at the Mount and, supposing M. Corroyer to be right, that they dined
in this room, between 1050, when the building must have been in use,
down to 1122 when the new abbatial quarters were built.

How far the monastic rules restricted social habits is a matter for
antiquaries to settle if they can, and how far those rules were
observed in the case of great secular princes; but the eleventh
century was not very strict, and the rule of the Benedictines was
always mild, until the Cistercians and Saint Bernard stiffened its
discipline toward 1120. Even then the Church showed strong leanings
toward secular poetry and popular tastes. The drama belonged to it
almost exclusively, and the Mysteries and Miracle plays which were
acted under its patronage often contained nothing of religion except
the miracle. The greatest poem of the eleventh century was the
"Chanson de Roland," and of that the Church took a sort of
possession. At Chartres we shall find Charlemagne and Roland dear to
the Virgin, and at about the same time, as far away as at Assisi in
the Perugian country, Saint Francis himself--the nearest approach
the Western world ever made to an Oriental incarnation of the divine
essence--loved the French romans, and typified himself in the
"Chanson de Roland." With Mont-Saint-Michel, the "Chanson de Roland"
is almost one. The "Chanson" is in poetry what the Mount is in
architecture. Without the "Chanson," one cannot approach the feeling
which the eleventh century built into the Archangel's church.
Probably there was never a day, certainly never a week, during
several centuries, when portions of the "Chanson" were not sung, or
recited, at the Mount, and if there was one room where it was most
at home, this one, supposing it to be the old refectory, claims to
be the place.