part I: History and Legend
So begins a multi-part series on gargoyles. Parts two and three can be found here and here.
For many years, the French city of Rouen had a curious tradition. Each year, on the Feast of the Ascension, a single death row inmate was released back into freedom. We have records of this that go back as far as the twelfth century and the practice lasted clear through the Middle Ages, only ending with the French Revolution.
The tradition’s roots were in a local legend. In the seventh-century, a dragon was said to have terrorized Rouen from a cave near the River Seine. It breathed fire upon the city, swallowed ships whole, and hurled river water through the streets. As the story goes, Rouen’s desperate inhabitants made a deal with the dragon. In exchange for peace, each year, the dragon would be given a single human to consume. For the citizens of Rouen, a death row inmate seemed the least costly.
At that time, Rouen’s bishop was Saint Romanus and, wanting out of this arrangement, he sought volunteers to help him capture and kill the dragon. He found just one taker: a death row inmate soon to be offered up.
They say that, to kill the creature, Romanus flung his priestly stole around its neck and the criminal wrestled and dragged it into town where it was burned at the stake. On account of his bravery, the condemned man was pardoned. More than that, a death row prisoner would now be released in his honor each year rather than sacrificed. Such was Rouen’s “Privilege of Saint Romanus,” as the custom came to be called.1
The dragon of Rouen had a name: La Gargouille ― “the Gargoyle.” Of course, these types of tales abounded throughout the Middle Ages. There’s a similar story from the other side of France about Graoully, a dragon who terrorized the people of Metz and was likewise vanquished by Saint Clement of Metz. This was all standard fare.
The claim in Rouen, though, was that, when they torched La Gargouille, the head and throat were so accustomed to fire they simply would not burn. So they chopped it all off and mounted it on a town wall. And thus the strange tradition of gargoyles is said to have been born. Even today, we see, perched upon so many of our buildings, the descendants of La Gargouille ― monsters of stone, their body parts fantastically patched together, screaming at the townspeople below.2
Technically, gargoyles are rain spouts. To prevent water from running down a building and eroding the mortar, rain is channeled toward a gargoyle and then spewed out its mouth and away from the wall. “Gargoyle” actually comes from the Latin word gargula, which means “throat.” The word “gargle” should come to mind. In Germany, gargoyles are just called “wasserspeier” ― “water spitters.”3
Decorative and animal-like gargoyles have been used for centuries, long before they appeared on medieval churches or La Gargouille was supposed to have terrorized Rouen. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans all used carved animal heads as waterspouts.4
And yet not every gargoyle is a waterspout. Gargoyles that are just decorative statues are more typically called chimeras or grotesques, rather than gargoyles proper. In ancient mythology, chimeras were creatures patched together from various distinct animal parts and our most recognizable gargoyles — rain spouts or not — are just these kinds of hideous hybrids. They stitch together the whole span of medieval fauna: dragons, griffins, monkeys, dogs, birds, even humans ― all of them deformed and contorted in unsettling ways.5
But what do these gargoyles ― rain spouts or not ― actually signify, especially as features of religious architecture? Indeed, what in the world are they doing on churches? It turns out that that’s an extraordinarily difficult question, one that will require several parts for our reflection.
In part two, we’ll begin to explore more thoroughly.
See Butler’s Lives of the Saints, vol. 4, ed. Herbert J. Thurston and Donald Attwater (Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1996), 184-185. Of course, the link between the Privilège de Saint-Romain and the historical Saint Romanus is purely legendary. There is no evidence of death row inmates having ever been pardoned until the 12th century, 500 years after Romanus’s death. See Amable Floquet, Histoire du privilège de Saint-Romain (Rouen: E. Legrand, 1833).
See Janetta Rebold Benton, Holy Terrors: Gargoyles on Medieval Buildings (New York: Abbeville Press, 1997), 12.
See Benton, Holy Terrors, 9.
See Benton, Holy Terrors, 11.
See Benton, Holy Terrors, 44.