---

Champeaux

In the small town of Champeaux (pronounced “cham-pō”), population about 815, is an interesting church. Earlier in this trip we saw a Basque Choir present a concert here . They were great, but we didn’t get a chance to look much at the church itself. A few days ago we were with Mary & Gilles on a day-trip ramble and, being not far from Champeaux, I asked if we could go there to take a look at the church. In fact, we were about five miles away, so to Champeaux we went.

The church is the Collégiale Saint-Martin de Champeaux. Cathedrals are the home of an bishop; parish churches — the most common in the Catholic structure — are the neighborhood churches. In the past a parish church would have a priest; today, only the biggest do, and the priest often serves multiple parish churches in the area. Collégiale churches sit between the cathedral and the parish church.

In France, collégial churches were, until the French Revolution in 1789, staffed by canons. Canons were almost always ordained priests and almost always lived in a communal setting. The canons handled all the duties of the church - liturgical and pastoral. The Collégiale Saint-Martin de Champeaux was such a church - too big to be a parish church and too small (and not having a bishop) to be a cathedral.

This is not your everyday, run-of-the-mill church, though. The church bills itself a “The little sister of Notre-Dame-de-Paris,” because it is big (though not as big as Notre-Dame by a long-shot) and Gothic and was built at the same time as its “older sister.” When we walked into this church to see the Basque choir I said, “This is a really old church.” Indeed: construction started in 1160 and finished in 1270; Notre-Dame de Paris was mostly constructed from 1134 to 1260, so these two churches were built over the same period. Both are Gothic, but the resemblance pretty much stops there.

As a cathedral, Notre Dame has always had the funding to maintain it; Saint-Martin de Champeaux has suffered from centuries of not enough money to keep it up. To a large extent, this is a result of its location - in a small town fifty miles from Paris.

But still, it’s worth a visit to see a large Gothic church pretty much in its original condition.

An almost-original-condition Gothic church in Champeaux.

To the left you can see the choir stalls. Each had a carving representing some aspect of a religious theme.

One of the choir stall carvings. There were some 50 of these, each a work of art unto itself. The choir stalls were installed in the 1500s and represent one of just a few additions/modifications to the original church.

The church has original stained-glass windows, but many others no longer exist and have been replaced by simple glass.

Sadly, not much left of the glass in this window.

I really encourage every visitor to Paris to immediately jump into a taxi and take the hour-long ride to Champeaux to see this church…not! This is a good thing about our long stays here: we can take the time to visit a place like this. Services have been held here for 800 years — even following the revolution — and 20th-century restoration took the structure back to its original beauty. A nice place to spend some contemplative time.