'Item fo ordenat que Moss. Aymar de Bessa et P. Karti ano a
Vinho far reverensa al papa per nom de la vila eque Phi recomendo
la vila. E quelh fasso supplicacio quelh plassa far am los vescomte
se bot que nos garde nostres previleges.'

This ancient town has suffered grievously from that spirit of demolition
which was so active during the first half of the present century, but
which in France has been somewhat checked by the Commission of Historic
Monuments. There are people who can remember when the town was surrounded
by two walls; now only a few remnants of the fortifications remain. The
church is exceedingly interesting. There are details indicating a very
early origin--they may possibly have come down from the foundation; but the
structure in the main belongs to the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. The
east end--the oldest portion--has more the character of a stronghold than
of a church. It has no apse, and the terminating wall, which is carried far
above the roof, has a row of machicolations, and the massive buttresses by
which it is flanked are really towers pierced with loopholes. At the foot
of the wall is a deep pool of water, which serves as the horse-pond for the
town; but it may originally have been part of a moat.

In the tympanum of the twelfth-century portal is one of those bas-reliefs
representing the Last Judgment upon which the artistic ambition of the
early Gothic period appears to have been chiefly directed in this region.

The fourteenth-century Senechaussee, with its embattled belfry, its little
turrets or bartizans hanging high at the angles of the wall, its dim old
court, with a deep well in the centre, speaks with a ghostly voice of
ancient Martel. This building, after the English left, was the residence of
the seneschals of the Viscounts of Turenne down to the Revolution. In two