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Title: Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine

Author: Edward A. Freeman

Commentator: William Holden Hutton

Release date: March 13, 2008 [eBook #24818]

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES OF TRAVEL
IN NORMANDY AND MAINE ***

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

IN

NORMANDY AND MAINE

St. Stephens, Caen, E.

Frontispiece

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

IN

NORMANDY AND MAINE
BY

EDWARD A. FREEMAN
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM DRAWINGS BY THE AUTHOR

AND A PREFACE BY

W.H. HUTTON, B.D.
FELLOW AND TUTOR OF S. JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD

London

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1897
All rights reserved

Richard Clay and Sons, Limited,
LONDON AND BUNGAY.

EDITOR'S NOTE
The first eight and the last four of these sketches appeared in the Saturday Review, the
others in the Guardian. They are here reprinted with a few omissions, but with no
other alteration. The permission courteously given to reproduce them is gratefully
acknowledged.
FLORENCE FREEMAN.

PREFACE
"Beyond doubt the finished historian must be a traveller: he must see with his own
eyes the true look of a wide land; he must see, too, with his eyes the very spots where
great events happened; he must mark the lie of a city, and take in, as far as a non-
technical eye can, all that is special about a battle-field."

So wrote Mr. Freeman in his Methods of Historical Study,[1] and he possessed to the
full the instincts of the traveller as well as of the historian. His studies and sketches of
travels, already published, have shown him a wanderer in many lands and a keen
observer of many peoples and their cities. He travelled always as a student of history
and of architecture, and probably no man has ever so happily combined the
knowledge of both. Though his thoughts were always set upon principles and upon the
study of great subjects, he delighted in the details of local history and local building.
"I cannot conceive," he wrote, "how either the study of the general sequence of
architectural styles or the study of the history of particular buildings can be unworthy
of the attention of any man. Besides their deep interest in themselves, such studies are
really no small part of history. The way in which any people built, the form taken by
their houses, their temples, their fortresses, their public buildings, is a part of their
national life fully on a level with their language and their political institutions. And
the buildings speak to us of the times to which they belong in a more living and, as it
were, personal way than monuments or documents of almost any other kind."[2]
And no less clearly and decisively did he write of the value of local history: "There is
no district, no town, no parish, whose history is not worth working out in detail, if
only it be borne in mind that the local work is a contribution to a greater work."[3]
Thus the keenness of his interest in the architecture and the history that could be
studied and learnt in every little town made him to the last the most untiring and
enthusiastic of historical pilgrims. It is impossible to read his letters, so fresh and
natural yet so full of a rare knowledge and insight, without seeing how thoroughly he
had succeeded in achieving in himself that union of the traveller and the historian
which adds so immeasurably to the powers of each. And that is what makes his letters
from foreign lands so delightful to read, and his sketches (published and republished
from time to time during the last thirty years) so illuminative. No one, I think, who
has seen the places he writes of in his Historical and Architectural Sketches or in his
Sketches from French Travel, with the books in his hand, will deny that they have
added tenfold to his pleasure. Mr. Freeman tells you what to see and how to see it,—
just what you want to know and what you ought to know. It would be an impertinence
in me to point out the breadth or the accuracy of his knowledge as it appears in these

sketches, which can be read again and again with new pleasure. But I think it may be
said without exaggeration that in all the great work that Mr. Freeman did he did
nothing better than this. He never "writes down" to his readers: he expects to find in
them something of his own interest in the buildings and their makers; and he supplies
the knowledge which only the traveller who is also a historian has at hand.
The volume that is now published contains sketches written at different times from
1861 to 1891. It will be seen that they all bear more or less directly on the great
central work of the historian's life, the history of the Norman Conquest. In his travels
he went always to learn, and when he had learned he could not help teaching. The
course of each of these journeys can be traced in his own letters as published in the
Life. In 1856 he made his first foreign excursion—to Aquitaine—and after 1860 a
foreign tour was "almost an annual event."[4] In 1861 he paid his first visit to
Normandy, with the best of all companions. In 1867 he went again, specially for the
sake of the "Norman Conquest," with Mr. J.R. Green and Mr. Sidney Owen; and in the
next year he was in Maine with Mr. Green. In 1875 he was again in Normandy, for a
short time, on his way to Dalmatia. In 1876 he went to Maine also to "look up the
places belonging to"[5] William Rufus, and again in 1879 with Mr. J.T. Fowler and Mr.
James Parker. In 1891 he paid his last visit to the lands which he had come to know so
well. He was then thinking of writing on Henry I., a work of which he lived to write
but little. In this last Norman journey the articles, published in The Guardian after his
death, were written. His method on each of these expeditions seems to have been the
same. Before he started he read something of the special history of the places he was
to visit. He always, if possible, procured a local historian's book. He wrote his articles
while he was still away. "To many of these Norman places," says his daughter who
has prepared this volume for the press, "he went several times, and he never wearied
of seeing them again himself or of showing them to others.... In the last Norman
journey of 1891 how one feels he was at home there, re-treading the ground so
carefully worked out for the Norman Conquest and William Rufus—the same
enthusiasm with which, often under difficulties of weather or of health, he 'stepped
out' all he could of Sicily."
Not only did he walk, and read, and write, while he was abroad, he drew: and from the
hundreds of characteristic sketches which he has left it had been easy to select many
more than those which now illustrate this volume. Still, from those that have been
reproduced, with the descriptive studies just as they were written, the reader is in a
position to see the Norman and Cenomannian sites as they were seen by the great
historian himself. More remains from his hand, sketches of Southern Gaul, of Sicily,
Africa, and Spain, which I hope may be republished; but the present volume has a
unity of its own.
I have said thus much because it was the request of those who loved him best that I
should say something here by way of preface, though I have no claim, historical or

personal, that my name should in any way be linked with his. But the last of his many
acts of kindness to me was the gift of his Sketches from French Travel, which had
been recently published in the Tauchnitz edition. And as one of those who have used
his travel-sketches with continued delight, who welcomed him to Oxford in 1884, and
whose privilege it was to attend many of the lectures which he delivered as Professor,
I speak, if without any claim, yet very gratefully and sincerely. And since his lectures
illustrate so well the work which made his sketches so admirable, I may be suffered to
say a word from my memory of them and of himself.
In his lectures on the text of mediæval historians he did a service to young students of
history which was, in its way, unique. He showed them a great historian at work. In
his comparison of authorities, in his references to and fro, in his appeal to every
source of illustration, from fable to architecture, from poetry to charters, he made us
familiar not only with his results, but with his methods of working. It was a priceless
experience. Year after year he continued these lectures, informal, chatty, but always
vigorous and direct, eager to give help, and keen to receive assistance even from the
humblest of his hearers, choosing his subjects sometimes in connection with the
historical work on which he happened to be engaged, sometimes in more definite
relation to the subjects of the Modern History school. In this way he went through
Gregory of Tours, Paul the Deacon—I speak only of those courses at which I was
myself able to be present—and, in the last year of his life, the historians of the Saxon
Emperors, 936–1002—Widukind, Thietmar, Richer, Liudprand, and the rest. In these
and many other books, such as the Sicilian historians and the authorities for the
Norman Conquest, he made the men and the times live again, and he seemed to live in
them. Whatever the praise which students outside give to his published lectures, we
who have listened to him and worked with him shall look back with fondness and
gratitude most of all to those hours in his college rooms in Trinity, in the long, high
dining-room in S. Giles's—the Judges' lodgings—and in the quaint low chamber in
Holywell-street, where he fled for refuge when the Judges came to hold assize.
Much has been heard about Mr. Freeman's want of sympathy with modern Oxford,
much that is mistaken and untrue. It is true that he loved most the Oxford of his young
days, the Oxford of the Movement by which he was so profoundly influenced, the
Oxford of the friends and fellow-scholars of his youth. But with no one were young
students more thoroughly at home, from no one did they receive more keen sympathy,
more generous recognition, or more friendly help. He did not like a mere smattering
of literary chatter; he did not like to be called a pedant; but he knew, if any man did,
what literature was and what was knowledge. He was eager to welcome good work in
every field, however far it might be from his own.
It is true that Mr. Freeman was distinctly a conservative in academic matters, but it is
quite a mistake to think that he was out of sympathy with modern Oxford. No man
was more keenly alive to the good work of the younger generation. Certainly no man

was more popular among the younger dons. A few, in Oxford and outside, snarled at
him, as they snarl still, but they were very few who did not recognise the greatness of
his character as well as of his powers. It is not too much to say of those who had been
brought into at all near relations with him that they learnt not only to respect but to
love him. He was—all came to recognise it—not only a distinguished historian, but, in
the fullest sense of the words, a good man. He leaves behind him a memory of
unswerving devotion to the ideal of learning—which no man placed higher than he.
His remembrance should be an inspiration to every man who studies history in
Oxford.
The kindness which allows me to say these words here is like his own, which was felt
by the humblest of his scholars.
W.H. HUTTON.

CONTENTS
PAGE
Normandy [S.R. 1861] 1
Falaise [S.R. 1867] 10
The Cathedral Churches of Bayeux, Coutances, and Dol [S.R. 1867] 21
Old Norman Battle-grounds [S.R. 1867] 33
Fécamp [S.R. 1868] 42
Footsteps of the Conqueror [S.R. 1868] 51
The Côtentin [S.R. 1876] 62
The Avranchin [S.R. 1876] 74
Coutances and Saint-Lo [G. 1891] 80
Hauteville-la-Guichard [G. 1891] 89
Mortain and its Surroundings [G. 1892] 100
Mortain to Argentan [G. 1892] 112
Argentan [G. 1892] 125
Exmes and Almenèches [G. 1892] 139
Laigle and Saint-Evroul [G. 1892] 154
Tillières and Verneuil [G. 1892] 168
Beaumont-le-Roger [G. 1892] 179
Jublains [S.R. 1876] 189
The Churches of Chartres and Le Mans [S.R. 1868] 200
Le Mans [S.R. 1876] 211
Maine [S.R. 1876] 224

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
page
1. St. Stephen, Caen, E. Frontispiece
2. Falaise Castle 12
3. St. Gervase, Falaise, S.W. 16
4. Coutances Cathedral, Central Tower 24
5. Interior of Coutances Cathedral 28
6. Capitals in Bayeux Cathedral 29
7. Abbey of Fécamp, N.E. 43
8. Limay Church, Tower, S.E. 53
9. Domfront Castle 56
10. Eu Church, S.E. 57
11. Valognes Church, N.E. 69
12. Abbey of Lessay, S.W. 72
13. Notre-Dame, Saint-Lo, S.E. 83
14. St. Nicolas, Coutances, Interior 88
15. Le Mans Cathedral, N.W. 205
16. Interior of Le Mans Cathedral 208
17. St. Martin-in-the-Vale, Chartres 210
18. Apse of La Couture, Le Mans 210
19. Notre-Dame-du-Pré, Le Mans, N.E. 221
20. Sainte-Susanne, Keep 235

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL IN
NORMANDY AND MAINE

NORMANDY
1861

Before foreign travelling had become either quite so easy or quite so fashionable as it
is now, the part of France most commonly explored by English tourists was
Normandy. Antiquarian inquirers, in particular, hardly went anywhere else, and we
suspect that with many of them a tour in France, as Mr. Petit says, still means merely a
tour in Normandy.[6] The mere holiday tourist, on the other hand, now more
commonly goes somewhere else—either to the Pyrenees or to those parts of France
which form the road to Switzerland and Italy. The capital of the province, of course, is
familiar to everybody; two of the chief roads to Paris lie through it. But Rouen, noble
city as it is, does not fairly represent Normandy. Its buildings are, with small
exceptions, later than the French conquest, and, as having so long been a capital, and
now being a great manufacturing town, its population has always been very mixed.
There are few cities more delightful to examine than Rouen, but for the true
Normandy you must go elsewhere. The true Normandy is to be found further West. Its
capital, we suppose we must say, is Caen; but its really typical and central city is
Bayeux. The difference is more than nine hundred years old. In the second generation
after the province became Normandy at all, Rouen had again become a French city.
William Longsword, Rollo's son, sent his son to Bayeux to learn Danish. There the old
Northern tongue, and, we fancy, the old Northern religion too, still flourished, while at
Rouen nobody spoke anything but French.
A tour in Normandy has an interest of its own, but the nature of that interest is of a
kind which does not make Normandy a desirable choice for a first visit to France. We
will suppose that a traveller, as a traveller should, has learned the art of travel in his
own land. Let him go next to some country which will be utterly strange to him—as
we are talking of France, say Aquitaine or Provence. He will there find everything
different from what he is used to—buildings, food, habits, dress, as unlike England as
may be. If he tries to talk to the natives he will perhaps make them understand his
Langue d'oil; but he will find that his Parisian grammar and dictionary will go but a
very little way towards making him understand their Lingua d'oc. Now, Normandy
and England, of course, have many points of difference, and doubtless a man who
goes at once into Normandy from England will be mainly struck by the points of
difference. But let a man go through Southern Gaul first, and visit Normandy
afterwards, and he will be struck, not with the points of difference, but with the points
of likeness. Buildings, men, beasts, everything will at once remind him of his own
country. We hold that this is a very sufficient reason for visiting the more distant

province first. Otherwise the very important phenomenon of the strong likeness
between Normandy and England will not be taken in as it ought to be.
Go from France proper into Normandy and you at once feel that everything is
palpably better. Men, women, horses, cows, all are on a grander and better scale. If we
say that the food, too, is better, we speak it with fear and trembling, as food is, above
all things, a matter of taste. From the point of view of a fashionable cook, no doubt the
Norman diet is the worse, for whence should the fashionable cook come except from
the land with which Normandy has to be compared? But certain it is that a man with
an old-fashioned Teutonic stomach—a man who would have liked to dine off roast
meat with Charles the Great or to breakfast off beef-steaks with Queen Elizabeth—
will find Norman diet, if not exactly answering to his ideal, yet coming far nearer to it
than the politer repasts of Paris. Rouen, of course, has been corrupted for nine
centuries, but at Evreux, and in Thor's own city of Bayeux, John Bull may find good
meat and good vegetables, and plenty of them to boot. Then look at those strong, well-
fed horses—what a contrast to the poor, half-starved, flogged, over-worked beasts
which usurp the name further south! Look at those goodly cows, fed in good pastures,
and yielding milk thrice a day; they claim no sort of sisterhood with the poverty-
stricken animals which, south of the Loire, have to do the horse's work as well as their
own. Look at the land itself. An Englishman feels quite at home as he looks upon
green fields, and, in the Bessin district, sees those fields actually divided by hedges. If
the visitor chance not only to be an Englishman but a West-Saxon, he will feel yet
more at home at seeing a land where the apple-tree takes the place of the vine, and
where his host asks special payment for wine, but supplies "zider" for nothing. But
above all things, look at the men. Those broad shoulders and open countenances seem
to have got on the wrong side of the Channel. You are almost surprised at hearing
anything but your own tongue come out of their mouths. It seems strange to hear such
lips talking French; but it is something to think that it is at least not the French of
Louis the Great or of Louis Napoleon, but the tongue of the men who first dictated the
Great Charter, and who wrung its final confirmation from the greatest of England's
later kings.
The truth is, that between the Englishman and the Norman—at least, the Norman of
the Bessin—there can be, in point of blood, very little difference. One sees that there
must be something in ethnological theories, after all. The good seed planted by the old
Saxon and Danish colonists, and watered in aftertimes by Henry the Fifth and John,
Duke of Bedford, is still there.[7] It has not been altogether choked by the tares of
Paris. The word "Saxon" is so vague that we cannot pretend to say exactly who the
Saxons of Bayeux were; but Saxons of some sort were there, even before another
Teutonic wave came in with Rolf Ganger and his Northmen. Bayeux, as we have said,
was the Scandinavian stronghold. Men spoke Danish there when not a word of Danish
was understood at Rouen. Men there still ate their horse-steaks, and prayed to Thor
and Odin, while all Rouen bowed piously at the altar of Notre-Dame. The ethnical

elements of a Norman of the Bessin and an Englishman of Norfolk or Lincolnshire
must be as nearly as possible the same. The only difference is, that one has quite
forgotten his Teutonic speech, and the other only partially. Not that all Teutonic traces
have gone even from the less Norman parts of Normandy. How many of the English
travellers who land at Dieppe stop to think that the name of that port, disguised as it is
by a French spelling, is nothing in the world but "The Deeps?" If any one, now that
there is a railway, prefers to go along the lovely valley of the Seine, he will come to
the little town of Caudebec. Here, again, the French spelling makes the word
meaningless; but only write it "Cauld beck," and it at once tells its story to a Lowland
Scot, and ought to do so to every "Anglo-Saxon" of any kind. As for the local dialect,
it is French. It is not, like that of Aquitaine and Provence, a language as distinct as
Spanish or Italian. It is French, with merely a dialectical difference from "French of
Paris." But the Normans, in this resembling the Gascons, have no special objection to
a final consonant, and most vulgarly and perversely still sound divers s's and t's which
the politer tongue of the capital dooms to an existence on paper only.
It is certainly curious that Normandy—which, save during the comparatively short
occupation in the fifteenth century, has always been politically separate from England,
since England became English once more—should be so much more like England
than Aquitaine, which was an English dependency two hundred and fifty years after
Normandy and England were separated. The cause is clearly that between Englishmen
and Normans there is a real natural kindred which political separation has not effaced,
while between English and Gascons there was no sort of kindred, but a mere political
connexion which chanced to be convenient for both sides. The Gascons, to this day,
have not wholly forgotten the advantages of English connexion, but neither then nor
now is any likeness to England the result. So, in our own time, we may hold Malta for
ever, but we shall never make Maltese so like Englishmen as our Danish kinsmen still
are without any political connexion more recent than the days of Earl Waltheof.
For the antiquary, nothing can be more fascinating than a Norman tour. Less curious,
less instructive, because much more like English buildings, than those of Aquitaine,
the architectural remains of the province are incomparably finer in themselves. Caen
is a town well nigh without a rival. It shares with Oxford the peculiarity of having no
one predominant object. At Amiens, at Peterborough—we may add at Cambridge—
one single gigantic building lords it over everything. Caen and Oxford throw up a
forest of towers and spires, without any one building being conspicuously
predominant. It is a town which never was a Bishop's see, but which contains four or
five churches each fit to have been a cathedral. There is the stern and massive pile
which owes its being to the Conqueror of England, and where a life which never knew
defeat was followed by a posthumous history which is only a long series of
misfortunes. There is the smaller but richer minster, part of which at least is the
genuine work of the Conqueror's Queen.[8] Around the town are a group of smaller
churches such as not even Somerset or Northamptonshire can surpass. Then there is

Bayeux, with its cathedral, its tapestry, its exquisite seminary chapel; Cerisy, with its
mutilated but almost unaltered Norman abbey; Bernay, with a minster so shattered and
desecrated that the traveller might pass it by without notice, but withal retaining the
massive piers and arches of the first half of the eleventh century. There is Evreux, with
its Norman naves, its tall slender Gothic choir, its strange Italian western tower, and
almost more fantastic central spire. All these are noble churches, sharing with those of
our own land a certain sobriety and architectural good sense which is often wanting in
the churches of France proper. In Normandy as in England, you do not see piles, like
Beauvais, begun on too vast a scale for man's labour ever to finish; you do not see
piles like Amiens, where all external proportion is sacrificed to grandeur of internal
effect.[9] A Norman minster, like an English one, is satisfied with a comparatively
moderate height, but with its three towers and full cruciform shape, it seems a
perfection of outline to which no purely French building ever attains.

FALAISE
1867

The beginnings of the Norman Conquest, in its more personal and picturesque point of
view, are to be found in the Castle of Falaise. There, as Sir Francis Palgrave sums up
the story, "Arletta's pretty feet twinkling in the brook made her the mother of William
the Bastard." And certainly, if great events depend upon great men, and if great men
are in any way influenced by the places of their birth, there is no place which seems
more distinctly designed by nature to be the cradle of great events. The spot is one
which history would have dealt with unfairly if it had not contrived to find its way
into her most striking pages. And certainly in this respect Falaise has nothing to
complain of. Except one or two of the great cities of the province, no place is brought
more constantly under our notice during five centuries of Norman history. And
Norman history, we must not forget, includes in this case some of the most memorable
scenes in the history of England, France, and Scotland. The siege by Henry the Fourth
was in a manner local; it was part of a warfare within the kingdom of France. But that
warfare was one in which all the Powers of Europe felt themselves to be closely
interested; it was a warfare in which one at least of them directly partook; it was one
in which the two great religions of Western Europe felt that their own fates were to be
in a manner decided. In the earlier warfare of the fifteenth century Falaise plays a
prominent part. Town and castle were taken and retaken, and the ancient fortress itself
received a lasting and remarkable addition from the hand of one of the greatest of
English captains. The tall round tower of Talbot, a model of the military masonry of
its time, goes far to share the attention of the visitor with the massive keep of the
ancient Dukes. Thence we leap back to the earliest great historical event which we can
connect, with any certainty, with any part of the existing building. It was here, in a
land beyond the borders of the Isle of Britain, but in a comparatively neighbouring
portion of the wide dominions of the House of Anjou, that the fullest homage was paid
which ever was paid by a King of Scots to a King of England. Here William the Lion,
the captive of Alnwick, became most effectually the "man" of Henry Fitz-Empress,
and burdened his kingdom with new and onerous engagements from which his next
overlord found it convenient to relieve him. Earlier in the twelfth century, and in the
eleventh, Falaise plays its part in the troubled politics of the Norman Duchy, in the
wars of Henry the First and in the wars of his father. Still going back through a
political and military history spread over so many ages, the culminating interest of
Falaise continues to centre round its first historic mention. Henry of Navarre, our own
Talbot, William the Lion, Robert of Bellême, all fail to kindle the same emotions as

are aroused by the spot which was the favourite dwelling-place of the pilgrim of
Jerusalem, the birthplace of the Conqueror of England.

Falaise Castle
Local tradition of course affirms the existing building to be the scene of William's
birth. The window is shown from which Duke Robert first beheld the tanner's
daughter, and the room in which William first saw what, if it really be the spot, must
certainly have been light of an artificial kind. A pompous inscription in the modern
French style calls on us to reverence the spot where the "legislator of ancient
England" "fut engendré et naquit." The odd notion of William being the legislator of
England calls forth a passing smile, and another somewhat longer train of thought is
suggested. William, early in his reign, tried to learn English. He proved no very apt
scholar, and he presently gave up his studies; but we may fairly believe that he learned
enough to understand the simple formulæ of his own English charters. This leads one
to ask the question: Would he not have been as likely to understand his own praises in
the tongue of the conquered English as in what is supposed to represent his own
native speech? Have we, after all, departed any further from the tongue of the oldest
Charter of London than the Imperial dialect of abstractions and antitheses has
departed from the simple and vigorous speech of the Roman de Rou? And, if he could
spell it out in either tongue, he would find it somewhat faint praise to be told that,

judged by the standard of the nineteenth century, he was a mere barbarian, but that
M.F. Galeron would condescend so far as to suggest to his contemporaries to judge
the local hero by a less rigid rule. If this is all the credit that the great William can get
from his own people in his own birthplace, we can only say that, while demurring to
his title of legislator of England, we would give him much better measure than this,
even if we were writing on the site of the choir of Waltham.
Antiquaries have, till lately, generally acquiesced in the local belief that the existing
building is the actual castle of Robert the Devil. The belief in no way commits us to
the details of the local legend. Robert must have had an astonishingly keen sight if he
could, from any window of the existing keep, judge of the whiteness of a pair of feet
and ankles at the bottom of the rock. Nor does it at all follow that, if the present keep
was standing at the time of William's birth, William was therefore born in it. The
Duke's mistress would be just as likely to be lodged in some of the other buildings
within the circuit of the castle as in the great square tower of defence. And, if we
accept the belief, which is now becoming more prevalent, that the present keep is of
the twelfth century and not of the eleventh, we are not thereby at all committed to the
dogma that, because Robert the Devil lived before 1066, he could not possibly have
had a castle of stone. In the wars of the eleventh and twelfth centuries many castles in
Normandy were destroyed, not a few of them by William himself after the great revolt
which was put down at Val-ès-dunes. The Norman castle, evidently of the type used
after the Conquest, was introduced into England before the Conquest by the foreign
favourites of Edward the Confessor. They could have built only in imitation of what
they had been used to build in Normandy, and unless the new fashion, with its new
name, had been a distinct advance on anything in the way of fortification already
known in England, it would not have caused so much amazement as it did.
Englishmen were perfectly familiar with stone walls to a town, but the Norman keep
was something new, something for which there was no English name, and which
therefore retained its French name of "castel." On the whole, the evidence is in favour
of the belief that the present castle of Falaise is of the twelfth century. But there is no
reason to deny, and there is every reason to believe, that Robert the Devil may have
inhabited a castle of essentially the same type in the eleventh century.
Adjoining the keep is the tall round tower of the great Talbot. The two towers suggest
exactly opposite remembrances. One sets before us the Norman dominant in England,
the other sets before us the Englishman dominant in Normandy. Or the case may be
put in another shape. Talbot, like so many of his comrades, was probably of Norman
descent. Such returned to the land of their fathers in the character of Englishmen. And
yet after all, when the descendants of Rolf's Danes and of the older Saxons of Bayeux
assumed the character of Englishmen, they were but casting away the French husk and
standing forth once more in the genuine character of their earlier forefathers. Such
changes were doubtless quite unconscious; long before the fifteenth century the
Norman in England had become thoroughly English, and the Norman in Normandy

had become thoroughly French. French indeed in speech and manners he had been for
ages, but by the time of Henry the Fifth he had become French in national feeling
also. The tower of Talbot was no doubt felt by the people of Falaise to be a badge of
bondage. It stands nobly and proudly, overtopping the older keep; its genuine masonry
as good as on the day it was built, while the stuff with which its upper part was
mended twenty years back has already crumbled away. Within, a few details of purely
English character tell their tale in most intelligible language.

St. Gervase, Falaise, S.W.
The position of the castle is striking beyond measure. It is all the more so because it
comes on the traveller who reaches the place in the way in which travellers are now
most likely to reach it as a thorough surprise. In the approach by the railway the castle
hardly shows at all. We pass through the streets of the town; the eye is caught by the
splendid church of St. Gervase, but of the castle we get only the faintest glimpse,
nothing at all to suggest the full glory of its position. We pass on by the fine but very
inferior church of the Holy Trinity; we contemplate the statue of the local hero; we
pass through the castle gate; we pass by a beautiful desecrated chapel of the twelfth
century; we feel by the rise of the ground and by the sight of the walks below that we
are ascending, but it is not till we are close to the keep itself, till we have reached the
very edge of the precipice, that we fully realise there is a precipice at all. At last we
are on the brow; we see plainly enough the falaises, the felsen—the honest Teutonic
word still surviving, and giving its name to the town itself, and to its distinguishing
feature. The castle stands on the very edge of the steep and rugged rock; opposite to it
frowns another mass of rocks, not sharp and peaked, but chaotic, like a mass of huge
boulders rolled close together. From this point the English cannon played successfully
on the ancient keep, which, under the older conditions of warfare, must have been
well nigh impregnable. It is from this opposing height that the castle is now best
surveyed by the peaceful antiquary. Between the two points tumbles along the same
little beck in which the pretty feet are said to have twinkled, and not far off the trade
of the damsel's father is still plied, perhaps on the very spot where that unsavoury
craft, of old the craft of the demagogue, was so strangely to connect itself with the
mightiest of Norman warriors and princes.
What, it may be asked, is the condition of this most interesting monument of an age
which has utterly passed away? If there is any building in the world which belongs
wholly to the past, towards which the duty of the present is simply to preserve, to
guard every stone, to prop if need be, but to disturb nothing, to stay from falling as
long as human power can stay it, but to abstain from supplanting one jot or one tittle
of the ancient work by the most perfect of modern copies—it is surely the donjon-
keep of Falaise. But, like every other building in France, the birthplace of the
Conqueror is hopelessly handed over to the demon of restoration. They who have
turned all the ancient monuments of France upside down have come to Falaise also.
They who were revelling ten years back in the destruction of Périgueux, they who are
even now fresh from effacing all traces of antiquity from the noble minster of Matilda,
they who have thrust their own handiworks even into the gloomy crypt of Odo, have
at last stretched forth their hands to smite the cradle of the Conqueror himself. The
Imperial architect, M. Ruprich Robert, has surveyed the building, he has drawn up a
most clear and intelligent account of its character and history, and, on this showing,
the work of destruction has begun. Controversy will soon be at an end; there will be
no need to dispute whether any part be of the eleventh or of the twelfth century; both

alike are making room for a spruce imitation of the nineteenth. We shall no longer see
the dwelling-place either of Robert the Devil or of Henry Fitz-Empress; in its stead we
shall trace the last masterpiece of the reign of Napoleon the Third. Sham Romanesque
is grotesque everywhere, but it is more grotesque than all when we see newly-cut
capitals stuck into the windows of a roofless castle, when the grey hue of age is wiped
away from a building which has stood at least seven hundred years, and when the
venerable fortress is made to look as spick and span as the last built range of shops at
Paris. Among the endless pranks, at once grotesque and lamentable, played by the
mania for restoration, surely the "restoration" of this venerable ruin is the most
grotesque and lamentable of all. The municipality of Caen have lately made
themselves a spectacle to mankind by pulling down, seemingly out of sheer
wantonness, one half of one of the most curious churches of their city.[10] We
commend them not; but we do not place even them on a level with the subtler
destroyers of Falaise. The savages of Caen are satisfied with simple, open destruction;
what they cannot understand or appreciate they make away with. But there is no
hypocrisy, no pretence about them; they simply destroy, they do not presume to
replace. But the restorer not only takes away the work of the men of old, he
impudently puts his own work in its stead. He takes away the truth and puts a lie in its
place. Our readers know very well with what reservations this doctrine must be taken
—reservations which in the case of churches or other buildings actually applied to
appropriate modern uses, are very considerable. But in the case of a mere monument
of antiquity, a building whose only value is that it has stood so many years, that it
exhibits the style of such an age, that it has beheld such and such great events, there is
no reservation to be made at all. In the castle of Falaise we may adopt, word for word,
the most vehement of Mr. Ruskin's declamations on this head. The man who turns the
ancient reality of the twelfth century into a sham of the nineteenth deserves no other
fame than the fame which Eratostratus won at Ephesus, and which James Wyatt won
in the chapter-house of Durham.

THE CATHEDRAL CHURCHES OF BAYEUX,
COUTANCES, AND DOL
1867

One would rather like to see a map of France, or indeed of Europe, marking in
different degrees of colour the abundance or scarcity of English visitors and residents.
Of course the real traveller, whether he goes to study politics or history or language or
architecture or anything else, is best pleased when he gets most completely out of the
reach of his own countrymen. The first stage out of the beaten track of tourists is a
moment of rapture. For it is the tourists who do the mischief; the residents are a
comparatively harmless folk. A colony of English settled down in a town and its
neighbourhood do very little to spoil the natives among whom they live. For the very
reason that they are residents and not tourists, they do not in the same way corrupt
innkeepers, or turn buildings and prospects into vulgar lions. It is hard to find peace at
Rouen, as it is hard to find it at Aachen; but a few English notices in the windows at
Dinan do not seriously disturb our meditations beneath the spreading apses of St.
Sauveur and St. Malo or the plaster statue of Bertrand du Guesclin. For any
grievances arising from the neighbourhood of our countrymen, we might as well be at
Dortmund or Rostock. But, between residents, tourists, and real travellers, we may set
it down that there is no place which Englishmen do not visit sometimes, as there
certainly are many places in which Englishmen abound more than enough.
We have wandered into this not very profound or novel speculation through a sort of
wish to know how far three fine French churches of which we wish to speak a few
words are respectively known to Englishmen in general. These are the Norman
cathedrals of Bayeux and Coutances, both of them still Bishops' sees, and the Breton
Cathedral of Dol, which, in the modern ecclesiastical arrangements, has sunk into a
parish church. Bayeux lies on a great track, and we suppose that all the world goes
there to see the tapestry. Coutances has won a fame among professed architectural
students almost higher than it deserves, but we fancy that the city lies rather out of the
beat of the ordinary tourist. Dol is surely quite out of the world; we trust that, in
joining it with the other two, we may share somewhat of the honours of discovery. We
will not say that we trust that no one has gone thither from the Greater Britain since
the days of the Armorican migration; but we do trust that a criticism on the cathedral
church of Dol will be somewhat of a novelty to most people.
We select these three because they have features in common, and because they all
belong to the same general type of church. As cathedrals, they are all of moderate size;

Coutances and Dol, we may distinctly say, are of small size. They do not range with
such miracles of height as France shows at Amiens and Beauvais, or with such
miracles of length as England shows at Ely and St. Albans. They rank rather with our
smaller episcopal churches, such as Lichfield, Wells, and Hereford. Indeed most of the
great Norman churches come nearer to this type than to that of minsters of a vaster
scale. And the reason is manifest. The great churches of Normandy, like those of
England, are commonly finished with the central tower. Perhaps they do not always
make it a feature of quite the same importance which it assumes in England, but it
gives them a marked character, as distinguished from the great churches of the rest of
France. Elsewhere, the central tower, not uncommon in churches of the second and
third rank, is altogether unknown among cathedrals and other great minsters of days
later than Romanesque. It is as much the rule for a French cathedral to have no central
tower as it is for an English or Norman cathedral to have one. The result is that, just as
in our English churches, the enormous height of Amiens and Beauvais cannot be
reached. But, in its stead, the English and Norman churches attained a certain justness
of proportion and variety of outline which the other type does not admit. No church in
Normandy, except St. Ouen's, attains any remarkable height, and even St. Ouen's is far
surpassed by many other French churches. But perhaps a vain desire to rival the vast
height of their neighbours sometimes set the Norman builders to attempt something of
comparative height by stinting their churches in the article of breadth. This peculiarity
may be seen to an almost painful extent at Evreux.

Coutances Cathedral, Central Tower
Our three churches, then—Coutances and Dol certainly—rank with our smaller
English cathedrals, allowing for a greater effect of height, partly positive, partly
produced by narrowness. They are, in fact, English second-class churches with the
height of English first-class churches. Bayeux, in every way the largest of the three,
perhaps just trembles on the edge of the first-class. Coutances, the smallest, is
distinctly defective in length; the magnificent, though seemingly unfinished, central
tower, plainly wants a longer eastern limb to support it. Even at Bayeux the eastern
limb is short according to English notions, though not so conspicuously so as
Coutances. We suspect that Dol is really the most justly proportioned of the three,
though in many points its outline is the one which would least commend itself to
popular taste. The central tower is still lower than that at Lisieux; it is rather like that
of St. Canice at Kilkenny, only just rising above the level of the roof. But, as is always

the case with this arrangement, the effect is solemn and impressive. The low heavy
central tower is a common feature in Normandy, and one to which the eye soon gets
accustomed. The west front of Dol is imperfect and irregular; the southern has been
carried up and finished in a later style, while the northern one, whose rebuilding had
been begun, was left unfinished altogether. The whole front is mutilated and poor, and
the chief attractions of Dol must be looked for elsewhere. The west front of Coutances
is as famous as the west front of Wells, and both, to our taste, equally undeservedly.
Both are shams; in neither does a good, real, honest gable stand out between the two
towers. The west front of Coutances also is a mass of meaningless breaks and
projections, and the form of the towers is completely disguised by the huge
excrescences in the shape of turrets. Far finer, to our taste, is the front of Bayeux.
Though it is a composition of various dates, thrown together in a sort of casual way,
and though the details of the two towers do not exactly agree, yet the different stages
are worked together so as to produce a very striking effect. The later work seems not
so much to be stuck upon the earlier as to grow out of it. One could hardly have
thought that spires, among the most elegant of the elegant spires of the district, would
have looked so thoroughly in place as they do when crowning towers, the lower parts
at least of which are the work of the famous Odo. There is nothing of that
inconsistency which is clearly marked between the upper and lower parts of the front
of St. Stephen's at Caen. The general external effect of Bayeux can hardly be judged
of till the completion of the new central lantern. This last is a bold experiment,
seemingly a Gothic version of the cupola which it displaces. But as far as the original
work goes, there can be no doubt of Bayeux holding much the first place among our
three churches.

Interior of Coutances Cathedral
Looked at within, the precedence of Bayeux is less certain. The first glance at
Coutances, within as without, is disappointing, mainly because the visitor has been led
to expect a building on a grander scale. But the interior soon grows on the spectator, in
a way in which the outside certainly does not. The first impression felt is one of being
cramped for room. The difference between Coutances and Bayeux is plainly shown by
the fact that at Bayeux room is found for a spacious choir east of the central tower,
while at Coutances a smaller choir is driven to annex the space under the lantern. This
is an arrangement which is often convenient in any case, but which, as a matter of
effect, commonly suits a Romanesque church better than a Gothic one. But when we
come more thoroughly to take in the internal beauties of Coutances, we begin to feel

that Bayeux, with all its superior grandeur, has found a very formidable rival.
Coutances is the more harmonious whole. The choir and the nave vary considerably,
and the choir must be somewhat the later of the two. But the difference is hardly of a
kind to interfere much with the general effect. The general appearance of the church is
thoroughly consistent throughout, and the octagon lantern, with its arcades, galleries,
and pendentives, all open to the church, forms a magnificent feature. It is evidently the
feature of which Coutances was specially proud; it is repeated, at a becoming distance,
in the other two churches of the city, as well as elsewhere in the diocese. The nave
arcades of Coutances are exquisite, the triforium is well proportioned and well
designed, except that perhaps the beautiful floriated devices in the head may be
thought to have usurped the place of some more strictly architectural design. The
clerestory is perhaps a little heavy. In the choir the clerestory and triforium are thrown
into one stage of singular likeness, though in this style the lack of a distinct triforium
is always to be regretted. The mouldings in both parts have, as is so usual in
Normandy, an English look, which is quite unknown in France proper, and in the choir
we find a larger use of the characteristic English round abacus. But, next to the
lantern, the most striking thing in the interior of Coutances is certainly the sweep of
the eastern aisles and chapels, where the interlacing aisles and pillars produce an
effect of spaciousness which is not to be found in the main portions of the church.

Capitals in Bayeux Cathedral
The interior of Bayeux, besides its greater spaciousness and grandeur of effect, is
attractive on other grounds. It is far more interesting than Coutances to the historical
inquirer. Many facts in the history of Normandy are plainly written in the architectural
changes of this noble church. The most interesting portion indeed does not appear in
the general view of the interior. The church of Odo, the church at whose dedication
William was present, and which must have been rising at the time of the visit of
Harold, now survives only in the crypt of the choir and in the lower portions of the
towers.[11] The rest was destroyed by fire, like so many other churches in Normandy,

during the wars of Henry the First. Of the church which then replaced it, the arcades
of the nave still remain. No study of Romanesque can be more instructive than a
comparison of the work of these two dates. Odo's work is plain and simple, with many
of the capitals of a form eminently characteristic of an early stage of the art of
floriated enrichment—a form of its own which grew up alongside of others, and
gradually budded into such splendid capitals of far later work as we see at Lisieux.
Will it be believed that the remorseless demon of restoration has actually descended
the steps of this venerable crypt, and that two of the capitals are now, not of the
eleventh century, but brand-new productions of the nineteenth? Of course we are told
that they are exact copies; but what then? We do not want copies, but the things
themselves, and if they were a little ragged and jagged, what harm could it do down
underground?
A striking contrast to the work of Odo, a contrast as striking as can easily be found
between two things which are, after all, essentially of the same style, is to be seen in
the splendid arcades of the nave, one of the richest examples to be found anywhere of
the later and more ornamented Romanesque. The arches are of unusual and very
irregular width; the irregularity must be owing to something in the remains or
foundations of the earlier building. They are crowned, however, not by a triforium and
clerestory of their own style, but a single clerestory of coupled lancets of enormous
height, with the faintest approach to tracery in the head. The effect is striking, but
certainly somewhat incongruous. The choir is one of the most beautiful productions of
the thirteenth-century style of the country, always approaching nearer to English work
than the architecture of any other part of the Continent. Another church at Bayeux,
that which now forms the chapel of the seminary, is well known as being more
English still. It might, as far as details go, stand unaltered as an English building.
And now for a few words as to the obscure Breton church which we have ventured to
put into competition with such formidable Norman rivals.[12] Perhaps it derives some
of its attractions from its being out of the way and comparatively unknown. It has that
peculiar charm which attaches to a fine building found where one would hardly expect
to find it—a feeling which reaches its highest point at St. David's. The first impression
which it gives is that there is something Irish about it; there is certainly no church in
Ireland which can be at all compared to it; still it is something like what one could
fancy St. Canice growing into. One marked characteristic of Dol Cathedral comes
from its material. It is built of the granite of the country, which necessarily gives it a
somewhat stern and weather-beaten look, and hinders any great exuberance of
architectural ornament. Not that we think this any loss; the simple buttresses and
flying buttresses at Dol are really a relief after the elaborate and unintelligible forests
of pinnacles which surround so many French churches, even of very moderate size. It
is only in the huge porch attached to the south transept that an approach to anything of
this kind is found. But very beautiful work of other sorts may be seen at Dol. The
smaller porch is a gem of early work, and the range of windows in the north aisle

presents some of the most delicate triumphs of geometrical tracery, too delicate in
truth to last, as all are more or less broken. The flat east end gives the church an
English look, and the flat east end with an apsidal chapel beyond it especially suggests
Wells. Within, the church has a great effect of height and narrowness, greater certainly
than Coutances. Like Coutances, the nave and choir are of somewhat different dates,
the choir being more modern, but, unlike Coutances, still more unlike Bayeux, they
range completely together in composition. The nave we might fairly call Early
English. It is not quite so characteristic as some of the work at Bayeux, but it uses the
round abacus freely, although not exclusively. But for a few square abaci which are
used, and for the appearance of early tracery in the side windows, it might pass as a
purely Lancet building. The choir is fully developed geometrical work, of excellent
character, with a beautifully designed triforium and clerestory. Altogether we think
Dol may make good its claim to a high place among churches of the second order. It is
specially curious to see how a building which does not differ in any essential
peculiarity of style from its fellows assumes a distinct character, and that by no means
wholly to its loss, through the use of a somewhat rugged material.

OLD NORMAN BATTLE-GROUNDS
1867

In the strictly historical aspect, the English inquirer is perhaps naturally led to think
most of those events in which his more recent countrymen were more immediately
concerned—those events of the Hundred Years' War, on which so much light has
lately been thrown by the researches of M. Puiseux.[13] But he should not forget that,
besides being the scene of these events in the great struggle between England and
France, Normandy, independent Normandy, has also a history of its own, in which
both England and France had a deep interest. It is not only because Normandy is the
cradle of so many families which after events made English, because so many
Norman villages still bear names illustrious in the English peerage. It is because it is
in the earlier history of Normandy, above all, in the reign of William himself, that we
are to seek for one side of the causes which made a Norman conquest of England
possible, just as it is in the earlier history of England, above all, in the reign of
Eadward, that we are to seek for the other side of those causes.
No one among those causes was more important than the personal character of the
great Duke of the Normans himself. And the qualities which made William able to
achieve the Conquest of England were, if not formed, at least trained and developed,
by the events of his reign in his own Duchy. Succeeding with a very doubtful title, at
once bastard and minor, it is wonderful that he contrived to retain his ducal crown at
all; it is not at all wonderful that his earlier years were years of constant struggle
within and without his dominions. He had to contend against rivals for the Duchy, and
against subjects to whom submission to any sovereign was irksome. He had to
contend against a jealous feudal superior, who dreaded his power, who retained
somewhat of national dislike to the Danish intruders, and who, shut up in his own
Paris, could hardly fail to grudge to any vassal the possession of the valley and mouth
of the Seine. William, in short, before he conquered England, had to conquer both
Normandy and France. And such was his skill, such was his good luck, that he found
out how to conquer Normandy by the help of France, and how to conquer France by
the help of Normandy. The King of the French acted as his ally against his rebellious
vassals, and those rebellious vassals changed into loyal subjects when it was needful
to withstand the aggressions of the King of the French.
The principal stages in this warfare are marked by two battles, the sites of which are
appropriately placed on the two opposite sides of the Seine. At Val-ès-dunes William
of Normandy and Henry of France overcame the Norman rebels.[14] Afterwards, when
Henry had changed his policy, the Normans smote the French with a great slaughter at

Mortemer, neither of the contending princes being personally present. Val-ès-dunes,
we must confess the fact, was in truth a victory of the Roman over the Teuton. It was
by the aid of his French overlord that William chastised into his obedience the sturdy
Saxons of the Bessin and the fierce Danes of the Côtentin. The men of the peninsula
boasted, in a rhyme which is still not forgotten in the neighbourhood of the fight, how
De Costentin partit la lance
Qui abastit le roy de France.
For King Henry, successful in the general issue of the day, had his own personal
mishaps in the course of the battle, and to have overthrown the King of the French
was an exploit which supplied the vanquished with some little consolation.
The scene of this battle is fitly to be found in the true Normandy, but towards its
eastern frontier. It must not be forgotten that the truest Normandy was not the oldest
Normandy. The lands first granted to Rolf, perhaps for the very reason that they were
the lands first granted to him, became French, while the later acquisitions of Rolf
himself still remained Danish.
The boundary was seemingly marked by the Dive. Val-ès-dunes then, placed a little to
the west of that river, comes within the true Normandy, though it is near to its
outskirts. The Teutonic Norman was beaten on his own ground, but the Frenchman at
least never made his way to the gates of Bayeux or Coutances. The site of the battle is
less attractive to the eye than many other battle-fields, but the ground is excellently
adapted for what the battle seems really to have been, a sharp encounter of cavalry, a
few gallant charges ending in the headlong flight of the defeated side. This was the
young Duke's first introduction to serious warfare; but he had tougher work than this
to go through before his career was over. To the east of Caen stretches a somewhat
dreary country, which forms a striking contrast to the rich meadows and orchards of
the Bessin, while it in no way approaches to the wildness of the sterner portions of the
Côtentin. A range of hills of some height bounds the prospect to the north, and it was
from that direction that William brought his forces to the field. The field itself is a sort
of low plateau, sloping to the east, and bordered by a series of villages placed in what,
if the height of the rising ground were higher, might be called combes or valleys. The
churches of Valmeray, where a ruined fragment of later date marks the spot where
King Henry heard mass before the fight, Billy, Boneauville, Chicheboville, and
Secqueville, all skirt the hill, if hill we can call it. The actual battle-field lies between
the two last-named villages. To the west a higher ridge, called by the name of St.
Lawrence, marks the furthest point of the battle, the place where the defeated rebels
made their last stand, and which was marked by a commemorative chapel, now
destroyed. From that point the high ground again stretches westward as far as the
village of Haute Allemagne, the great quarry of Caen stone. Over all the ground in this

direction the rebels were scattered, multitudes of them being carried away, we are
told, by the stream of the Orne.
The spot, as we have said, is not in itself particularly attractive, though there is
something striking in the view both ways from the high ground of St. Lawrence. It is
easy to say how thoroughly well the ground was chosen for what took place on it, a
mêlée, of mounted knights, a tournament in earnest. And it is quite worth the while of
any student of Norman history to walk over the ground, Wace in hand, taking in the
graphic description of the honest rhymer, as clear and accurate as usual in his
topographical details. And it is pleasant to find how well the events of the day are still
remembered by the peasantry of the neighbourhood. There is no fear, as there is said
to be in the neighbourhood of Worcester, of an inquirer after the field of battle being
taken to see the scene of a battle between some local Sayers and Heenan. The Norman
of every rank, when let alone by Frenchmen, is a born antiquary, proud of the ancient
history of his country, and taking an intelligent interest in it which in England is
seldom to be found except amongst highly-educated men.
The other site, Mortemer, lies in a region far more attractive to the eye than Val-ès-
dunes, but, as an historical spot, it is chiefly remarkable from the event of the battle
having, so to speak, wiped out all traces of itself.[15] The spot where the French
invaders received so heavy a blow lies appropriately in the more French part of
Normandy, in the region on the right of the Seine, and it seems to have been almost
wholly by the hands of the men of the surrounding districts that the blow was struck.
The Mortemer of which we speak must not be mistaken for the Abbey of Mortemer,
near Lyons-la-forêt, in that famous wood of which Sir Francis Palgrave has so much
to tell. Both the one and the other Mortemer happily lie quite out of the beat of
ordinary tourists. The Mortemer of the battle lies on the road between the small towns
of Neufchâtel and Aumale. Neufchâtel-en-Bray, a Neufchâtel without lake or watches
or republic, can nevertheless boast of surrounding hills which, if not equal to the Jura,
are of considerable height for Northern Gaul, and its cheese is celebrated through a
large portion of Normandy. Ascend and descend one hill, then ascend and descend
another, and the journey is made from Neufchâtel to Aumale. Just out of the road, at
the base of the two hills, the eye is caught by a ruined tower on the right hand. This is
what remains of the castle of Mortemer, a fragment of considerably later date than the
battle. The church is modern and worthless; the few scattered houses, almost wholly
of wood, which form the hamlet, present nothing remarkable. But it is in this very
absence of anything remarkable that the historic interest of Mortemer consists. The
Mortemer of the eleventh century was a town; the Mortemer of the nineteenth century
is a very small and scattered village. Doubtless a town of that age might be, in point of
population, not beyond a village now; still a town implies continuous houses, which is
just what Mortemer now does not possess. The French occupied Mortemer because of
the convenient quarters to be had in its hostels. It is now one of the last places in the
world to which one would go for quarters of any kind. Mortemer was apparently an

open town, not defended by walls or a castle, or the French could hardly have
occupied it, as they did, without resistance. But it must have been a town, as towns
then went, or so large a body could not have been so comfortably quartered in it as
they evidently were. The key to the change is to be found in the event itself. The
Normans of the surrounding country surprised the French on the morning after they
had entered Mortemer, while they were still engaged in revelry and debauchery. They
set fire to the town, and slew the Frenchmen as they attempted to escape. To all
appearance, the town was never rebuilt, and its change into the mean collection of
houses which now bears its name is a strange but abiding trophy of a great triumph of
Norman craft—in this case we can hardly say of Norman valour—eight centuries
back.
Such are two of the historic spots which are to be found in abundance on the historic
soil of Normandy. They are only two out of many; every town, almost every village,
has its tale to tell. From Eu to Pontorson there is hardly a spot which does not make
some contribution to the history of those stirring times when Normandy had a life of
its own, and when the Norman name was famous from Scotland to Sicily. After six
hundred years of incorporation with the French monarchy, Normandy is still Norman;
"le Duc Guillaume" is still a familiar name, not only to professed scholars or
antiquaries, but to the people themselves. Without any political bearing—for the
political absorption of Normandy by France was remarkably speedy—the feelings and
memories of the days of independence have lingered on in a way which is the more
remarkable as there is no palpable distinction of language, such as distinguishes
Bretons, Basques, or even the speakers of the Tongue of Oc. But in everything but
actual speech the old impress remains, and the result is that in Normandy, above all in
Lower Normandy, the English historical traveller finds himself more thoroughly at
home than in any other part of the Continent except in the lands where the speech
once common to England, to Bayeux, and to Northern Germany is still preserved.

FÉCAMP
1868

It has sometimes struck us that the mediæval founders of towns and castles and
monasteries were not so wholly uninfluenced by considerations of mere picturesque
beauty as we are apt to fancy. We are apt to think that they had nothing in their minds
but mere convenience, according to their several standards of convenience,
convenience for traffic, convenience for military defence or attack, convenience for
the chase, the convenience of solitude in one class of ecclesiastical foundations, the
convenience of the near neighbourhood of large centres of men in another class. This
may be so; but, if so, these considerations of various kinds constantly led them, by
some sort of happy accident, to the choice of very attractive sites. And we venture to
think that it was not merely accident, because we often come upon descriptions of
sites in mediæval writers which seem to show that the men of those times were
capable of appreciating the picturesque position of this or that castle or abbey, as well
as its direct suitableness for military or monastic purposes. Giraldus, for instance,
evidently admired the site of Llanthony, and, if he expressed himself about it in rather
exaggerated language, that is no more than what naturally happens when any man,
especially when Giraldus, expresses himself in Latin, especially in mediæval Latin. In
the like sort, we have come across one or two descriptions of the Abbey of Fécamp
which clearly show that the writers were struck, as any man of taste would be, with
the position in which that great and famous monastery had arisen. And, to leap to
scenes which far surpass either Fécamp or Llanthony, the well-known story of Saint
Bernard's absorption on the shores of the Lake of Geneva really tells the other way.
We are told that the saint was so given up to pious contemplation that he travelled for
a whole day through that glorious region without noticing lake, mountains, or
anything else. Now we need hardly stop to show that the fact that Bernard's absorption
was thought worthy of record proves that, if he did not notice any of these things,
there was some one in his company who did. We suspect that in this, as in a great
many things, we have more in common with our forefathers several centuries back
than we have with those who are nearer to us by many generations.

Abbey of Fécamp, N.E.
Modern taste might possibly make one objection to the site of Fécamp. Though near
the sea, it is not within sight of the sea. The modern watering-place of Fécamp is
springing up at a considerable distance from the ancient abbey. But the love of
watering-places and sea-bathing is one which is altogether modern, and, in the days in
which our old towns, castles, and monasteries grew up, a site immediately on the sea
would have been looked on as unsafe. And in truth there are not many places, and
certainly Fécamp is not one of them, where all the various buildings of a great
monastery could have been planned so as to command the modern attraction of a sea-
view. Moreover it is a point not to be forgotten that people who go to Fécamp or
elsewhere for sea-views and sea-bathing go there during certain months only, while
the monks had to live there all the year round. The monks of Saint Michael's Mount
were indeed privileged with, or condemned to, an everlasting sea-view; but the title of
their house was that of Saint Michael "in periculo maris." To be exposed to the perils
of the sea was no part of the intention of the founders of Fécamp, either of abbey,
town or palace.[16] They chose them a site which gave them the practical advantages
of the sea without the dangers of its immediate neighbourhood. Fécamp then lies a
little way inland. Two parallel ranges of hills run down to the sea, with a valley and a
small stream between them, at the mouth of which the modern port has been made. On
the slope of the hills on the left side lies the huge mass of the minster rising over the

long straggling town which stretches away to the water. But though the great church
thus lies secluded from the sea, the spiritual welfare of sea-faring men was not
forgotten. The point where the opposite range of hills directly overhangs the sea is
crowned by one of those churches specially devoted to sailors and their pilgrimages
which are so often met with in such positions. The chapel of Our Lady of Safety, now
restored after a season of ruin and desecration, forms a striking and picturesque object
in the general landscape. And from the chapel itself and from the hill-side paths which
lead up to it, we get the noblest views of the great abbey, in all the stern simplicity of
its age, stretching the huge length of its nave, one of the very few, even in Normandy,
which rival the effect of Winchester and Saint Albans. A single central tower, of quite
sufficient height, of no elaborate decoration, crowned by no rich spire or octagon, but
with a simple covering of lead, forms the thoroughly appropriate centre of the whole
building. We feel that this tower is exactly what is wanted; we almost doubt whether
the church gained or lost by the loss of the western towers, which would have taken
off from the effect of boundless length which is the characteristic of the building. At
any rate we think how far more effective is the English and Norman arrangement,
which at all events provides a great church with the noblest of central crowns, than the
fashion of France, which concentrates all its force on the western front, and leaves the
at least equally important point of crossing to shift for itself.
The church itself is one of the noblest even in Normandy, and it is in remarkably good
preservation. And the two points in which the fabric has suffered severe damage are
not owing either to Huguenots or to Jacobins, but to its own guardians under two
different states of things. The bad taste of the monks themselves in their later days is
chargeable with the ugly Italian west front, which has displaced the elder front with
towers of which the stumps may still be seen. An Italian front, though it must be
incongruous when attached to a mediæval building, need not be in itself either ugly or
mean, but this front of Fécamp is conspicuously both. The other loss is that of the jubé
or roodloft, which, from the fragments left, seems to have been a magnificent piece of
later Gothic work, perhaps almost rivalling the famous one at Alby. The destruction of
roodlofts has been so general in France that one is not particularly struck by each
several case of destruction. But there is something singular about this Fécamp case, as
the jubé was pulled down at the restoration of religion, through the influence of the
then curé, in opposition to the wishes of his more conservative or more ritualistic
parishioners. With these two exceptions Fécamp has lost but little, as far as regards the
church itself. The conventual buildings, like most French conventual buildings, have
been rebuilt in an incongruous style, and now serve for the various public purposes of
the local administration. In a near view of the north side, they form an ugly
excrescence against the church, but they are lost in the more distant and general view.
The church itself mainly belongs to the first years of the thirteenth century, with
smaller portions both of earlier and of later date. On entering the church, we find that
the long western limb is not all strictly nave, the choir, by an arrangement more

common in England than in France, stretching itself west of the central tower. The
whole of this western limb is built in the simplest and severest form of that earliest
French Gothic, which to an English eye seems to be simply an advanced form of the
transition from Romanesque. Even at Amiens, amid all the splendours of its fully-
developed geometrical windows, the pillars and arches, in their square abaci and even
in the sections of their mouldings, have what an Englishman calls a Romanesque
feeling still hanging about them. At Fécamp this is far stronger. The large triforium,
the untraceried windows, the squareness of everything except a few English round
abaci in some bays of the triforium, the external heaviness and simplicity, all make the
early Gothic of Fécamp little more than pointed Romanesque. We do not say this in
disparagement. This stage was a necessary stage for architecture to pass through, and
the Transitional period is always one of the most interesting in architectural history.
And when work of that date is carried out with such excellence both of composition
and detail as it is at Fécamp, it is much more than historically interesting, it is
thoroughly satisfactory in artistic effect. We say nothing against the style, except that,
as being essentially imperfect and not realising the ideal of either of the two styles
between which it comes historically, we cannot look on it as a proper model for
modern imitation. Several diversities of detail may on minute examination be seen in
the different bays of the nave of Fécamp, just as in the contemporary nave of Wells.
Just as at Wells, the western part—in this case the five western bays—is slightly later
than the rest. And, as at Wells, the distinction between the older and newer work is
easily to be remarked by those who look for it, though it is a distinction which makes
no difference in the general effect and which might pass unnoticed by any but a very
minute observer. In truth it is, in both cases, a difference not of style but of taste. The
eastern limb of Fécamp—strictly the presbytery and not the choir—is more
remarkable in some ways than the nave. It is here that we find the only remains of an
earlier church, and these are of no very remarkable antiquity. M. Bouet, in a short
account of Fécamp, addressed to the Norman Antiquarian Society, records his
disappointment at finding at Fécamp no traces of the days of the early Dukes, or even
of days earlier still, such as he found at Jumièges. This oldest part of Fécamp is part of
a church begun so late as 1085. One bay of its presbytery and two adjoining chapels
have been spared. The style is a little singular. There is something not quite Norman
about the very square arches of a single order, and the capitals are not the usual
Norman capitals of the second half of the eleventh century. Except this bay, the
presbytery has been rebuilt in essentially the same style as the nave, though naturally a
little earlier. But on the south side a singular change took place in the fourteenth
century. As at Waltham, the builders of that day cut away the triforium and threw the
two lower stages into one. But what was done at Waltham in the most awkward and
bungling way in which anything ever was done anywhere, was at Fécamp at least
done very cleverly. Without meddling with the vaulting or the vaulting-shafts, the
pier-arches and triforium range of the thirteenth century have been changed into
arches of the fourteenth, resting on tall slender pillars, almost recalling the choir of Le

Mans. Whether this change was an improvement or not is a question of taste, but there
can be no question as to the wonderful skill, æsthetical and mechanical, with which
the change was made, and it is the more striking from the contrast with the wretched
"botch" at Waltham.
The church is finished to the east by a fine Flamboyant Lady Chapel. The contrast
between it and the earlier work suggests the effect of Henry the Seventh's Chapel at
Westminster, though the contrast is not quite so strong. Altogether there can be no
doubt of the claim of the church to a place in the very first rank of the great minsters
of a province specially rich in such works.
We have dwelt so long on the position and the architecture of Fécamp that we have no
space left to add anything on its history. But the local history of Fécamp naturally
connects itself with several other more general points at which we shall perhaps have
some future opportunity of glancing.

FOOTSTEPS OF THE CONQUEROR
1868

Many of the great events of Norman history, many of the chief events in the life of the
Great William, happened conveniently in or near to the great cities of the Duchy. But
many others also happened in somewhat out of the way places, which no one is likely
to get to unless he goes there on purpose. The Conqueror received his death-wound at
Mantes, he died in a suburb of Rouen, he was buried at Caen. All these are places easy
to get at. Perhaps we should except Mantes, which in a certain sense is not easy to get
at. All the world goes by Mantes, but few people stop there. The reason is manifest.
The traveller who goes by Mantes commonly has in his pocket a ticket for Paris,
which enables him to spend a day at Rouen, but not to spend a day at Mantes. People
very anxious to stop at Mantes, and to muse, so to speak, among its embers, have had
great searchings of heart how to get there, and have not accomplished their object till
after some years of reflection. And the interest of Mantes, after all, is mainly negative.
The town stands well; its river, its bridges, its islands, suggest the days when
Scandinavian pirates sailed up the Seine and encamped with special delight on such
eys or holms as that between Mantes and Limay. A specially prolonged fit of musing
may perhaps lead one to regret the prowess of Count Odo, and to wish that Paris also
had received that wholesome Northern infusion which still works so healthily between
the Epte and the Coesnon. But Mantes, as regards William, is something like
Mortemer as regards William's rival King Henry. Mantes can show no traces of
William or his age, for the simple reason that William took good care that no such
traces should be left. By perhaps the worst deed of his life, a deed which awakened
special indignation at the time, he gave Mantes to destruction to avenge a silly jest of
its sovereign. At Mantes he held his churching and lighted his candles, and their blaze
burned up houses, churches, whatever was there. Therefore, because William himself
was there in only too great force, it is that Mantes has no work of man to show on
which William can ever have looked. The church, whose graceful towers every one
has seen from the railway, is a grand fabric a hundred years or more later than
William's time, but to Norman and English eyes it might seem that, with such a height
as it has, the building ought to have fully doubled its actual length. The third tower,
that of a destroyed church, is worth study as an example of a striking kind of cinque-
cento, the design being purely Gothic and the details being strongly Italianised. But,
after all, the architectural inquirer will be best pleased with the fine Romanesque
tower in the suburb of Limay, and the lover of picturesque effect will not fail to dwell
on the mediæval bridge which leads thither from the town.

Limay Church, Tower, S.E.
So much for the spot, beyond the limits of his own Duchy, where William, in the
words of our Chronicles, "did a rueful thing, and more ruefully it him befel." Of the
points within Normandy which his name invests with their main interest, we have
already spoken of his birthplace at Falaise—where the brutal work of "restoration,"
i.e. of scraping and destroying, is still going on in full force—of the field of his early

victory at Val-ès-dunes, and of the victory won for him by others at Mortemer. We
may, however, suggest that any one who visits Val-ès-dunes, will not do amiss if he
extends his ramble as far as the churches of Cintheaux and Quilly. Cintheaux is one of
the best of the small but rich twelfth-century churches which are so common in the
district. And its worthy curé, the historian of Val-ès-dunes, is doing his best to bring it
back to its former state, without subjecting it, like Falaise or like one of the spires of
Saint Stephen's, to the cruel martyrdom of the apostle Bartholomew. Quilly is more
remarkable still, as possessing a tower containing marked vestiges of that earlier
Romanesque style of which Normandy contains so much fewer examples than either
England or Aquitaine. Cintheaux=Centella, has also a certain historic interest in the
generation after William. There, in 1105, King Henry and Duke Robert, "duo germani
fratres," had a conference. We forget who it was who translated "duo germani fratres"
by "two German brothers," and went on to rule that the Henry spoken of must have
been the Emperor Henry the Fourth, and to remark that the conference happened not
very long before his death. Cintheaux, however, has carried us from the age of
William into the age of his sons, and we must retrace our steps somewhat. The sites
connected with William himself will easily fall into three classes—those which belong
to his wars with France and Anjou, those which figure in the Breton campaign which
he waged in company with Earl Harold, and those which have a direct bearing on the
Conquest of England. The second class we may easily dispose of. Of Dol and Dinan
we have said somewhat already, and Dinan especially is a place familiar to many
Englishmen. But we may remark that, though Dinan contains few remains of any great
antiquity, few places better preserve the general effect of an ancient town. It still rises
grandly above the river, spanned both by the lowly ancient bridge and the gigantic
modern viaduct; the walls are nearly perfect, and houses, partly through the
necessities of the site, have not spread themselves at all largely beyond them. We may
add that the good sense of the inhabitants has found out a way to make excellent
boulevards without sacrificing the walls to their creation. Rennes, the furthest point
reached by the two comrades so soon to become enemies, is now wholly a modern
city. Saint Michael's Mount has become a popular lion, which can only be seen under
the vexatious companionship of a guide and a "party." It is therefore impossible to
study the interior with much comfort or profit. Yet one has still time to wonder at the
strange effect produced by crowding the buildings of a great monastery on the top of
the rock, an effect which reaches its highest point when we go up a staircase and find
ourselves landed in a cloister of singular beauty. But the rock and the buildings—
nowhere better seen than from the Mount of Dol—are still there, a most striking
object from every point of the landscape, Saint Michael "in peril of the sea" seeming
to watch over the bay which bears his name, as from his height at Glastonbury he
seems to watch over the flats and the hills peopled with the names alike of British and
of West-Saxon heroes. And the vast expanse of sand brings vividly before us the scene
in the Tapestry where the giant strength of the English Earl is shown lifting with ease
the soldiers who found themselves engulfed in the treacherous stream.

Domfront Castle
The wars of William with Geoffrey of Anjou and Henry of Paris introduce us to
several points, striking in the way both of nature and of art. Few among them surpass
Domfront, William's first conquest beyond the bounds of his own Duchy, the fortress
which he won by the mere terror of his name after the fearful vengeance which he had
inflicted on the rebels of Alençon.[17] The spot reminds one in some degree of his own
birthplace at Falaise. That is to say, the castle crowns one rocky hill, and looks out on

another, still wilder and more rugged, with a pass between them, through which runs
the stream of the Varenne, a tributary of the Mayenne, as that is in its turn of the Loire.
But the position of the two towns is different. Though the castle of Falaise occupies so
commanding a site, the town itself is anything but one of the hill-towns, while
Domfront is one of the best of the class. Not that it is the least likely to be an ancient
hill-fort, like Chartres, Le Mans, or Angers; both Falaise and Domfront are, beyond all
doubt, towns which have gathered round their respective castles in comparatively
modern times. Both, there can be no doubt, date, in their very beginnings, from a time
later than the Norman settlement. Still Domfront is practically a hill-town; the walls
simply fence in the top of the height, and the town, never having reached any great
size, has not yet spread itself to the bottom. A more picturesque site can hardly be
found. Of the castle, the chief remnant is a shattered fragment of the keep, most likely
the very fortress which surrendered to William's youthful energy.[18] As for churches,
the only one within the walls is worthless, but the church of Notre-Dame at the foot of
the hill is one of the best and purest specimens of Norman work on a moderate scale
to be found anywhere. The original work is nearly untouched, except that the
barbarism of modern times has removed about half the nave.

Eu Church, S.E.
After Domfront had submitted to William and had become permanently incorporated
with Normandy, he himself founded the fortress of Ambrières, as a border stronghold.

[19]
A fragment of the castle still overlooks the lower course of the Varenne, but the
ground is no longer Norman. Some way further on the same road we reach Mayenne,
a town whose name suggests far later warfare, but which was an important conquest
of William's in the days when Maine was the border ground, and the battle-field, of
Norman and Angevin.[20] The site of Mayenne, sloping, like that of Mantes, down to a
large river, has caused quite another arrangement. The river is here the main point for
attack and defence as well as for traffic. The castle therefore does not crown the
highest point of the town, but flanks the stream with a grand range of bastions, a
miniature of the mighty pile of Philip Augustus at "black Angers." This lower position
of castles, thus returned to in later times, seems however to have been the usual
position for the fortresses of the earliest Norman time. Before the Scandinavian
conquerors were fully settled in the country, the great point was to occupy sites
commanding the sea and the navigable rivers; it was a sign of quite another state of
things when the lord of the soil perched himself on the crest of an inland hill. Of the
earlier type of fortress we have an example in the castle of Eu, a name whose
associations may seem to be wholly modern, but which is, in truth, as the border
fortress of Normandy towards Flanders and the doubtful land of Ponthieu between
them, one of the most historic sites in the Duchy. Eu figures prominently in the wars
of Rolf; in its church William espoused his Flemish bride; in its castle he first received
his renowned English guest.[21] The church of William's day has given way to a
superb fabric of the thirteenth century, which needs only towers, which are strangely
lacking, to rank among the finest minsters in Normandy. The castle where William
and Harold met has given way to that well-known building of the House of Guise
which lived to become the last home of lawful royalty in France. But the site still
reminds one of the days of Rolf rather than of the days of William. It can hardly be
said to command the town; it is itself commanded by higher ground immediately
above it; town, church, castle, all seem from the surrounding hills to lie together in a
hole. But it is admirably placed for commanding the approaches from the sea and
from the low, and in Rolf's time no doubt marshy, ground lying between the town and
the water. In exact contrast to Eu, stands the noble hill-castle of Arques, near Dieppe,
the work of William's rebellious uncle and namesake, which he had to win by the slow
process of hunger from Norman rebels and French auxiliaries.[22] The little town, with
a church of later date, but of striking outline, lies low, lower than Eu; but the castle
soars above it, crowning a peninsular height which forms the extremity of a long
range of higher ground. The steep slopes of the hill might have seemed defence
enough, but Count William did not deem his fortress secure without cutting an
enormous fosse immediately within its circuit, so that any one who climbed the slope
of the hill would find a deep gulf between himself and the fortress, even if he were
lucky enough to escape falling headlong. The building has been greatly enlarged in
later times, but the shell of Count William's keep, a huge massive square tower, is still
here, as perhaps are some portions of his gateway and of his surrounding walls. The
view is a noble one, and it takes in the site of that later battle of Henry of Navarre to

which Arques now owes most of its renown, and which has gone some way to wipe
out the memory of both Williams, Count and Duke alike.
One point more. Round the lower course of the Dive all sorts of historical associations
centre. The stream divides the older and the later Normandy, but of these the later is
the truer, the land where the old speech and the old spirit lingered longest. By its
banks was fought the battle in which Harold Blaatand rescued Normandy from the
Frank, and in which the stout Dane took captive with his own hands Lewis King of
the West-Franks, the heir and partial successor of Charles.[23] There, too, are the
causeway and bridge of Varaville, marking the site of the ford where William's well-
timed march enabled him to strike almost as heavy a blow against the younger royalty
of Paris as the Danish ally of his forefathers had struck against the elder royalty of
Laon.[24] The French invaders of Normandy, King Henry at their head, had gorged
themselves with the plunder of the lands west of the Dive and were now carelessly
advancing towards the high ground of Auge in the direction of Lisieux. The King with
his vanguard had already climbed the hill, when he looked round, only to behold the
mass of his army cut to pieces before the sudden onslaught of the irresistible Duke.
William had marched up from Falaise and had taken them at the right moment, almost
as Harold took his Norwegian namesake at Stamford bridge. It is one of those spots
where the story is legibly written on the scene. The causeway is still there, and it is
easy to realise the King looking on the slaughter of his troops, and hardly withheld
from rushing down to give them help which must have proved wholly in vain. The
heights from which he looked down stretched to the sea, by the mouth of the river.
The port of Dive, now nearly choked up with sand, was then a great haven, and there
the fleet of William, assembled for the conquest of England, lay for a whole month,
waiting for the favourable winds which never came till they had changed their
position for the more auspicious haven of Saint Valery.

THE CÔTENTIN
1876

The "pagus Constantinus," the peninsular land of Coutances, is, or ought to be, the
most Norman part of Normandy. Perhaps however it may be needful first to explain
that the Latin "pagus Constantinus" and the French Côtentin are simply the same
word. For we have seen a French geography-book in which Côtentin was explained to
mean the land of coasts; the peninsular shape of the district gave it "trois côtes," and
so it was called Côtentin. We cannot parallel this with the derivation of Manorbeer
from "man or bear";[25] because this last is at least funny, while to derive Côtentin
from côte is simply stupid. But it is very like a derivation which we once saw in a
Swiss geography-book, according to which the canton of Wallis or Valais was so
called "parce que c'est la plus grande vallée de la Suisse." And, what is more, a Swiss
man of science, eminent in many branches of knowledge, but not strong in etymology,
thought it mere folly to call the derivation in question. It was no good arguing when
the case was as clear as the sun at noon-day. Now, in the case of Wallis, it is certainly
much easier to say what the etymology of the name is not than to say what it is; but in
the case of the Côtentin one would have thought that it was as clear as the sun at
noon-day the other way. How did he who derived Côtentin from côte deal with other
names of districts following the same form? The Bessin, the land of Bayeux, might
perhaps be twisted into something funny, but the Avranchin could hardly be anything
but the district of Avranches, and this one might have given the key to the others. But
both Côtentin and Bessin illustrate a law of the geographical nomenclature of Gaul, by
which, when a city and its district bear the same name, the name takes two slightly
different forms for the city and for the district. Thus we have Bourges and Berry,
Angers and Anjou, Périgueux and Périgord, Le Mans and Maine.[26] So Constantia
has become Coutances; but the adjective Constantinus has become Côtentin. City and
district then bear the same Imperial name as that other Constantia on the Rhine with
which Coutances is doomed to get so often confounded. How often has one seen
Geoffrey of Mowbray described as "Bishop of Constance." In an older writer this may
be a sign that, in his day, Coutances was spoken of in England as Constance. In a
modern writer this judgment of charity is hardly possible. It really seems as if some
people thought that the Conqueror was accompanied to England by a Bishop of the
city where John Huss was burned ages afterwards.
We have called the Côtentin a peninsula, and so it is. Sir Francis Palgrave points out,
with a kind of triumph, that the two Danish peninsulas, the original Jütland and this of
the Côtentin, are the only two in Europe which point northward. And the Côtentin

does look on the map very much as if it were inviting settlers from more northern
parts. But the fact is that the land is not really so peninsular as it looks and as it feels.
The actual projection northward from the coast of the Bessin or Calvados is not very
great. It is the long coast to the west, the coast which looks out on the Norman islands,
the coast which forms a right angle with the Breton coast by the Mount of Saint
Michael, which really gives the land its peninsular air. We are apt to forget that the
nearest coast due west of the city of Coutances does not lie in Europe. We are apt
further to forget that the whole of that west coast is not Côtentin. Avranches has its
district also, and the modern department of Manche takes in both, as the modern
diocese of Coutances takes in the older dioceses of Coutances and Avranches.
Part of the Côtentin then is a true peninsula, a peninsula stretching out a long finger to
the north-west in the shape of Cape La Hague; and this most characteristic part of the
land has impressed a kind of peninsular character on the whole region. But we must
not forget that the land of Coutances is not wholly peninsular, but also partly insular.
The Norman islands, those fragments of the duchy which remained faithful to their
natural Duke when the mainland passed under the yoke of Paris, are essential parts of
the Constantine land, diocese and county. Modern arrangements have transferred their
ecclesiastical allegiance to the church of Winchester, and their civil allegiance to the
Empire of India; but historically those islands are that part of the land of Coutances
which remained Norman while the rest stooped to become French.[27] The peninsula
pointing northwards, with its neighbouring islands, save that the islands lie to the west
and not to the east, might pass for no inapt figure of the northern land of the Dane.
They formed a land which the Dane was, by a kind of congruity, called on to make his
own. And his own he made it and thoroughly. Added to the Norman duchy by William
Longsword before Normans had wholly passed into Frenchmen, with the good seed
watered again by a new settlement straight from Denmark under Harold Blaatand, the
Danish land of Coutances, like the Saxon land of Bayeux, was far slower than the
lands beyond the Dive in putting on the speech and the outward garb of France. And
no part of the Norman duchy sent forth more men or mightier, to put off that garb in
the kindred, if conquered, island, and to come back to their natural selves in the form
of Englishmen. The most Teutonic part of Normandy was the one part which had a
real grievance to avenge on Englishmen; in their land, and in their land alone, had
Englishmen, for a moment in the days of Æthelred, shown themselves as invaders and
ravagers. But before the men of the Côtentin could show themselves as avengers at
Senlac, they had first to be themselves overthrown at Val-ès-dunes. Before William
could conquer England, he had first to conquer his own duchy by the aid of France.
Bayeux and Coutances were to have no share in the spoil of York and Winchester till
they had been themselves subdued by the joint might of Rouen and Paris.
It is singular enough that the two most prominent names among those which connect
the Bessin and the Côtentin with England should be those of their two Bishops,
Geoffrey of Mowbray, for a while Earl of Northumberland, and the more famous Odo,

Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent. Geoffrey would deserve a higher fame than he
wins by the possession of endless manors in Domesday and by the suppression of the
West-Saxon revolt at Montacute,[28] if we could believe that, according to a legend
which is even now hardly exploded, the existing church of Coutances is his work.
William of Durham and Roger of Salisbury would seem feeble workers in the building
art beside the man who consecrated that building in the purest style of the thirteenth
century in the year 1056. According to that theory, art must have been at Coutances a
hundred and fifty years in advance of the rest of the world, and, after about a hundred
and twenty years, the rest of the world must have begun a series of rude attempts at
imitating the long-neglected model. But without attributing to the art of Coutances or
the Côtentin so miraculous a development as this, the district was at all times fertile in
men who could build in the styles of their several ages. A journey through the
peninsula shows its scenery, so varied and in many parts so rich, adorned by a
succession of great buildings worthy of the land in which they are placed. The great
haven of the district is indeed more favoured by nature than by art. In the name of
Cherbourg mediæval etymologists fondly saw an Imperial name yet older than that
which is borne by the whole district, and the received Latin name is no other than
Cæsaris Burgus. Yet it is far more likely that the name of Cherbourg is simply the
same as our own Scarborough, and that it is so called from the rocky hills, the highest
ground in the whole district, which look down on the fortified harbour, and are
themselves condemned to help in its fortification. The rocks and the valley between
them are worthy of some better office than to watch over an uninteresting town which
has neither ancient houses to show nor yet handsome modern streets. The chief
church, though not insignificant, is French and not Norman, and so teaches the wrong
lesson to an Englishman who begins his Côtentin studies at this point. But, four miles
or so to the west, he will find a building which is French only if we are to apply that
name to what runs every chance of being præ-Norman, the work of a day when Rolf
and William Longsword had not yet dismembered the French duchy. On a slight
eminence overhanging the sea stands Querqueville, with its older and its newer, its
lesser and its greater, church, the two standing side by side, and with the outline of the
greater—the same triapsidal form marking both—clearly suggested by the smaller. Of
the smaller, which is very small indeed, one can hardly doubt that parts at least are
primitive Romanesque, as old as any one chooses. It is the fellow of the little church
of Montmajeur near Arles, but far ruder. But at Querqueville the name is part of the
argument; the building gives its name to the place. The first syllable of Querqueville is
plainly the Teutonic kirk; and it suggests that it got the name from this church having
been left standing when most of its neighbours were destroyed in the Scandinavian
inroads which created Normandy. The building has gone through several changes; the
upper part of its very lofty tower is clearly a late addition, but the ground-plan, and so
much of the walls as show the herring-bone work, are surely remains of a building
older than the settlement of Rolf.

Valognes Church, N.E.
From the rocks of the Norman Scarborough, one of the only two railways which find
their way into the Côtentin will carry the traveller through a district whose look, like
that of so much of this side of Normandy, is thoroughly English, to Valognes, with its
endless fragments of old domestic architecture, remnants of the days when Valognes
was a large and aristocratic town, and with its church, where the architect has
ventured, not wholly without success, on the bold experiment of giving its central
parts the shape of a Gothic cupola. Is its effect improved or spoiled—it certainly is

made stranger and more striking—by its grouping with a spire of late date
immediately at its side? There is much to please at Valognes; but when we remember
the part which the town plays in the history of the Conqueror, that it was from hence,
one of his favourite dwelling-places, that he took the headlong ride which carried him
away safely from the rebellious peninsula before Val-ès-dunes, we are inclined to
grumble that all that now shows itself in the place itself is of far later date. The castle
is clean gone; and the traveller to whom Normandy is chiefly attractive in its Norman
aspect may perhaps sacrifice the Roman remains of Alleaume if the choice lies
between them and a full examination of the castle and abbey of Saint Saviour on the
Douve, Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, the home of the two Neals, the centre, in the days
of the second of the rebellions which caused William to ride so hard from Valognes to
Rye.[29] A characteristic church or two, among them Colomby, with its long lancets,
may be taken on the way; but the great object of the journey is where the little town of
Saint Saviour lies on its slope, with the castle on the one hand, the abbey on the other,
rising above the river at its feet. The abbey, Neal's abbey, where his monks supplanted
an earlier foundation of canons, has gone through many ups and downs. Its
Romanesque plan remained untouched through a great reconstruction of its upper part
in the later Gothic. It fell into ruin at the Revolution, but one side of the nave and the
central saddle-backed tower still stood, and now the ruin is again a perfect church,
where Sisters of Mercy have replaced the monks of Saint Benedict. Here then a great
part of the work of the ancient lords remains; with the castle which should be their
most direct memorial the case is less clear. Besides round towers—one great one
specially which some one surely must have set down as Phœnician—the great feature
is the huge square tower which forms the main feature of the building, and which has
thoroughly the air of a Norman keep of the eleventh or twelfth century. But when we
come nearer, there is hardly a detail—round arches of course alone prove nothing—
which does not suggest a later time. And the tower is attributed to Sir John Chandos,
who held the castle in Edward the Third's time. Did he most ingeniously recast every
detail of an elder keep, or did he choose to build exactly according to the type of an
age long before his own? Anyhow, as far as general effect goes, the tower thoroughly
carries us back to the days of the earlier fame of Saint Saviour. The view from its top
stretches far away over the peninsula of which it was once the citadel to the backs of
the hills which look down on Cherbourg and the sea, the sea which, if we believe the
tale, bore the fleet of Æthelred when the elder Neal drove back English invaders more
than three hundred years before Sir John Chandos.

Abbey of Lessay, S.W.
The visitor to Saint Saviour may perhaps manage to make his way straight from that
place to Coutances without going back to Valognes. In any case his main object
between Saint Saviour and Coutances will be the great Romanesque abbey of Lessay;
only, by going back to Valognes and taking the railway to Carentan, he will be able to
combine with Lessay the two very fine churches of Carentan and Periers. Of these,
Carentan has considerable Romanesque portions, the arches of the central lantern and
the pillars of the nave which have been ingeniously lengthened and made to bear
pointed arches. Lessay, we fancy, is very little known. It is out of the way, and the
country round about it, flat and dreary, is widely different from the generally rich, and
often beautiful, scenery of the district. But few churches of its own class surpass it as
an example of an almost untouched Norman minster, not quite of the first class in
point of scale. We say untouched, because it is so practically, though a good deal of
the vaulting was most ingeniously repaired after the English wars, just as Saint
Stephen at Caen was after the Huguenot wars. Some miles over the landes bring us
again into the hilly region round the episcopal city, and Coutances is seen on its hill,
truly a city which cannot be hid. Of its lovely minster we once spoke in some detail;
[30]
of the city itself we may add that none more truly bespeaks its origin as a hill-fort.
The hill is of no extraordinary height; but it is thoroughly isolated, not forming part of
a range like the hills of Avranches and Le Mans. And, saving the open place before the
cathedral—perhaps the forum of Constantia—there is not a flat yard of ground in

Coutances. The church itself is on a slope; you walk up the incline of one street and
see the houses sloping down the incline of the other. In the valley on the west side of
the city is a singular curiosity, several of the arches of a mediæval aqueduct.[31]
Pointed arches, and buttresses against the piers, are what we are not used to in such
buildings. A road by a few small churches leads to Granville on its peninsula, with its
strange church where Flamboyant and Renaissance die away into a kind of
Romanesque most unlike that of Ragusa, and the Côtentin has been gone through
from north to south. The modern department and the modern diocese go on further;
but the "pagus Constantinus" is now done with; the land of Avranches, the march
against the Breton, has a history of its own.

THE AVRANCHIN
1876

The town of Avranches is well known as one of those Continental spots on which
Englishmen have settled down and formed a kind of little colony. A colony of this
kind has two aspects in the eyes of the traveller who lights upon it. On the one hand, it
is a nuisance to find one's self, on sitting down to a table-d'hôte in a foreign town, in
the middle of ordinary English chatter. Full of the particular part of the world in which
he is, the traveller may hear all parts of the world discussed from some purely
personal or professional aspect, without a single original observation to add anything
to his stock of ideas. On the other hand, it must be allowed that the presence of an
English settlement anywhere always brings with it a degree of civilisation in many
points such as is not always found in towns of much greater size which our
countrymen do not frequent. But to the historical traveller Avranches is almost dead. A
few stones heaped together are all that remains of the cathedral, and another stone
marks the sight of the north door where Henry the Second received absolution for his
share in the murder of Thomas. The city which formed the halting-place of Lanfranc
on his way from Pavia to Bec is now chiefly to be noticed for its splendid site, and as
a convenient starting-point for other places where more has been spared. Avranches,
like Coutances, is a hill-city, and, as regards actual elevation, it is even more of a hill-
city than Coutances. But then the hill of Coutances is an isolated hill, while Avranches
stands on the projecting bluff of a range. Seen from the sands of Saint Michael's Bay,
the site proclaims itself as one which, before the fall of its chief ornament, must have
been glorious beyond words. It might have been Laon, as it were, with, at favourable
tides at least, the estuary washing the foot of its hill. What the view is from the height
itself is implied in what has just been said. The bay, with the consecrated Mount and
the smaller Tombelaine by its side, the Breton coast stretching far away, the Mount of
Dol coming, perhaps within the range of sight, certainly within the range of ideas, the
goodly land on either side of the city, the woods, the fields—for in the Avranchin we
are still in a land of pasture and hedgerows—all tell us that it was no despicable
heritage of his own to which Hugh of Avranches added his palatine earldom of
Chester. And if Avranches gave a lord to one great district of England, England
presently gave a lord to Avranches. The Avranchin formed part of the fief of the
Ætheling Henry, the fief so often lost and won again, but where men had at least some
moments of order under the stern rule of the Lion of Justice, while the rest of
Normandy in the days of Robert was torn in pieces by the feuds of rival lords and
countesses. But musings of this kind would be more to the point if the city itself had
something more to show than a tower or two of no particular importance—if, in short,

the hill of Avranches was crowned by such a diadem of spires and cupolas as the hill
of Coutances. As it is, Avranches is less attractive in itself than it is as the best point
for several excursions in the Avranchin land. The excursion to the famous Mount of
Saint Michael and its fortified abbey need not here be dwelled on. No one can walk
five minutes in the streets of Avranches without being reminded that the city is the
starting-place for "le mont Saint-Michel." But no one suggests a visit to Saint James
nor even to Mortain and its waterfalls. Nor should we ourselves suggest a visit to
Saint James, except to those who may be satisfied with a beautiful bit of natural
scenery, heightened by the thought that the spot is directly connected with the memory
of William, indirectly with that of Harold.

When we write "Saint James," we are not translating.[32] The "castrum sancti Jacobi"
appears as "Saint James" in Wace, and it is "Saint James" to this day alike in speech
and in writing. The fact is worthy of some notice in the puzzling history of the various
forms of the apostolic names Jacobus and Johannes and their diminutives. Jacques
and Jack must surely be the same; how then came Jack to be the diminutive of John?
Anyhow this Norman fortress bears the name of the Saint of Compostela in a form
chiefly familiar in Britain and Aragon, though it is not without a cognate in the Italian
Giacomo. The English forms of apostolic names are sometimes borne even now by
Romance-speaking owners, as M. James Fazy and M. John Lemoinne bear witness.
But here the name is far too old for any imitative process of this kind. And it is only as
applied to the place itself that the form "James"[33] is used; the inn is the "Hôtel Saint-
Jacques," and "Saint-Jacques" is the acknowledged patron of the parish. Anyhow the
effect is to give the name of the place an unexpectedly English air. Perhaps such an air
is not wholly out of place in the name of a spot which was fortified against the Breton
by a prince who was to become King of the English, and whose fortification led to a
war in which two future and rival Kings of the English fought side by side.
For the castle of Saint James was one of the fortresses raised by William's policy to
strengthen the Norman frontier against the Bret-Welsh of Gaul, just as in after days he
and his Earls raised fortresses on English ground to strengthen the English frontier
against the Bret-Welsh of Britain. It stands very near to the border, and we can well
understand how its building might give offence to the Breton Count Conan, and so
lead to the war in which William and Harold marched together across the sands which
surround the consecrated Mount. In this way Saint James plays an indirect part in
English history, and it plays another when it was one of the first points of his lost
territory to be won back by Henry the Ætheling after his brothers had driven him out
of the Mount and all else that he had.[34] But the place keeps hardly anything but its
memories and the natural beauty of its site. A steep peninsular hill looks down on a
narrow and wooded valley with a beck—that is the right word in the land which
contains Caudebec and Bec Herlouin—running round its base. The church—a strange
modern building with some ancient portions used up again—stands on the extreme

point of the promontory. This seems the best point for commanding the whole valley,
and we may perhaps guess that a less devout prince than William would not have
scrupled to raise his donjon at least within the consecrated precinct. But he chose the
southern side of the hill, the side to be sure most directly looking towards the enemy;
and church and castle stood side by side on the hill without interfering with each
other. But the visitor to Saint James—if Saint James should ever get any visitors—
must take care not to ask for the château. If he does, he will be sent to the other side
of the valley, to a modern house, on a lovely site certainly, and working in some
portions of mediæval work, but which has nothing to do with the castle of the
Conqueror. The name for that, so far as it keeps a name, is "le fort." The open space
by the church is the "place du Fort," and the inquirer will soon find that on the south
the hill-side is scarped and strengthened by a wall. That is all that is left of the castle
of Saint James; but it is enough to call up memories of days which, from an English as
well as from a local point of view, are worth remembering.

COUTANCES AND SAINT-LO
1891

Geoffrey of Mowbray, Bishop of Coutances, appears once in Domesday as Bishop of
Saint-Lo, but it must not therefore be thought that he had his bishopstool in the town
so called, or that the great church of Saint-Lo was ever the spiritual head of the
peninsular land of Coutances. There is indeed every opportunity for confusion on the
subject. The Bishops of Coutances were lords of Saint-Lo in the present department of
La Manche; but, so far as they were Bishops of Saint-Lo at all, it was of quite another
Saint-Lo, namely, of a church so called in the city of Rouen. There, when the Côtentin
was over-run by the still heathen Northmen, the Bishops of Coutances took refuge,
carrying with them Saint-Lo himself—Sanctus Laudus, a predecessor in the bishopric
—in the form of his relics. When heathen Northmen were turned into Christian
Normans, the Bishops of Coutances went home again, but the title which they had
picked up on their travels seems to have stuck to them. As they had to do with two
things, both called Saint-Lo, as well as with their own city, the error of speech was not
wonderful. But, setting aside times of havoc, when there was nothing left to be head
of, Coutances always remained the formal head, ecclesiastical and civil, of the
Côtentin, the "pagus Constantinus," which took its name from the city. The town of
Saint-Lo has now outstripped Coutances in the matter of temporal honour as the head
of the department of La Manche, though that dignity was not assigned to it without a
good deal of opposition on the part of the elder seat of rule. The same series of
changes gave to ecclesiastical Coutances, if not a higher dignity, at least a wider
jurisdiction. When the episcopal church of Coutances, after being put to various
strange uses in the revolutionary time, became once more a place of Christian worship
and the head church of the diocese, that diocese was enlarged by the ecclesiastical
territory of Avranches. Avranches and Lisieux have both vanished from the roll of the
six suffragans of the Archbishop of Rouen, Primate of Normandy. But Avranches has
suffered worse things than Lisieux. The Lexovian bishopstool has passed away; but
the church that held it is still there. From Avranches the church itself has vanished. It
is from its site only that we look down on the wide plain at our foot, on the Mount of
the Archangel in its bay, and the rocks of Cancale beyond.[35]
There is no need to describe anew a building so well known as the cathedral church of
Coutances. There is no need to argue against, there is hardly need to wonder at, the
strange belief against which Gally Knight and others had to fight, that this beautiful
example of the fully developed Early Gothic was really the work of that Bishop
Geoffrey who blessed the Norman host on its march from Hastings to Senlac.[36] That

belief was indeed a strange one. It implied that some nameless genius at Coutances
had, in the middle of the eleventh century, suddenly, at a blow, invented the fully
developed style of the thirteenth—that this great discovery was kept hidden at
Coutances till the very end of the twelfth—that then various people in Normandy,
France, England, and above all Saint Hugh of Burgundy, began to make many, and at
first not very successful, attempts to imitate what the men of one spot in the Côtentin
had known, and must have been proud of, for a century and a half. The local invention
of Perpendicular at Gloucester, and its spreading abroad by the great Bishops of
Winchester forty or fifty years later, is a remarkable fact; but it is a small matter to this
fiction. So strange a vagary need no longer be discussed; but it is worthy of a place in
the memory among odd delusions. As an honest delusion, it is at least more
respectable than making Alfred found things at Oxford and Ripon.

Notre-Dame, Saint-Lo, S.E.
In position, Saint-Lo, town and church, outdoes Coutances. It is, we
believe, a favourite resort of artists, and it deserves to be so. At Coutances
we are on a hill. If we draw near to it by railway, we see the three towers of
the cathedral church soaring far above us, and even the two towers of Saint
Peter are by no means on our own level. The town stands on a height, at the
end of a range of high ground; yet somehow there is not the same feeling of
a hill town about Coutances which there is in many other places—one thing
perhaps is that there is no river. The hill of Coutances is not a hill simply
rising from a plain; there are valleys on two sides, and we ask for a stream
at the bottom of them as naturally as we do at Edinburgh. At Saint-Lo, the
Vire, with the rocky hill rising high above it, is the chief feature of the
landscape. And as we pass by on the railway and look up, the two graceful
spires of the church of Our Lady seem quite worthy of their position. We
feel at once that the characteristic feature of Normandy and England, the

central tower, is missing. But, accepting a French effect instead of a
Norman one, the impression made by Saint-Lo and its church is a very
striking one. We must go on to Coutances and come back to Saint-Lo, and
then walk along the banks of the Vire if we wish to take in the fact, that
even the spires of Saint-Lo, much less the church as a whole, have no claim
to belong to the same class of buildings as Coutances. In neither case is the
church built, as that of Avranches must have been, like Durham, on the
brow of the hill. There is a considerable space, at Saint-Lo a busy market,
between the west front and the steep. From any point in this space the effect
of the west front of Saint-Lo is striking beyond its actual size. The towers
are of different dates, and do not altogether match, which has the effect of
thrusting the central door rather out of its place. But the front is a grand one
all the same. One must go down below, and see from how many points the
towers, and even the spires, are lost among the houses, before we find out
how comparatively small they are. And in the body of the church we see a
marked example of an opportunity thrown away. That the church is much
smaller than that of Coutances is a fact of less importance than it would be
in England. A characteristic of French architecture is the constant
reproduction of the designs of great churches on a much smaller scale. This
is a thing which we know nothing of in England, where the parish church
and the minster are buildings of two different types, each of which may be
equally good in its own way. The church of Saint Peter at Coutances, much
smaller than that of Saint-Lo, will illustrate this position. And there are
plenty of instances, from graceful miniatures like Norrey and Les Petits
Andelys up to churches of considerable size. But at Saint-Lo, whatever little
outline the church has apart from its spires it gets from a series of gables
along the aisles, something like those of Saint Giles at Oxford. Inside we
have a not very successful hallenkirche, three bodies without a clerestory,
Bristol-fashion. Much of the work is good enough of its kind, and the late
stained glass is worth studying; but, as soon as we leave the west front
behind there is a strange lack of design in the whole building, inside and
out.
But Notre-Dame is not the only church at Saint-Lo. Both De Caumont and
Gally Knight have a good deal to tell us about the church of Saint Cross,
which it seems that some antiquaries had carried back to the days of Charles
the Great. Distinguendum est. To carry back a piece of Romanesque of any

date to a date too early, but still within Romanesque times, is a mistake of
quite another kind from attributing finished work of the thirteenth century
to Geoffrey of Mowbray in the eleventh. Gally Knight himself erred more
slightly in the same way. He knew very well that the work at Saint Cross
could not be of the eighth century; but he took it for the eleventh instead of
the twelfth. No one can blame him for that at the time when he wrote. But
both Gally Knight and De Caumont saw some things at Saint Cross which
are not to be seen now, and some things are to be seen now which they did
not see. They saw a twelfth-century church which had gone through some
changes and additions, and they also saw some considerable monastic
buildings, of part of which, a vault with what seems to be a rather classical
column, De Caumont gives a drawing. Here it is, if anywhere, that one
would look for the earlier date of Romanesque. But all outside the church
itself has perished. The church itself has, since De Caumont's visit, been
greatly enlarged in imitation of the twelfth-century work, and the twelfth-
century work itself has been frightfully scraped and scored after the manner
of restoration. Still several bays of arcade and triforium are left in such a
state that we can see the original design of round arches with Norman
mouldings on piers with shafts with foliated caps. The church, before it was
pulled about, must have been a fine one, but assuredly of the twelfth
century and not of any earlier time.
One bit of detail which Gally Knight saw may still be seen untouched. "The
west entrance," he says, "is barbarously adorned with a grotesque group, in
high relief, which represents the Subjugation of the Evil Spirit." The power
subjugated takes the shape of a creature, said to be a toad, with his head
downwards. The work of subjugation is done by two men below pulling at
his head with ropes.
Though Romanesque is the thing which one wishes most to see, yet a
church in such a case as Saint Cross at Saint-Lo teaches one less than the
smaller churches at Coutances. Both of these, Saint Peter and Saint Nicolas,
aim at reproducing on a smaller scale the most distinctive feature of the
episcopal church. This is the grand central octagon, with its quasi-domical
treatment inside. But in both of the smaller churches it is coupled with a
single western tower. This arrangement of a central and western tower is
rare in England, because in most of the cases where it once existed one or
other of the towers has fallen down. In France it is somewhat more usual,

and in Auvergne it is the rule. Here at Saint Peter's a vast deal of effective
and stately outline is crowded into a wonderfully small space on the ground.
The two towers, tall and massive, rise with a strangely small allowance of
nave between them. Begun in the latest Gothic, carried out in early
Renaissance, their outline is rich but fantastic, and in many points of
general view the three towers of the cathedral do not despise the two of
Saint Peter's as fellows in a most effective piece of grouping. The internal
effect, which the height might have made very striking, is not equal to the
external outline. The discontinuous impost, the ugliest invention of French
Flamboyant, may perhaps be endured in some subordinate place; it is
intolerable in the main piers of a church. The treatment of the central tower
within is very curious; the lantern of the cathedral is here translated into an
Italianising style. In short we have here, as we have seen in many places,
specially at Troyes,[37] as we shall see again in a most marked form at
Argentan, that curious process of transition from mediæval to Renaissance
detail which in England we are familiar with in houses, but which in France
is to be largely studied in churches also. At Saint Nicolas, though the
building is later in date and less striking in design, such work as keeps any
style at all is better. Its nave is free from discontinuous imposts.
Lastly, at Coutances the mediæval aqueduct, a little way out of the town,
must not be forgotten. There are not many such anywhere, save one or two
in Sicily. It is a pity that of late years the ivy has been allowed to grow over
the arches to that degree that a new-comer would hardly know whether they
were round or pointed.

St. Nicolas, Coutances, Interior

HAUTEVILLE-LA-GUICHARD
1891

The experienced antiquarian traveller is perfectly familiar with the doctrine
that in many cases it is more satisfactory to find a mere site than to find
anything on the site. Suppose one is castle-stalking in Maine, suppose one
is looking for primæval walls in the Volscian or the Hernican land. If one
does not find the exact thing that one wishes, the second-best luck is to find
the place where it once was, and to find nothing there. Best of all is to find a
fortress of the right age on its mound surrounded by its ditch; next to this is
to find the mound surrounded by its ditch, but supporting nothing at all. If
there is nothing at all, there is nothing that stands in our way, whereas
anything of a later date does stand in our way. But what are we to say when
we cannot even find the site, and when the name seems meant for some
other place than that to which maps and common fame attach it? So it is
with what would be, if we could only find it, one of the most memorable
sites, in its own way of being memorable, to be found in all Western
Normandy. We say in its own way of being memorable, because, even if we
found ditch and mound and tower all as they should be, their claim to
historic reverence would not be that they themselves were the witnesses of
any specially memorable acts. Its sound has gone forth into all lands; but it
is in lands far away from the site that we seek that the deeds were wrought
which made the name of the site famous. We are at Coutances; we seek for
Hauteville. The Hauteville that we seek is not that which seems to occur
most naturally to the mind of Coutances. It is not Hauteville-sur-mer; it is
the namesake that bears the speaking surname of Hauteville-la-Guichard.
We seek, in short, for the home of Tancred and his sons. Their statues are
now again set up in their niches on the north side of the church of
Coutances. But the artist has surely given William of the Iron Arm far too
mild a look. It is true that he and all the rest are tricked out as shepherds of
the people, in royal, or at least ducal, apparel. It may be then that even he of
the Iron Arm, when thus attired, ought not to look as one fancies he must

have looked when he sailed into the haven of Syracuse as the brother-in-
arms of George Maniakês and Harold Hardrada.
As an episode in the history of the world, one is tempted to think that the
fellowship of three such warriors as those, each representing the tongue, the
speech, and the mode of warfare of his own folk, is the most striking scene
in the whole story of the house of Hauteville. But it is naturally the brother
whose deeds have had more abiding results who has made the deepest
impression on the minds of men, and who has stamped his surname on the
place of his birth. One might almost have been better pleased if Hauteville
were known as the Hauteville of Tancred himself rather than by the name of
any of his sons. But, if it was to bear the name of one of his sons, one
cannot wonder at the son who was chosen. Hauteville is Hauteville-la-
Guichard, the Hauteville of Robert the Wiscard, him whom Palermo knows
in one character and Rome in another. A good deal of local history lies hid
in these surnames of places. The place took the name of its lord to
distinguish it from other places of the same name. But we cannot always
say why it took the name of this or that particular lord, that is, in effect, why
it took its name in this or that particular generation. Old Roger of
Beaumont, who stayed to look after Normandy and its duchess while Duke
William went to seek a crown in England, is so distinctly Roger of
Beaumont that it seems only fair that his Beaumont should be known back
again as the Beaumont of Roger.[38] His sons are of Meulan, of Leicester, of
Warwick, rather than of Beaumont. Beaumont-le-Roger is felt at once to be
the becoming name of his home. Nearer to Hauteville, Saint-Jean, between
Avranches and Granville, cradle of all who have written themselves de
sancto Iohanne, is Saint-Jean-le-Thomas, after Thomas, its lord in the days
of Henry the First. His name is written in Orderic, but he is hardly so
famous even as the name-father of Beaumont, much less as the name-father
of Hauteville. One needs to know the exact state of things at Saint-Jean in
the days of Thomas, before one can tell why the place took his name as its
surname rather than the name of any other lord before or after. But mark
that it was the Christian name only that Saint-Jean could take; it could not,
like La Lande-Patry and Longueville-Giffart, take the surname of the house
which was called after itself. But if Hauteville had to take the name of a
Tancreding, Robert was the obvious one to choose, and his surname of the
Wiscard was the most distinctive name that the family could show. The

fame of Robert, the actual founder of the Apulian duchy and indirectly of
the Sicilian kingdom, the ally of Gregory the Seventh, the deliverer or the
destroyer of Rome, the invader of Eastern Europe, must have quite
overshadowed the fame of his elder brothers. And, while he lived, it must
have overshadowed the fame of Roger of Sicily also.[39] The Great Count
was the younger brother and the liegeman of the Duke. It was later events
which caused the youngest branch of the house of Hauteville to outstrip all
that had gone before it, to rise in the next generation to the royal crown of
Sicily, and in the female line to the crown of Jerusalem and the crown of
Rome.
It is then the Hauteville of Robert Wiscard, Hauteville-la-Guichard, that we
seek for. As far as the map goes, as far as the road goes, there is no
difficulty. But it is a strange thing that in such books as we are able to carry
with us we can find no account of Hauteville whatever. Joanne does not
mention it; Murray does not mention it; it does not come within the range of
De Caumont's Statistique Routière de la Basse Normandie. A little local
book on Coutances and its neighbourhood looks upon Hauteville either as
too far off or unworthy of notice. Yet the distance at least, as the map
witnesses, is not frightful, and one would have thought that the mere fact of
the setting up of the new statues would have awakened the writer of the
Coutances guidebook to the fact that such a spot was not far off. Anyhow, if
all refuse to describe, the place seems to describe itself. Hauteville, Alta
Villa, must surely be what its name implies. We may have unluckily
forgotten the warning of Geoffrey Malaterra that Hauteville was not so
much called from the height of any hill ("non quidem tantum pro
excellentia alicuius montis in quo sita sit"), but rather prophetically, from
the height of power and glory to which men who went from it should climb
("sed quoniam, ut credimus, aliquo auspicio ad considerationem
praenotantis eventum et prosperos successus eiusdem villae futurorum
haeredum, Dei adiutorio et sua presenuitate gradatim altioris honoris
culmen scandentium"). We look then for a high place. It might be bold to
expect to see the high place crowned by any actual building of the days of
Tancred; but it seems only reasonable to argue that Hauteville must be
Hauteville, that it must stand high. We feel sure of finding, perhaps, if our
hopes are very daring, the eagle's nest on the top of the rock, or perhaps,
what in Norman scenery is far more likely, the mound, natural or artificial,

with its ditches, rivals, it may be, of Arques. And, where there is so little
chance of finding any building of Tancred's own day, we cherish the hope
that the site of his dwelling may stand wholly void, and may not have been
turned to support any other building of later times.
In this fairly hopeful frame of mind, we set forth from Coutances to the
north-east. The path at least is easy enough. After some miles of route
nationale, with a fine view of the towers of Coutances for those who look
backwards, we turn off into a route départementale. And all who are used to
French roads know well that a route nationale is always excellent, and that
a route départementale is always endurable and something more. We have
one or two gentle ups and downs; but we neither see nor feel anything to
suggest the presence or the neighbourhood of an alta villa. Presently a
gentle down rather than a gentle up brings us to a small village, a church
with a good example of the usual saddle-back tower, and with a few houses
around it. We are told, and the ordnance map confirms the statement, that
this is Hauteville, Hauteville-la-Guichard. Here then is the home of the
Norman gentleman of the twelfth century, whose sons grew into counts and
dukes in the southern lands, and whose remoter descendants wore the
crowns of kingship and of Empire. With this knowledge, we are staggered
to find ourselves, if not actually in a hole, yet in something much nearer to a
hole than to a height, in a spot which, of the two, would seem to be more
fittingly called Basseville than Haute. A slightly rising ground to the east of
the church kindles again some faint hopes, the more so when the
bystanders, again confirmed by the map, point out this direction as the way
to the château. But château, in modern French use, is a dangerous word,
and even the higher ground did not at all answer our preconceived notion of
Hauteville. Still, not to throw away the faintest chance, we go on in the
direction pointed out, trusting to our natural wits, for we had nothing else to
guide us. Our books had failed us; nor did we, as sometimes happens, light
on some intelligent priest or other person more likely to help us than the
ordinary villager. A short further drive through two or three narrower roads
and their turnings brings us to a spot beyond which there is clearly nothing
"carossable" or even "jackassable." We come to two ranges of buildings
standing among fields, buildings which have greatly gone down in the
world, but which proclaim themselves as the remains of a château in the
later French sense, or perhaps only of its outhouses. The modern château

does indeed often enough stand on the site of the ancient castle; but here
were no signs whatever of mound or ditch, though we ran into several fields
to look for them. And, though we were certainly on higher ground than the
church and village, there was nothing at all to suggest why the name of the
place should have been called Hauteville.
The only hope now is to go back to the village, on the chance either of
finding out something more by the light of nature or of lighting on some
one who can tell us something. To the south of the church, as to the east,
there is some ground rather higher than the village itself; but we see nothing
of a mound, nothing to suggest an alta villa. But some farm-buildings to the
west of the church attract the eye; they are not of yesterday; a round tower,
seemingly belonging to a gateway, suggests a château which has taken the
place of a château-fort. And, hard by, some of our company are led, perhaps
by their noses, to an undoubted ditch, though not exactly a fellow of
Arques, Marsala, or Old Sarum. And it is more than a common ditch; it is
deep; it is four-sided, and it fences in a distinct plot of ground. Our thoughts
have come down so low from the lofty donjon with the vision of which we
set out that we begin to think of the smaller kind of moated houses in our
own land. The rectory at Slymbridge in Gloucestershire had, some years
back at least, a moat round it. Some traces of a moat were not long ago still
to be seen at the Bishop's court-house at Wookey in Somerset. Is it possible
that this unsavoury ditch really marks out the home precinct of the father of
kings? Can it be that Tancred lived within it, perhaps in a wooden house,
defended by a palisade and by such a ditch? We do not like the guess, but
we have no better, and it really is not so absurd as it sounds. We must
remember that, in Tancred's day, at least in Tancred's youth, the existence of
stone castles is a little problematical. It is certain that there are few or none
left of so early a date; but Normandy has seen so many seasons of the
destruction of castles that it is rash to say positively that there never were
any. In Tancred's day and later we often hear of the "domus defensabilis," as
distinguished from the castle. And, as the famous one at Brionne, which so
long defied the arms of Duke William, is defined as "aula lapidea,"[40] it
seems implied that a "domus defensabilis" might be only "lignea." To be
sure the stone house at Brionne had in the river Rille a ready-made moat in
every way better than the ditch that we have stumbled on at Hauteville. In
England, at the same time, we should have been perfectly satisfied with a

wooden "aula" as the dwelling place of a powerful thegn, but then we
should have looked for it on something of a mound, like the home of
Wiggod at Wallingford. Certainly, a frightfully stinking ditch of no great
width, compassing a square field, is a poor find after the hopes with which
we set out. But, in the absence of all help from books or men, it is all that
we have to offer. We should be glad if anybody would tell us of something
better; but this is all we could make out for ourselves. The name is hardly a
greater difficulty on this lower site than on the higher ground of the
château. It may be then—we hope it is not so, but it may be—that it was
within this ditch that Humphrey and Drogo and William of the Iron Arm
were so carefully brought up by their good stepmother, that it was here that
the Wiscard played his first childish tricks, with the yet smaller Roger as a
willing younger brother. Tancred's estate, we are told, was not large enough
to feed his two batches of children; that was the reason why they went to
seek their fortunes so far off. If they had stayed at home, the estate might
possibly have grown; for we are told by their own biographer that it was the
nature of the sons of Tancred, when they saw that anybody else had
anything, to take it to themselves. Perhaps this dangerous tendency
extended only to misbelievers, schismatics, or at least men of other tongues.
Otherwise such vigorous annexers of other men's lands might have found
more than one chance at home, in days of confusion, of enlarging the estate
of Hauteville. In short we may speculate on many matters; we can only say
what we have seen and what we have not. And at the last moment a
frightful thought comes upon us. We have with us one book of Gally
Knight's, but it is only the Norman book. But he wrote another book, in
which the house of Hauteville plays a great part. What if he went to
Hauteville and found out all about it and put it all in print, only not in his
Norman, but in his Sicilian book.

MORTAIN AND ITS SURROUNDINGS
1892

In the course either of a Norman journey or of any study of Norman
matters, the thought is constantly suggesting itself that there is an important
class of people who are always using the names of the places through which
we go, but who seem to attach no meaning to them. The whole tribe of
genealogists, local antiquaries, and the like, are, in the nature of things,
constantly speaking of Norman places, or at least of the families which take
their names from them. But it never seems to come into their heads that
these places are real places still in being on the face of the earth. What was
the state of mind of the endless people who have spoken of both King
Stephen and King John in earlier stages of being by the strange title of "Earl
of Moreton"? Do they think they took their title from Moreton-in-the-
Marsh, or do they mix those kings up with the Earl of Moreton in Scotland,
who died by the maiden a good while later? And, if they try to improve
their spelling, and to give it more of a continental look, perhaps he comes
out in some such shape as "Count of Mortaigne." That is to say, no
distinction is made between Mortain, Moretolium or Moretonium, in the
Avranchin, and Mortagne, Mauritania, in Perche. Yet the two towns are
both there, each in its old place, though in official speech we have no longer
to speak of the Avranchin, but of the department of La Manche, no longer of
Perche, but of the department of Orne. There are railways, branch railways
certainly, which lead to both; there is no difficulty in getting to either, and
Mortain at least, the one most closely connected with our own history, is
very well worth going to indeed.
The position of Mortain, to say nothing else, is certainly one of the most
beautiful to be found in any region which does not aspire to the sublimity of
mountain scenery. The waterfalls have been famous ever since Sir Francis
Palgrave connected them with the story of the place and its counts. But the
whole position of town, castle, everything about Mortain, is lovely. The
town itself in a strange way suggests Taormina. It stands in somewhat the
same sort on a kind of ledge on a hill-side, with higher hills rising behind it.

But while Taormina looks straight down on the Ionian Sea, Mortain looks
down only on the narrow dale of the little river Cance, with its steep banks
rising on the other side. Yet there are spots among the limestone rocks
which rise about and above Mortain which call up other Sicilian memories.
If the traveller intrusts himself to the care of a local guide he will certainly
be carried to the little chapel of Saint Michael overhanging the town. From
that height he will be rewarded by a wide view, the most part of which, over
the rich Norman plain, is as unlike Sicily as may be. But, on another side,
the greater Mount of the Archangel may be seen far away floating on its
bay, and the position of the chapel itself—old, but modernised and no great
work of art—called up for a moment that chapel of Saint Blaise on the
Akragantine rocks, which once was the temple of Dêmêtêr and her Child.
And, if one only had the means of finding out, it may be that the Archangel
displaced some Celtic powers, such as those which Gregory of Tours still
knew as abiding on the Puy de Dôme of Auvergne. But the life of Mortain
as Mortain is, or rather as Mortain, with its counts and its canons, once was,
began at a lower point, at a point lower than the town itself. The Moretolian
akropolis, like some others, was not an akropolis in the literal sense, for the
good reason that the point of most value for military purposes was not the
most lofty. The windings of the little stream allow of the projection of a
bold peninsular rock, joined by a kind of isthmus to the main hill on which
the town stands. Here stood the castle; town and church rise above it, and
higher hills rise above town and church. But no higher point was so well
suited for the purposes of a great and strong fortress. On that spot therefore
the castle of Mortain arose; the town, the church, the suburb on the opposite
height with its smaller church, the house of nuns above the waterfalls, the
Archangel's chapel on the highest point of all, were alike satellites of the
castle. They came into being, because the castle had come into being. Count
Robert, the brother of the Conqueror, founded the great church of Mortain;
but he founded it only because some one before him had founded the castle.
The castle is gone; a few pieces of wall on the rock are all that remains.
Mortain is now ruled, not by a count, but by a sub-prefect, and the sub-
prefect has made his home on the site of the home of the count. The sub-
prefect of Mortain is therefore in one sort to be envied above all sub-
prefects, and even prefects too. Such functionaries are commonly quartered
in some dull spot in the middle of a town. The sub-prefect of Mortain

dwells, and doubtless goes through the duties of his sub-prefecture, in a fair
house in a fair garden. That house is the château that is, on the site of the
château-fort that was, looking down on the valley, looking up at the hills,
looking across at the church which marks the hermitage of the Blessed
Vital. Whether from any point he can actually look over on the lesser
waterfall, one must be the sub-prefect or his guest to know. Such is the
change, and perhaps one should not regret it; a sub-prefect is certainly a
more peaceful representative of authority than a mediæval count. But he is
less picturesque and less ancient; and his dwelling follows the pattern of its
inhabitant. Sub-prefects are a fruit of the principles of 1789, and it would
doubtless be easy to find out who was the first of the sub-prefects of
Mortain. Nor is it hard to find out who was the first of the counts. We came
upon him in Malger, son of Duke Richard the Fearless. But we are tempted
to think that the first of the counts of Mortain need not have been absolutely
the first man to make himself a stronghold on the peninsula rock of
Mortain, whether for his own defence or for the better harrying of his
neighbours.
From Count Malger the castle of Mortain, and all that went with the castle
of Mortain, passed to his son William the Warling.[41] Such seems to be the
obvious English shape of Warlencus; but we have a natural curiosity to
know what a Warling is, and why William was so called. The name has an
attractive sound, and some have seen in it that same approach to a warlock
which Gibbon saw to a wiseacre in the surname of Robert Wiscard. We
have also a natural curiosity to know whether Duke William really had any
good reason for banishing him, and thereby giving the Wiscard another
comrade in the Apulian wars. We care more for the reputation of William
the Great than for that of William the Warling: the accuser of the Warling
too was the first recorded Bigod.[42] That is, he was the first who bore that
name as a surname; for Normans in general were scoffed at by Frenchmen
as bigods, bigots,—never mind the spelling or the meaning—and also as
drinkers of beer. We have that reverence for a much later Bigod that we had
rather not think that any Bigod told lies; but there is an awkward oath which
an intermediate Bigod took at the time of the election of Stephen. So we
will not venture to go beyond the fact that Duke William gave the lands of
the Warling to his half-brother Robert. We know him on Senlac; we know
him in Cornwall; we know him through all the western lands; we know him

most of all on that Montacute of his founding which once was
Leodgaresburh, scene of the Invention of the Holy Cross of Waltham.[43]
The West-Saxon knew Count Robert only as a spoiler, the Norman of
Mortain knew him as a great ecclesiastical founder. In 1082 he founded the
collegiate church of Saint Evroul "in castro Moretonii" for a Dean and eight
Canons, to whom seven more were added by other benefactors. He also
built or rebuilt the church, and, just as in the case of Harold at Waltham, the
language of the charter seems to imply that he built the church first and then
founded the canons to serve in it. There was a time—it seems not so very
long ago—when Gally Knight had to fight against people who believed that
the present church was of Count Robert's own building. So to believe was
indeed one degree less grotesque than to believe that the far more advanced
church of Coutances was earlier still. Gally Knight easily saw that there was
nothing in the church which could be of Count Robert's time except the fine
Romanesque doorway on the south side. And even that we should now call
too advanced for Count Robert's own work; we should set it down for the
last finish of a building which doubtless took some time to make complete
in all its parts.
It is common enough in England to find a grand doorway of the twelfth
century left in a church where everything else has been rebuilt. Later
builders clearly admired them and spared them. Much more would this be
the case at Mortain, where the building of the new church must have begun
no very long time after the adding of this last finish to the old. The style of
the building is Transition, and advanced Transition; it is all but early
Gothic. The pointed arch alone is used; the only trace of Romanesque
feeling is to be seen in the short columns of the arcade, and in the extreme
simplicity of the triforium and clerestory, a single unadorned lancet in each.
The vaulting is naturally a little later; that at least, with the English-looking
shafts from which it springs, is in the fully developed Pointed style.
The plan of the church of Saint Evroul, Mortain, is as simple as a church
that has aisles can be. We were going to say that it is a perfect basilica; but
no; the basilica commonly has the transepts and the arch of triumph. At
Mortain the same simple arcade runs round nave, choir, and apse without
break of any kind. Within the building the effect of this austere and
untouched simplicity—no one at Mortain has altered a window or added a

chapel—is perfectly satisfactory. Many buildings are larger and more
enriched; not many can be said to be more perfect wholes. Save in the
matter of multiplied aisles within and flying buttresses without, Mortain
may pass for Bourges in small. And, just as at Bourges, the external outline
is less satisfactory than the internal effect. A single body of this kind has in
itself no outline at all; it depends on its tower or towers. At Mortain the
usual central tower of a great Norman church could not be; but neither has
Saint Evroul the two Western towers of Saint-Lo and Séez; the arrangement
designed was rather a development of the side towers common in the
smaller churches of the district. A tower on each side was designed and
begun. They stand near the east end; but they are not eastern towers like
those of Geneva and many German churches. They stand outside the aisles,
so as not to interrupt the continuous design within. They therefore do not
really group with the apse; they are detached towers whose lowest stage just
touches that of the church. But we are speaking as if both towers were
there. In truth only the southern one was carried up, and that only to a
height very little above the ridge of the roof, and there furnished with a
saddle-back. Such a tower lends the building hardly any increase of outline
in the distance, and in a near view it is chiefly remarkable for the oddness
of the wonderfully long coupled windows on the west side, which are not
continued all round. Save only the simple and graceful west front and the
general goodness of the design and execution, the beauties of the church of
Mortain are certainly to be sought within.
The castle looks up at the church, which stands on the rather steep slope of
the hill, the effect of which is that the east end can hardly be seen, except
from a considerable distance. Above it is the hospice, with the fragment of a
church with a saddle-back to its central tower. Above again is the chapel of
Saint Michael. Of quite another value from Saint Michael is a church a little
way out of Mortain, in the near neighbourhood of the waterfalls, with rocks
above it and rocks below. This is the church of nuns known as l'Abbaye
Blanche, a foundation of Count William of Mortain in 1105. As the next
year he was taken at Tinchebray and kept in prison for the rest of his days,
he was not likely to do much in the way of building. The church described
long ago by Gally Knight and De Caumont is palpably later than his day. It
is of the Transition, and it is a much less advanced example of the
Transition than the church of Mortain. Whatever Count William meant to

found, the actual house was Cistercian, and the church carries Cistercian
severity to its extremest point. One thinks of Kirkstall; but Kirkstall, plain
as it is, drew majesty from its grand and simple outline; the White Abbey is
small; it has, through the lack of a central tower, no outline without, and its
small scale hinders the effect of Kirkstall.[44] One might even say that, in
buildings of this class—not in those of more elaborate design—something
is gained, as with the monuments of Rome, by being somewhat out of
repair. Anyhow, in connexion with Mortain, the White Abbey does not lack
architectural importance. It is very odd if anybody took the collegiate
church to be the older. The White Abbey is a truly Cistercian building, a
simple cross with a flat east end, no aisles to the nave, but chapels east of
the transepts. It follows the usual law of Transitional buildings. The main
constructive arches are pointed; the windows are round-headed in the
eastern part, pointed in the western. The cloister and chapter-house have
round arches; the remains of the cloister have small single shafts, not the
Saracenic coupling to which we have got used in Italy, Sicily, and Southern
Gaul. In an odd position to the west of the church, forbidding any west
front, is an undercroft with columns with good, but not very rich, twelfth-
century capitals, clearly of a piece with the cloister.
Lastly, on the opposite side of the valley, forming a picturesque object on
the road from Mortain to the White Abbey, is the small plain church of
Neufbourg. The spot marks the solitary dwelling of the Blessed Vital, him
who strove to make peace between the contending brothers at Tinchebray,
and who gave up his prebend at Mortain and all that he had, to dwell as a
hermit amid the woods and rocks.[45] The church, bating a few later
insertions, is a perfect Transitional cross church, with a flat east end and no
aisles. In this part of Normandy the small churches that one lights on in the
villages, though commonly of pleasing outline, have seldom any
remarkable work. In this they are distinguished in a marked way from the
wonderful series of parish churches round Caen and Bayeux. Those we are
tempted to compare with the churches of our own Holland, Marshland, and
Northern Northamptonshire. But the comparison does not strictly apply. In
each case there is a series of notable churches which never were collegiate
or monastic. But in the English district the churches are, as parish churches,
of considerable size, sometimes indeed very large, though never affecting
the character of a minster. The churches in the Bessin are mainly small, but

of singular excellence of work, largely Romanesque of the twelfth century.
We may come to some of them before we have done.

MORTAIN TO ARGENTAN
1892

One great object in the parts of Mortain is to see the historic site of
Tinchebray, so closely connected with Mortain in its history, though the two
places are, and seem always to have been, in different divisions,
ecclesiastical and civil. We debate whether Tinchebray can be best got at
from Mortain, Vire, or Flers. Mortain would be the best way by railway, if
only trains ran on every part of the line. But between Sourdeval and
Tinchebray no trains now run. We rule then that Tinchebray will be best got
at by road from Flers, and owing to the gap on the railway, the way by train
from Mortain to Flers is by Vire. We thus get a few hours at Vire. It is the
Feast of the Assumption; the great church is crowded with worshippers. It is
therefore impossible to make a study of its interior. But we can see that it
has a grand nave, nearly of the same style as Mortain, but loftier. There are
many additions and changes in the later styles, and the only tower is at the
side and of no great height. We would fain see more of this church on some
less venerated day. Then there is the gateway with the tower-belfry; there is
the donjon on its mound, crowning another of the peninsular heights on
which castles rose, this time a real peninsula, with the river below from
which the town takes its name. There is a glimpse to be taken of the famous
valley of Vire, and we go back to the station to betake us to Flers. It is not
altogether for the sake of its own merits that we go to Flers, but because we
have ruled that it is on the whole the best place from whence to make the
journey to Tinchebray. Flers, we imagine, is as old as other places; but there
seems to be nothing to say about it. It has no church of any importance, it
has a respectable castle of late mediæval lines, standing in a real moat. This
has become in an odd way a dependency of a later house, which happily has
not swallowed it up. Flers itself has of late years risen to some importance
as a manufacturing town. And we are bound to say that these French
manufacturing towns look much cleaner and tidier than their fellows in
England. But for historical and antiquarian purposes Flers counts for very

little. And it is, after all, possible that it may not be the best starting point
for Tinchebray. We cannot say till we have made the attempt from Vire.
We had meant to go by carriage from Flers to Tinchebray, and to take on the
way La Lande-Patry the house of that William Patry who appears in Wace
as having entertained Earl Harold as a guest at the time of his stay in
Normandy. And we did get to La Lande-Patry another day. Strange to say,
while De Caumont spoke of traces of the castle in the past tense, Joanne, so
much later, spoke of them in the present. At any rate, the thing was worth
trying; one might at least muse on the spot. We found the place a little way
from Flers, a church and a few houses, called distinctively La Lande-patry,
as distinguished from a neighbouring village called by some such name as
La Fontaine de Patry. The church is not quite wholly new, though it is
mostly so; but there is nothing that could have been built or looked on by
any one who received Harold. Nor do we distinctly see anything in the way
of mounds or ditches. And yet we flatter ourselves that we have lighted on
the site. He who has read Wace's story of Duke William's ride from
Valognes and of his greeting by Hubert of Rye will remember how Hubert
was standing "entre le moutier et la motte."[46] The "moutier" and the
"motte," the church and the castle, have, in these places, a way of standing
near together. So, having got the church and marked that it stands on a bit of
high ground with a slope to the south-east, we run down a lane and into a
field to the north-west, and there find a charming site for the "motte." The
little hill rises with a fair amount of steepness above a flat piece of land
with a small stream wriggling about in it. Then we go on and find that there
is a near slope to the north-east also, so we have our "moutier" and the
almost certain site of our "motte." They are fixed, as they should be, on one
end of a peninsular hill, though we must confess that the hill is not very
lofty. Here then, we feel fairly satisfied, it was that William Patry—written,
it seems, in Latin Patricius—welcomed as a peaceful guest the Earl whom
in after-days he was to meet in arms as King on the day of the great battle.
[47]

But Tinchebray is much more than La Lande-Patry, and the site is much
more certain. There it was, as Englishmen at the time deemed, that the
assize of God's judgment on Senlac was reversed after forty years.[48]
England had been won by the Duke of the Normans; Normandy was now to

be won by a King of the English. To be sure the English King was the son
of the Norman Duke; but he was born in England; he spoke the English
tongue; Englishmen had chosen him to be their king rather than his purely
Norman brother. King Henry's host was most likely far more largely
Norman—specially West-Norman—than English; the chief men above all
were Norman; still there were Englishmen in it, and those Englishmen
looked on the fight as a national struggle and on the result as a national
victory. William of Malmesbury witnesses to the feeling; it is odd that there
is not a word of it in "Ordericus Angligena," writing at Saint-Evroul. We
read our Orderic; we read the little that there is in Wace; we read the
contemporary account in a letter by a Norman partisan of Henry. We then
go forth to make out what we can of the site, knowing perfectly well that
we shall not find a castle standing up as at Falaise.
The railway takes us from Flers to Montsecret junction, and from
Montsecret junction to Tinchebray station. We are looking out for a possible
site for the battle, and we soon rule that the ground where the station itself
stands, the flat ground to the north of the town, will do perfectly well for the
purpose; but we do not as yet know whether there may not be some other
site which may do equally well. We walk up from the station, and we find
Tinchebray itself a somewhat larger town than we had looked for, though
still but small. It strikes us almost at once that it is a town of the same class
as Carlisle, Stirling, and Edinburgh, where a single long street, with more or
less of slope, leads up to a castle at one end. Here at Tinchebray it is the east
end, where the castle hill rises boldly enough over the little stream of the
Noireau, the Norman Blackwater, which gives a surname to that Condé
which became the seat of princes. On the opposite side of the narrow and
grassy valley rise higher hills on which King Henry may well have planted
his Malvoisin. To the south, the hills have withdrawn to a greater distance;
the castle hill rises above a meadow which in times past seems to have been
a marsh. On the northern side, the hill slopes away more gradually to the
plain. Here the castle must have trusted wholly to its own defences. It is on
this north side only, where the railway runs, that the battle could have been
fought. For the fight of Tinchebray really was a battle, one of the very few
pitched battles of the age. The campaign indeed began in an attack on the
fortress; but it grew into something more on both sides. And it is only to the
north that there was room for the operations of two armies of any size; the

earlier besieging could take place from all points, but specially, one would
think, from the east and north. But we have to make out these things as well
as we can from the look of the ground. The contemporary accounts give us
the facts; but they give them without local colouring.
Of the buildings of the castle fairly full accounts have been preserved,
which may be studied in a History of Tinchebray in three volumes by the
Abbé L.V. Dumaine (Paris: 1883). It is a book most praiseworthy for
bringing together all manner of local facts of all manner of dates. And it is
full of plans and plates to illustrate particular subjects. For historical
criticism we do not look; but we should have liked a clear plan of the castle
and town, and, if possible, the reproduction of some old drawing of the
castle, such as one often finds. As things are, we have to put up with M.
Dumaine's description. Towards the river and the marsh the castle trusted
mainly to its natural defences; but at least on the side towards the town it
had a ditch which has now vanished. The gates are gone, but the likeness
survives of a building near the eastern gate with two pointed arches rising
from a pillar, known as Les Porches. Here was the Champ Belle-Noe, and
on the hill on the opposite site of the valley was Beaulieu. The names were
not ill deserved; the stream and its accompaniments make a pleasant look-
out. But of the buildings of the castle nothing now is left; the utmost that we
can do is to make out, not the eastern gate itself, but its site. No walls and
bulwarks stand up; we must be content with calling up an imagination what
there once was. But that is enough; the castle of Henry's day standing up
would be best of all; a simple empty space would be next best; but the
scattered buildings of the little suburb which occupies the castle site do not
seriously hinder us from understanding what we want to understand. In
other lines all that Tinchebray has to show is a desecrated fragment of the
church of Saint Remigius just outside the castle. Here is a central tower
with a very short eastern limb. On the eastern face of the tower is a
Romanesque arcade, so very simple and even rude that one is inclined to
assign it to a time a good bit earlier than the day of Tinchebray. But there is
no such arcade on the other sides, and the western arch of the tower is
pointed. What are we to infer when the place is locked and it is hopeless
trying to get the key? We do at least remember that the four lantern-arches
at Saint David's are not all of the same date; and we hope that, whenever the
pointed arch was made, the plain arcade was there on the 28th day of

September, 1106, just forty years after the father of the contending princes
had landed at Pevensey.
Our accounts are not very clear in their topography, and they do not
distinctly point out the site of the battle. The relieving force under Duke
Robert and Count William came from Mortain—that is, from the south-
west. A striking tale is told of their march. In crossing the forest of Lande-
Pourrie to the south of Tinchebray the army heard mass under a tree from
the mouth of Vital, the holy solitary of Neufbourg. Count William was his
lord, if one who had renounced the world could be said to have an earthly
lord, and he was only in his allegiance if he accompanied the forces of
Mortain. The object of the holy man was to reconcile the brothers, and he
made an attempt on the mind of Henry also. But, according to Orderic, the
King of the English was able to show that the fault rested wholly with
Robert, and that he himself had entered Normandy only from the purest
motives. Anyhow arms were to decide. Only on what spot? The south side
of the castle, the natural approach from Mortain, gave no opportunities for
fighting an open battle, hardly even for an assault on the castle. The ducal
army, with William of Mortain and the terrible Robert of Bellême, must
have gone round to some other point. The name of Champ Henriet, borne
by a site to the west of the town, therefore away from the castle, does not
seem to prove much. The north side seems to furnish the best fighting-
ground, and it is the weakest side of the castle. The King's forces would
most likely be on that side, and the Duke would come round to attack them.
But one cannot pretend to certainty.
The combatants, some of them, awaken a more lively interest than the
immediate scene of their exploits. It is hard to throw ourselves into the
feeling of those men of the time who saw in the fight of Tinchebray a
national victory of Englishmen over Normans. In some sort it was so; from
that day no once could say that a Duke of the Normans held England; it was
the King of the English who held Normandy. And the invasion of
Normandy by Englishmen and their King, and the fighting of the victorious
battle on the forty years' anniversary of the Conqueror's landing, could not
have failed to strike men's minds. One strange turning-about of things
indeed there was. The man whom Englishmen had once chosen as their
King, the heir of Alfred, Cerdic, and Woden, fought at Tinchebray in the
following of Duke Robert. Eadgar and Robert had been comrades in the

Crusade, and the two men were not unlike in character. Neither could ever
act for himself; both could sometimes act for others. And if Eadgar thought
at all, he may have seen a rival in Henry, while he assuredly could not have
seen one in Robert. Anyhow the Ætheling who had marched on York with
Waltheof and Mærleswegen now marched on Tinchebray with William of
Mortain and Robert of Bellême. Englishmen may well have seen a truer
countryman in the son of the Conqueror, born in England, chosen to his
crown by Englishmen and leading Englishmen to battle, than in the
grandson of Æthelred, born in Hungary, and fighting alongside of the
foreign oppressors whom England and her King had cast out. And the best
and the worst of the warrior princes and nobles of the time were there on
opposite sides. With Duke Robert came Robert of Bellême, no longer of
Shrewsbury or Arundel. With King Henry came the Count of Maine, Helias
of La Flèche.
Orderic witnesses to the presence of Englishmen in the battle. The
contemporary letter-writer only implies it by mentioning others, of whom
he speaks a little scornfully, as well as the men of Bayeux, Avranches, and
Coutances, and the Breton and Mansel allies. When Robert of Torigny
speaks of the "acies Anglorum," he doubtless simply means, according to a
very common form of speech, the force of the King of the English,
whatever they might be, either "genere" or "natione." But all who were
under the King's immediate command had in some sort to become
Englishmen in the hour of battle. Like Brihtnoth and Harold, King Henry
stood and waited for the enemy on foot. So did Randolf of Bayeux and the
younger William of Warren; so did the wary counsellor who had little love
for Englishmen, Robert of Beaumont, Count of Meulan, and presently to be
Earl of Leicester, forefather in the female line of another Earl who loved
them well. Seven hundred horsemen only kept the two flanks of the
infantry. The main body of the horse, Breton and Mansel, stood apart. King
Henry's footmen, perhaps with some little advantage of the ground, stood as
firm in their ranks as the fathers of some of them had stood forty years
before when the lord of Meulan was foremost in the charge against them.
They bore up against every charge of the ducal force till Count Helias, with
his reserve, chose a happy moment and broke in on their assailants with his
horsemen. The lord of Bellême fled for his life; the Duke of the Normans

and the Count of Mortain became the prisoners of their conqueror and near
kinsman.
The prison of Count William was a strait one. Henry might fairly look on
him as a traitor, and it was the general belief that he paid for his treason
with his eyes. Here we may perhaps see the groundwork for the foolish
story that Duke Robert's fate was equally hard. But Henry was far too wise
to commit so useless a crime. The captive Duke spent the remaining
twenty-eight years of his life in this castle, and that, treated with all honour,
but kept under such restraint as was needful, specially after he had once
tried to get away altogether. He did not even cease to be Duke of the
Normans. His brother administered his duchy for him; but he never took the
ducal title while Robert lived. Robert, in short, was in much the same case
as Henry III. was at the hands of Earl Simon. To be carefully looked after at
Bristol or Cardiff must have been dull work for one who had scaled the
walls of Jerusalem; but in his brother's keeping Robert assuredly never had
to lie in bed for want of clothes. As for his comrade Eadgar, he was let go
free altogether. The crowned King had no need to fear the momentary King-
elect of forty years before. We only wish to know whether he did himself
live to so preternatural an age as to be a pensioner of Henry II., or whether
he who bears his name in the accounts of that reign is a son of whom
history has no tale to tell.
We go back from Tinchebray to Flers. Next day the main line takes us to
Argentan. The name of Tenarcebrai is written in our own Chronicles; so is
that of Argentses; only is that really Argentan or only Argences?

ARGENTAN
1892

A good many of the places which we go through on such a journey as we
are now taking in Western Normandy, full as they are of historic and local
interest on particular grounds, might easily fail to attract, not only the
ordinary tourist, but even the general antiquarian traveller. No one, for
instance, need go to La Lande-Patry, unless he is anxious to get a better
understanding of a single sentence of the Roman de Rou. Even at
Tinchebray the strictly historic interest is all. Unless we except that single
arcade on the tower of St. Remigius, there is really nothing memorable to
show in the shape of either church or castle. With Argentan the case is
different. Any one who has a turn for mediæval antiquities in any shape
would surely reckon that town as one of high interest. With no such single
memory as the great fight of Tinchebray, it plays a certain part in history
through many ages; the local history of the town itself is remarkable, and its
existing monuments are of various kinds and instructive in several ways.
And the means of getting there are as simple as any means well can be; for
Argentan is a principal station on the line from Paris to Granville. It is also
a station on the great cross line from Caen to Le Mans. This position makes
it a good centre for seeing several places in various directions, to say
nothing of others for which none of the many railways of Normandy has as
yet done anything. In the journey now recorded it served as a centre for
Falaise and Séez, and for what will to most people be the less familiar
names of Exmes and Almenèches, and it might easily have been made a
centre for other places.
Argentan is a kind of town to which it would be hard to find an exact fellow
in England. It is not the head of any district; it is not the seat of any great
ecclesiastical foundation; such importance as it has in history seems to have
come from the presence of a castle which not uncommonly received
princely sojourners. Yet it is plainly something more than one of those
towns which have simply sprung up at the gate of a castle. It has one main
characteristic of a class of towns much greater than its own: the fortress and

the great church stand side by side in its most prominent quarter. That in the
general view the church is far more conspicuous than the fortress is the
result of later havoc; but we are surprised to find that a church of such
dignity in itself and placed in such a position as the chief church of
Argentan was never the seat of abbot or dean. Falaise is now a larger town
than Argentan; but we feel that at Falaise the town has simply grown up at
the foot of the castle hill. Saint Gervase at Falaise is no fellow to the mighty
fortress on the felsen, as Saint German of Argentan must have been to the
donjon of Argentan, even when that donjon was better seen than it is now.
The name of Argentan does not at once lead us to some Gaulish tribe or to
some Roman prince; but it does not, like that of Falaise, at once carry its
own meaning with it in the speech of some or other of the Teutonic
conquerors of Gaul. We feel that Falaise, looking up to the great keep and to
the tower of Talbot, is merely a magnificent Dunster or Richmond—we
cannot say Windsor; for the sainte chapelle of Saint George has no fellow
there. But Argentan is a miniature, a very small miniature certainly, but still
a miniature, of Durham and Lincoln and Angers. That is, church and
fortress stand together on the highest point in the town.
Is Argentan therefore to be set down among the hill-towns? Falaise, of all
places in the world, assuredly is not; the castle is set on a hill, but not the
town. But can we give the name to Argentan? Some scruple may be felt by
one who has come from Saint-Lo, from Coutances, or from Avranches. Yet
the ascent from the Orne to the upper part of the town is very marked, and
as the chief buildings, ecclesiastical and military, are gathered together on
the higher ground, there is a true akropolis. And there is no doubt that this
akropolis had its own circuit of wall, distinct from that of the lower town.
This last took in a large space, and was of a strangely complicated shape,
running out hither and thither in various directions. According to all our
experience of other places, we would take for granted that the inner circuit
was the older. Here, we should say, was the original settlement; the town,
after the usual manner of towns, outstripped its boundaries; it spread itself
in whatever directions suited its inhabitants; lastly, the suburbs which thus
grew up were taken into the town, and were fenced in by a second wall.
This, one need hardly say, is a thing which has happened over and over
again, in this place and that, till we take it for granted as the explanation of
such a state of things as we see at Argentan. But in a local book, in which a

great deal of information about Argentan is brought together, Le Vieil
Argentan, by M. Eugène Vimont, it is distinctly asserted that the case is the
other way. The wider circuit, he tells us, is the older. In the wars of the early
days of William, King Henry of France burned Argentan. The burning is
undoubted; it is recorded by William of Jumièges. But M. Vimont's
inference seems strange—namely, that after this destruction the town was
rebuilt, but on a smaller scale. The case would be something like one stage
in the history of Périgueux, when only a part of old Vesona was fortified at
the time of the barbarian invasion of 407, and the part outside the new walls
was forsaken.[49] But an ordinary burning of a town in warfare like that
which went on between France and Normandy did not commonly lead to
such great changes as this, and it is very hard to believe that the town of
Argentan can, in the first half of the eleventh century, have reached this
great extent and this irregular shape. We are bound to suppose that a local
writer who shows much local knowledge has some reason for what he says.
But for a thing so hard to believe some direct authority should be quoted,
and M. Vimont quotes none. Till some other convincing authority is
produced, we shall believe that the growth of Argentan followed the same
law as that of other towns.
It is only in a few small pieces here and there that either the wider or the
narrower circuit of wall has left any sign of itself. But we can believe both
on M. Vimont's witness, and indeed they hardly need any witness. Each
circuit has left its stamp behind it in the way that town walls do leave it,
even when, as walls, they have altogether vanished. We hold, then, that the
narrower circuit, taking in only the higher ground with the church of Saint
German, and the two castles, is the oldest. The church and the donjon
doubtless had predecessors before King Henry came against Argentan. His
burning need not have wrought any more of lasting destruction than a
hundred other such burnings. The town sprang up again; in course of time,
when Argentan flourished under princely favour, it grew beyond its old
bounds. The growth of the inhabited town called for a wider circuit of
walls. The new suburbs, with the church of Saint Martin, were taken within
the fortified area. Argentan no longer merely looked down on the Orne, but
was washed by it.
The upper town, then, besides the church of Saint German, contains not
only one, but two castles. On the highest ground of all, in the north-west

corner of the enclosure, are the remains of a large polygonal keep, which
keeps its name of the donjon. It makes very little show, being sadly
crowded in by houses. Somewhat lower down is the château, a graceful
building of the late French Gothic, now used as the Palace of Justice. The
building itself has hardly any defensive character about it, but it stands as
part of the general line of defence, and it was also connected with the
donjon by an inner wall, parting the two castles from the town. Some parts
of the wall in this neighbourhood, both inner and outer, are still standing;
and near the château is the desecrated chapel of Saint Nicolas, keeping
some good windows.
The château would attract anywhere; the fragment of the donjon simply
peeps over houses. The chief thing in Argentan after all is the great church
of Saint German. Both this and the smaller church of Saint Martin down
below give us most instructive lessons in the course by which the late
Gothic of France gradually changed into Renaissance. As we have often
said, this transition has in England to be studied almost wholly in houses,
while in France we trace it in churches, and grand churches also. The
church of Saint German at Argentan is undoubtedly a noble pile. At a
distance it suggests the memory of Saint Peter at Coutances on a larger
scale. We seem to look on the same grouping of central and western towers,
though the central tower of Saint German's is not octagonal, but square. But
the western tower at Argentan is not western in the same sense as the
western tower at Coutances. That is, it does not stand in the same line with
the central tower. It is not a western, but a north-western tower. This allows
a greater variety of outline than can be had at Saint Peter's. But the general
effect of the towers, all of which evidently received their last finish after the
days of pure Gothic had passed away, is essentially the same in the two
cases. In the central tower of Saint German this finish is nothing more than
a cupola of wood and lead on a handsome but not lofty lantern of late
Gothic, wonderfully good, outside at least, for the date of 1555. But the
general effect is not bad. The north-western tower, known as la grosse tour,
has a more curious history. The lowest stage is good and rich Flamboyant,
with a highly adorned porch. On this is a much plainer stage, from which
the Gothic feeling has passed, but which has no distinctly Renaissance
detail. It has long narrow windows with flat-arched heads. This must have
been building in 1617, when the governor of the town forbade the tower to

be carried higher, lest it should overlook the donjon. We think of William
Rufus bidding Hildebert of Le Mans to pull down his pair of newly built
towers.[50] The hindrance was afterwards withdrawn, and in 1638 the tower
was finished with its fantastic, but certainly taking, cupola. The nave was
begun in 1421, when Normandy was ruled for a season by the descendants
of its ancient dukes. It was carried on gradually for 220 years, and was
finished in 1641. The changes in style during this time are easily traced.
The nave is late but pure Gothic, a really fine design, though a good deal
spoiled by the loss of tracery in so many of the windows both in aisles and
clerestory. In a large panelled triforium a very keen eye may possibly detect
in the lowest range of ornament a tendency—it is nothing more—to
Renaissance ideas. Or it may only be fancy suggested by the stages further
east. Certainly the nave, if not quite of first-rate merit, has a really striking
effect, and is far better than most panel work of the time. The transepts are
of the same style. They are finished north and south with apses, which are
really graceful, though we miss the rose-windows which we should
otherwise have looked for in a French church on such a scale as this. The
choir too, as seen out of the nave, is well-proportioned and effective, though
we see that the windows in the apse have flat arches and no tracery. The
apse, if we can call it so, has the strange singularity of ending in a point,
and some odd details have crept into the bosses of the vault. But, in the
general view from the nave, the only thing that mars the general harmony
and good effect is the treatment of the lantern. The four lantern arches have
the flattened shape of the latest Gothic; but, oddly enough, the variety here
chosen is the English four-centred arch, not the usual French shape, three-
centred, elliptic, or actually flat-headed. But both the English and the
French form are quite unsuited for pier-arches, and for lantern arches yet
more. And, though the work of the lantern is quite good outside, yet within
we see that the enemy has begun to take possession. There is perhaps no
actual un-Gothic detail, but the feeling of the arcade of flat-headed arches
which forms the gallery shows the way in which things are tending.
We go into the choir. There, setting aside the apse windows, the arcade,
triforium, clerestory, are still pure, if very late Gothic; the new fashion
comes in one detail only; the vaulting shafts have an odd kind of Ionic
capital. It is in the latest part of all, the chapels round the choir, that the new
taste comes in most strongly, and even there it is not altogether dominant. It

is very strange outside, where heavy flying-buttresses are tricked out with
little columns. Within, pairs of such little columns are the chief ornament.
But they support no arches, only scraps of entablature. The arches of the
roof, the windows, and everything else, are still of the elliptic shape, and
they still keep the late Gothic mouldings. No building better shows what a
long fight was waged between the two styles. Saint German at Argentan is
not like Saint Eustace, where we see a grand Gothic conception carried out
without a single correct Gothic detail. Here not only the conception, but the
great mass of the internal detail, is purely Gothic; the new fashion thrusts
itself in only in particular parts.
This last remark is specially true of the smaller church of Argentan, that of
Saint Martin. Here we have not the full cruciform shape. There is no central
tower or lantern, but only lower transepts projecting from a continuous nave
and choir, whose roof-line, within and without, runs uninterruptedly from
east to west. The only tower is a small octagonal one with a spire at the
north-west corner. The peculiarity within is that, while the arcade and
clerestory are still late Gothic, the triforium between them has run off into
Renaissance. The reason seems clear. The new fashion affected details long
before it touched the great lines of the building. The triforium at this date is,
as at Saint German, simply a matter of detail, an arrangement of panelling
and the like. That stage, therefore, was naturally touched by the intruding
foes, while the main features, like the pillars and pier-arches, are as yet not
all affected. At Saint Martin the windows are some of them good
Flamboyant, while some are a kind of very bad Perpendicular. From others,
as at Saint German, the tracery has been cut away altogether. This church,
smaller than Saint German, of a less effective outline, and standing in the
lower part of the town, has nothing like the same grand effect as the two
towers of Saint German on the hill. But it has, with its tall clerestory, a
stately look from some approaches, and it has its lesson to tell in the history
of art.
One is surprised to hear that in the old days Argentan had but a single curé,
whose sphere of usefulness took in both Saint German and Saint Martin.
One fully expects to find that such a church as Saint German was collegiate.
But this is one of the characteristic features of French architecture. We are
used in England to great town churches, which never were more than parish
churches, covering a good deal more ground than Saint German's. But we

are not used, save at Shoreham and Bristol, to see them built, like Saint
German, so thoroughly on the type of churches of higher rank. Boston,
Newark, Saint Michael's at Coventry, Trinity Church at Hull, are as grand in
their way as Saint German at Argentan, only it is in quite another way.
There are a few other things to see at Argentan. On the slope of the hill is a
good late Gothic house, with two arches of street arcade in front. Add a
little more, and we should have the arcade of Carentan; add a great deal
more, and we should have the arcades of Bern. Those who seek for it will
also find a mediæval bridge of two pointed arches over one of the branches
of the Orne. And it is grievous when, after moving from Argentan to new
quarters at Laigle, we take another look at M. Vimont's book, and find that
we have failed to see a small desecrated Romanesque church called Notre-
Dame de la Place. We relieve ourselves by finding fault with M. Vimont,
who certainly does not always put things in those parts of his book where
we should most naturally look for them.
But we have one point to settle with witnesses nearer home. In the war
between William Rufus and Duke Robert, the Duke, with his ally King
Philip of France, took a castle in which Roger the Poitevin, son of Earl
Roger of Shrewsbury and brother of Robert of Bellême, commanded for
William at the head of 700 knights. Strange to say, they all surrendered
without shedding of blood on the first day of the siege. Our chronicle calls
the place Argentses, which Florence of Worcester translates by Argentinum
castrum.[51] The name looks like Argences, much nearer to Caen than
Argentan. But one doubts whether Argences could ever have been a fortress
of such importance, perhaps whether it was a fortress at all. And Robert of
Torigny, who must have known the country better than anybody at
Peterborough or Worcester, has Argentomum, which certainly means
Argentan, and which may perhaps have the force of a correction. If so, we
have a second visit to Argentan by a French king of the eleventh century,
but not one which made any new building needful.
There is a good deal more to say about Argentan in later times, from Henry
the Second of Normandy and England to Henry the Fourth of Navarre and
France. The traveller is most likely to sojourn at the Hôtel des Trois Maries,
a resting-place which, in its foundation rather than in its buildings, goes
back to the fourteenth century. It has received many memorable guests, and

its host is said to have purveyed for the last Henry that we have spoken of.
It stands in the main street on the lower ground. The thought did suggest
itself that it might be a trifle too near the Orne, whose waters at Argentan
are not attractively clean, and that the Hôtel du Donjon on the top of the hill
might have a better air. But we can say nothing as to the further merits or
demerits of the Donjon, and the Three Maries sheltered us well enough by
the space of six days.

EXMES AND ALMENÈCHES
1892

Exmes and Almenèches; one fancies that those names will sound strange to
almost any one save those who have been lately reading the eleventh book
of Orderic the Englishman. Exmes indeed is one of those unlucky places
which, even in the year 1891, remain without the comfort of a railway. But
Almenèches has a station happily placed on two lines; it is visited by trains
between Granville and Paris, and also by trains between Caen and Le Mans.
It thus seems to stand in a closer relation to the world of modern times than
Exmes, to which he who does not care to trust himself to a Norman
omnibus must go on his own account. To Almenèches too one may go on
one's own account; each place makes a pleasant drive from Argentan. There
is nothing very striking on the road to either, but the road to Almenèches
decidedly goes through the prettier country. Each has a church and a castle
to show, or rather each has a church and the site of a castle. As in so many
places, the ecclesiastical building has outlived the fortress. And this is more
to be noticed at Almenèches, where the church was monastic, and therefore
ran greater chances of destruction in the days of havoc. In general history
we cannot venture to say that either spot has a place. In special Norman
history Exmes, under some or other of the forms of its name, Oximum,
Hiesmes, anything else, often shows itself; its early importance is noticed
by its giving its name to the large district, Pagus Oximensis, Oixmeiz,
Hiesmsis. And the Oximenses are sometimes spoken of in a special way, as
if they were a distinct people, capable of acting for themselves. Of
Almenèches we hardly hear anything but at one particular moment, and
then we hear of Exmes along with it.
In short, the history of Almenèches, as far as we are concerned with it,
might be summed up under a sensational heading, as "The Sorrows of
Abbess Emma." Her sorrows did not last long, but they were heavy while
they lasted. It was hard for the head of a devout Sisterhood to have three of
the great ones of the earth set upon her at once, one of them being her own
brother. She was daughter of Roger of Montgomery, afterwards Earl of two

shires in England, and of his first wife, Mabel of Bellême, who bears so evil
a reputation for bloodshed and treachery. She was therefore sister to the heir
of her mother's estates and crimes, to that Robert of Bellême who is charged
with a crime from which the worst Merwing would have shrunk, that of
pulling out the eyes of his little godson, seemingly only for the fun of the
thing. But Emma and her sisters are described as being much better than
any of their brothers, even those who were not so bad as Robert. She may
therefore not have been wholly unfit for the post in which she was set when
her father put her at the head of his newly founded abbey, though she could
hardly have been qualified according to the rule which Gregory the Great
laid down for the monasteries of Sicily, that no abbess should be under sixty
years of age.
The troubles of Abbess Emma began in the year 1102, when her brother
Robert was happily driven out of England, with his brothers and his whole
followings and belongings. It might seem a little hard when King Henry, in
getting rid of the whole stock, seized on the English lands which Earl Roger
had given to his daughter's Norman Abbey. But we remember that, in so
doing, he was forestalling, not the Eighth of his name, but the Fifth. We did
not want alien priories in England. Robert came back to his native
Normandy, began to work every kind of mischief there, and his brothers
Arnulf and Roger helped him for awhile in so doing. Arnulf is famous at
Pembroke.[52] Roger the Poitevin, so called from his marriage, had been
lord of that land between Mersey and Ribble, which afterwards went to
patch up the modern shire of Lancaster. Presently the brothers quarrelled.
Robert of Bellême refused to give Arnulf and Roger any share in their
father's inheritance. Then they forsook him, and Arnulf took an active part
against him on behalf of Duke Robert. We read how, in June, 1103, he
seized his brother's munitio of Almenèches, and how it was occupied for the
Duke. This was dangerous to his sister's abbey, where his followers did not
scruple to occupy the buildings and to stable their horses in the church.
Then Robert of Bellême, looking on the abbey as a hostile fortress, comes
down on Almenèches, burns the church and all the buildings of the
monastery, and leaves his sister and her nuns to find shelter where they can.
The Duke's followers, who fall into his hands, he deals with after his
manner; they are killed, mutilated, or kept in hard bonds. Robert of
Bellême, it must be remembered, is the man of whom it was said that he

refused ransom for his prisoners, despising gain, compared with the keener
pleasure of tormenting them. The Duke then and his following set forth to
do something against the hateful tyrant—"odibilis tyrannus" he is called, a
phrase in which we must not forget the ancient sense of "tyrannus."[53]
Counts and lords are with him, and the whole force of the land of Exmes.
They hold their councils in the castle of Exmes; they did what they could
against the tyrant; but he was too strong for them. He defeated the Duke in
battle, and got possession of the castle of Exmes.
Meanwhile Abbess Emma and her Sisterhood had to go whither they could.
"Tener virginum conventus misere dispersus est." Some sought shelter with
kinsfolk and friends. The Abbess herself and three nuns went to Saint-
Evroul, where Orderic, who tells the story, dwelled as the monk Vital. They
found a shelter and a place of worship in an ancient chapel where Saint
Evroul himself had dwelled—"coelesti theoriae intentus solitarie degebat."
There they abode six months, till in the next year they were able to go back
to Almenèches and to begin to set up their ruined home again. For ten years
Abbess Emma laboured at gathering the sisterhood together and rebuilding
the church. Then she died, and, by as near an approach to hereditary
succession as could be in the case of abbesses, her staff passed to her niece
Matilda, daughter of her brother Philip. She, too, had to rebuild church and
monastery after another fire. We are not told how it was kindled: but by that
time her uncle Robert was safe in prison in England, shorn of all power of
burning anything or of gouging out anybody's eyes.[54]
Our present business is to see the sites of all these events. We hardly dared
to hope that we may see any ecclesiastical work of Abbess Emma or Abbess
Matilda. Still less do we hope to see the castles which Arnulf and Robert of
Bellême seized on standing up as they were in their day. Both Exmes and
Almenèches, in the present state of their military works, are among the
places which most fully bear out the doctrine with which we started in
speaking of Hauteville, that a site is often better when there is nothing on it.
The site of the castle of Exmes is not exactly in an ideal state. The best case
of all would be if it still bore a castle of the right date; the second best
would be if there were only a green hill and its ditch, with full power of
walking freely over them as one thought good. The castle-hill of Exmes is
not in so happy a case as either of these; but it is much better off than if it
were surmounted by a barrack or a prison. The hill is there; the ditch, as we

suppose we must call it, is there; there is no building on the hill save a small
modern chapel; the only bad thing about it is that the top of the hill is cut up
into small fields with high hedges, and that the ditch is cut up into gardens.
There is therefore no means either of going freely about, or of taking any
connected view of the top of the hill. Still, the general line of the place can
be easily made out, and we soon see that a site well suited for its purpose
has been made the most of. The actual hill of the castle makes no special
show in the distance. No longer marked by the castle itself, it seems simply
part of the general mass of high ground on which both town and castle
stand, and from which the castle-hill itself stands forward in a peninsular
fashion towards the north. The hill is round, or nearly so; and no small
measure of human skill has been employed in adapting it to purposes of
defence. We spoke of a ditch; but a ditch is hardly the right word. At a good
height above the actual bottom, as one feels very strongly in going up the
road from Argentan, the castle-hill strictly so called is surrounded by the
artificial work which, for want of a better name, we have called a ditch. But
it is safer to say that the hill-side has been cut, leaving the upper part of the
hill with scarped sides rising above a flat piece of ground all round, which
puts on the character of a ditch or not according as the hill-side at different
points supplies a bank on the other side. It is on the side towards the town
that it is most truly a ditch. The general effect is something like the
clerestory of a round church, the Temple Church or any other, rising above
a flat-roofed surrounding aisle. The ditch is wide, and doubtless has been
deeper—that is, more of a ditch—than it is now; that is, its use for gardens
must have raised its general level. One's thoughts somehow rather go away
to Marsala than to Arques or Old Sarum—perhaps because in those last we
can freely go about, while gardens, houses, what not, come in the way both
at Marsala and at Exmes. If they were away, the whole thing would be more
like some of the ditches on the Malvern hills than anything else.
Such is all that is to be seen of the castle of Exmes; but, in the absence of an
actual donjon that can have seen the wars of the Conqueror and his sons, it
is quite enough. The look-out is a wide one indeed; but it is now easier to
get it from the road going back to Argentan than from the top of the hill
itself. The eye ranges over a vast space chiefly to the north-west, over the
great forest of Gouffers, over plains and undulating ground, a wide and
striking view, but in which no remarkable object rises up to catch the eye.

We look forth with the special hope of getting a distant glimpse of Falaise
and its donjon. Perhaps not the donjon itself, but the high ground about it is
said to be seen from the tower of Saint German at Argentan. But we at least
could not see it from Exmes.
The other object in the little town of Exmes, now hardly more than a
village, is the church. This stands on the general mass of high ground from
which the castle hill juts out. It is a building of no small interest, both from
what it has to show and from what it has not. At first sight it seems utterly
shapeless. What first catches the eye is a very pretty apse of good
Flamboyant work, with windows in two ranges, of which all in the upper
and some in the lower are blocked. We see also at the same glance that
something just to the west of the apse has been destroyed or left unfinished.
Beyond this again is a much lower western body, a nave with its aisles
thrown under one roof. This last is not attractive from without, but when we
go in, we find that it is the jewel of Exmes. There is a nave of five bays,
perhaps once of six, of the very simplest and purest Romanesque, one of the
examples which show how that style, better than any other style, can
altogether dispense with ornament. There are no columns, no capitals, not a
moulding of any kind. Arches of two orders rise from square piers with
imposts, and support an equally plain clerestory. For a clerestory there is,
genuine and untouched, though so strangely hidden outside by the great
sloping roof. This is all; but we ask for no more; the design, plain as it is,
leaves nothing to ask for. One does not rush at a date; it may be twelfth
century; it may be eleventh; but, if so, it is of the second half of the
eleventh. Plain as are the imposts, they show that the work is of the
confirmed Norman variety of Romanesque; there are no Primitive traces
hanging about it, such as we see at Jumièges.
The perfection of the Norman nave seems to have been tampered with in
later days by cutting through a low transepted chapel on each side. The
arches look as if they had supplanted a sixth arch of the nave. But far
greater changes were presently designed. As at Gisors, as at a hundred other
places, the Flamboyant architects thought the elder building too plain, and
above all things too low. In a great number of cases they rebuilt the choir
after their own fashion, but never carried the work on to the nave. Here at
Exmes the work in the eastern part was never finished. That seems most
likely; but it is possible that the work was finished and has been pulled

down. The apse at least was done, and very pretty it is; but a tall transept on
each side with a large chapel to the east of each, perhaps built, certainly
designed, are not there now. Within, there is no vaulting, and a mean
wooden roof has been thrown across at about half the proper length. The
nave, too, is covered with a wooden roof, a kind of coved roof with tie-
beams. A real barrel-vault would be best of all; but a good flat ceiling, such
as was common in Romanesque times, would do very well. It is one of the
differences between French and English architecture that the French
designers always meant or hoped to have a vault; the wooden roof in a
French church is always a mere shift. It was the builders of English parish
churches who found out that the wooden roof could be made into an equal
substitute for the vault, preferred to it by a deliberate taste.
For one very anxious to work out in detail the curious little bit of history
with which the two places are chiefly concerned, it might be better, if he
could manage it, to take Exmes and Almenèches in a single round. But it is
easier to make them the objects of two separate excursions from Argentan.
We set out then from that town with a twofold anxiety on the mind. Shall
we find any signs of the abbey of the persecuted Emma? We do not give up
all hope till we shall see with our own eyes. Shall we find any signs of the
"munitio" occupied by her brother Arnulf? Signs we may fairly look for, if
not for the thing itself. Our guidebook describes a church of Almenèches,
but it does not distinctly say whether it is the church of the abbey or a
separate parish church. It speaks of a "beau tumulus" in the "environs" of
Almenèches, and says that the neighbourhood is full of "equestrian
memories," whatever those may be. One of them, to be sure, bears the name
of the "Manoir de la Motte," which has a very tempting sound. On the
ordnance map we can find nothing of this manor; but we do find
"Almenèches" and "le Château d'Almenèches" marked as two distinct
communes. This is encouraging; we seem to have lighted on what at home
we should call "Abbess Almenèches" and "Castle Almenèches." We see
Emma at the one and Arnulf at the other; but we still do not know what
traces either sister or brother may have left. At last we reach Almenèches,
Abbess Almenèches, and we see the church described in our Joanne. It is
not very tempting in its general look, and there is nothing particular about
its site, except that the ground does slope away from its east-end. Is this
Emma's minster or its successor, or is it merely a parish church, and have

we to look for the abbey elsewhere? Some signs of the cloister roof on the
south side soon settle this question. But we begin to hope, for the credit of
the house of Montgomery, that Emma, either before or after her troubles,
and her niece after her, had a better church than this to preside over. We find
from Joanne that Almenèches boasts of its church; but it doth falsely boast.
Instead of the nave of Romsey or of Matilda's church at Caen, we have a
single body of late Gothic, with windows like very bad Perpendicular, a
form not uncommon hereabouts. We get its date from an inscription:—
"Ce temple lequel a esté ruiné par l'antiquité fut commencé à
reedifier l'an de grace 1534 et fut perfaict l'an 1550 par reverende
dame Madame Loyse de Silly abbesse de ceans. Gloire et honr.
soyt au seigneur."
Louise of Silly's work may be just endured; it is at any rate better than the
choir built by a later Abbess Louise—we have got out of the age of Emmas
and Matildas—in 1674. That is the lowest depth of all; it is the depth
reached by the choir of Saint Wulfram of Abbeville; that is, it is of no style
at all; a decent Italian building would be welcome by the side of it. But its
modern adornments may teach us the history of Saint Opportuna down to
our own day. That may be said, because it represents her translation in the
days of the second Republic in 1849. What most strikes one is the
appearance in stained glass of modern uniforms and—we were going to say
modern bonnets, only we are told that the bonnets of 1849 are not counted
as modern in 1891. Still we are sure that neither Abbess Emma nor even
Abbess Louise ever wore such before they entered religion. Altogether one
never saw so poor an abbey church anywhere. One is curious to know what
it immediately supplanted, and whether the sisterhood was again in such
straits as those which it had been in the time of Emma of Montgomery. Did
the house never recover from the seizure of its lands by King Henry?
Of the "Manoir de la Motte" nothing can be heard. But the "munitio" must
be represented, at least in name, by Le Château d'Almenèches. Our driver
protests that there is no château there, only a commune. So much the better.
If there is no château there in his sense, that is, no intruding modern house,
we are more likely to find the site of the real château, the munitio. And we
presently do find it. We are going on in some difficulties, amidst a good
deal of rain; but we see something in a field by the roadside, between

Almenèches and the church of Le Château d'Almenèches which is evidently
the right thing. There is a manifest mound and ditch of some kind. We go on
to the church, one about as worthless as may be, but which will serve as a
place at least of shelter. But by that time the rain has stopped, and we are
able to study our mound and ditch without let or hindrance. Here is the
castle, the munitio, of Almenèches, whence the Duke's followers first
troubled Abbess Emma. But yet more, here is Joanne's "beau tumulus"
thrown in along with it. A plan is almost needed to set forth what we see.
Here is a piece of slightly elevated ground girded by a ditch on all sides
except where the sluggish river Don—how many Dons are there in Europe?
—which in times past clearly supplied the ditch with water, itself flows.
Here then is the castle; at least here are its essential features. And they are
all clearer, because there is no château in the driver's sense, but only a
farmhouse of decent age, which does no harm. But then the ditch, on one
side at least, is prolonged to follow one side of a much more striking
mound, a long mound which is clearly the "beau tumulus." We do not like
to be too positive about præ-historic tumps, but this certainly looks very
like one. Indeed it need not be præ-historic, it may cover the bones or ashes
of some invading Northman, who was cut off too soon to be christened, to
learn French, and to become the founder of a Norman house. The tump
must be older than the munitio proper; but we may be sure that the makers
of the munitio did not leave it out of their reckonings. It had to be guarded;
it could not well be lived on. Here then we have found all that we want at
Exmes and Almenèches. We understand the scene of the petty war which
drove Abbess Emma to Saint-Evroul. We have found our two castles, all
that we cared to find of them. We have found our abbey, or at least a
successor on its site. And we have both the tump and the church of Exmes
thrown in ἐν παρέρλῳ. It is not at all a bad two days' work that we have
done in the immediate land of the Oximenses.

LAIGLE AND SAINT-EVROUL
1892

Our next halting-place is Laigle on the Rille, the Rille that runs out to flow
by Brionne and the Bec of Herlouin. We choose it as a halting-place less
from any merits of its own than because it is the best centre for some very
remarkable places indeed, and because the place itself calls up certain
associations. There is, perhaps, more interest attaching to the name of
Laigle and to the lords of Laigle than to Laigle itself. Its name supplies us
with the crowning instance of the singular incapacity of so many in England
to understand that these Norman towns and castles are real places. They
give surnames to a crowd of men who figure in the English history of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries; but, as we have said before, hardly anybody
seems to understand that those surnames are taken from places which are
still standing, and to most of which the railway is open. There is the
renowned Bishop William of Durham in the days of the Conqueror and the
Red King, the greatest name in the history of Romanesque art. He is
Willelmus de Sancto Carilefo, just like William of Malmesbury or William
of Newburgh, simply because he had been monk and prior in the monastery
of Sanctus Carilefus, in modern form, Saint-Calais, in the land of Maine. It
is better to say "William of Saint-Calais" than "William of Saint-Carilef,"
because the use of the modern form shows that we know where the place is;
but "William of Saint-Carilef" is not so bad as "Bishop Carilef," as if
Carilef were no place at all, and as if it had been usual in those days to talk
of Bishops or anybody else by their casual surnames. So with Laigle,
Aquila, a place which must have somehow taken its name from an eagle,
possibly from some incident or legend, as there is certainly nothing in the
look of Laigle to suggest eagles in a general way. Its lords of course called
themselves "Gilbertus," "Richeras," or anything else "de Aquila," "of
Laigle." On the whole, for the same reason as in the case of Saint-Calais, it
is better to speak in English of the place and its lords by the now received
form Laigle rather than L'Aigle, though L'Aigle is not quite forgotten on the
spot. But the events of the Norman Conquest brought men of the house of

Laigle into England, and their presence led to a possession in Sussex being
called "Honor de Aquila." When South-Saxon antiquaries, or possibly
lawyers, of whatever age, translated this into "the Honour of the Eagle,"
they plainly did not know that Aquila, Laigle, was a real place from which
men had taken their name and brought it into Sussex. And we have heard of
an Englishman being christened "Richard de Aquila," as if it were hopeless
trying to put "de Aquila" into plain English. We have also heard of a man
being christened "Joseph of Arimathæa"; but that was at least in English,
and not in French, Latin, or Hebrew.
"Richard de Aquila" is a form notable on another ground, as implying a
confusion between the two wholly distinct names of Richard and Richer.
We do not at this moment remember a Richard of Laigle, but Richer of
Laigle is, perhaps, the man of his house who is best worth remembering. He
lived in the days of the Conqueror, he bears the best character possible in
those times, and his one recorded act bears it out. He was fighting for
William, Duke and king, against that castle of Sainte-Susanne in Maine
which the Conqueror of Le Mans and Exeter could not take. In a skirmish
below the castle a beardless-boy, sheltered behind a thicket, aimed an arrow
which gave Richer a mortal wound. His comrades would have killed the
lad; but Richer bade them spare him; his own sins deserved death. For want
of a priest, he confessed those sins to his comrades, and died.
The lords of Laigle did plenty of other things besides this; but it is the
thought of the last act of Richer which cleaves most firmly in the memory,
and makes us most wish to see the place where the lords of Laigle dwelled.
And we set out with some vague notion, a notion not exactly to be fulfilled,
that the home of the lords of Laigle—"domini de Aquila"—must be
something of an eagle's nest. But alas, when we reach Laigle from
Argentan, we find that, with all its historic associations, it is in itself far
from being a town of the same interest as Argentan. The position of the two
is quite different. The chief buildings of Argentan cover a small hill in the
midst of scenery in no way strongly marked. Laigle covers the slope of the
hill which forms one side of the valley of the young Rille, while another
height matches it on the opposite side. At Laigle the chief church, standing
out with a dignity which it hardly keeps when we come near to it, is the one
striking object. Of the castle we see nothing but the surrounding woods, and
in truth there is nothing more to see. The large brick house known as le

vieux château, standing a little to the east of the church, marks, it is to be
supposed, the site of the home of Richer and all the rest of the brood of the
eagle. But no site of any castle can well be further from the eagle's nest
which we came in search of. The town, as distinguished from castle and
church, has little or nothing to show; like Flers, it has risen to some modern
importance through manufactures. The chief church, St Martin, has already
struck us on our approach by its stately tower of late Gothic such as in
England we might have looked to see crowned with battlement and
pinnacles, but which here is finished with a high roof bearing statues on its
ridge. Beside the tower there is something, one hardly knows what, a very
high roof and a kind of spire. When we come near, we find that the church,
though very short, has two western towers. The northern one is the rich
piece of Flamboyant work with which we have already got familiar—or
rather not familiar, as its narrow windows may in the distance be taken for a
Romanesque arcade. Its southern fellow is a real Romanesque tower with
pilaster buttresses, which bears the spire. It is very plain, of the eleventh
century rather than of the twelfth, so that the lord of Laigle, who awakens
an interest above the rest of his house, may have looked at it or even built it.
The same may be said of the apse which ends the central of the three bodies
—they are hardly to be called nave and aisles—which make up the church
of Laigle. But a Romanesque apse, rich or plain, is not improved by first
cutting pointed windows in it and then blocking them up. And the apse, thus
sadly mutilated, is further imprisoned. It barely peeps out between the east
ends of the northern and southern bodies, of which the northern takes the
form of a kind of transept. They are in the worst style of the late French
Gothic, with windows of the same wretched Perpendicular as those of
Almenèches. Whence came this strange taste? Henry the Fifth and John
Duke of Bedford might, somewhat earlier, have taught their Norman
subjects to build good Perpendicular, but not this kind of stuff.
There is not much more to see in Laigle itself. Of the castle we can hardly
be said to have even seen the site. The house which represents it has ceased
to be a château even in the latter sense. It stands pleasantly at the end of the
town, with fields beyond it, and a good slope down to the river, if only it
could be seen. But the whole way from the castle to the Rille is blocked
with modern buildings. We wish that the home of Richer was in the same
case as the head of the Oximenses, where the gardens in the ditch do

comparatively little harm. Or rather we cherish a hope that the vieux
château may not be the true castrum de Aquila. We cannot say that we saw
any other castle anywhere else at Laigle; but we saw one or two sites higher
up the hill where a castle might have stood very fittingly.
But the main object at Laigle is not Laigle. The place may be used, like
Argentan, as a centre for seeing several objects, and in the case of Laigle
the objects to be seen from the centre are certainly of higher interest than
the centre itself. There are the famous border castles of Verneuil and
Tillières, easily to be reached by railway, and there is an ecclesiastical spot
of still higher fame which can in a rather complicated way be reached by
railway, but which it is pleasanter and certainly more appropriate to take by
road. Yet as a means of approaching Ouche, Aticum, Saint-Evroul, even the
road seems too modern. It is essentially a place of pilgrimage, not a
Canterbury pilgrimage, but a pilgrimage to the cell of a hermit, to the
scriptorium of a chronicler of whom we get more personally fond than of
any other.
At Saint-Evroul we ought to think first of all of Saint Evroul; we do think
first of all of Orderic the Englishman, called in religion Vital.[55] We called
him just now a chronicler; but that is assuredly not his right description. If
he were more of a chronicler, that is, if he told his story in a more orderly
way, without so many repetitions and runnings to and fro, that is, if he were
other than the kindly, gossiping, rambling old monk who has made Saint-
Evroul a household word for all students of English and Norman history in
his own day we ought not to feel so warmly drawn to him as we are. It was
the home of Orderic that we wished to see. But it was very hard to find out
whether his home had anything left to show us. Not a word could we find in
any guidebook to say whether the abbey was living or ruined or desecrated
or wholly swept away. It might be as unlucky as Avranches or as lucky as
Saint Peter-on-Dives. And a monastic site from which everything monastic
has been swept away is not so instructive as a fortified site from which the
fortifications are gone. We should be best pleased to find at Saint-Evroul a
church in which Orderic may have worshipped, but it would be better to
find a later church—we had almost said one with discontinuous imposts to
its pillars—rather than no church at all. We set forth in faith, not knowing
what we are to find, but determined that we will at least see the place where
the Ecclesiastical History of Normandy was written. One little incident of

the journey may be mentioned. We reached Saint-Evroul; we saw more of
Saint-Evroul's Abbey than we had ventured to hope that we should find
there. But before we reached it our driver stopped near a house and
buildings which seemed in no way attractive. Asked why he stopped there,
he said that was where the landlady at Laigle had told him to stop. There
were the great glass-works for which Saint-Evroul is now best known. And
it was the Saint-Evroul of the glass-work that we were thought to have set
forth to see, not the Saint-Evroul of Orderic or of Saint Evroul himself.
Orderic, son of a French father and an English mother, born by the banks of
the Severn ten years after King William came into England, in the year of
the martyrdom of Waltheof, was before all things Orderic the Englishman.
If we are to take his words literally, English must have been the only
language of his childhood. He was sent in his childhood to be a monk of
Saint-Evroul;[56] one wonders why, as his father might surely have found
him a cell either in the Orleans of his birth or the Shrewsbury of his
adoption. Himself more truly the founder of Shrewsbury Abbey than his
patron, Earl Roger, Odelerius of Ettingsham, the married priest, preferred
Saint-Evroul to any other house of religion as the home of his son. The
Abbey had lately been set up again, after a time of decay, by the bounty of
several members of the houses of Geroy and Grantmesnil, one of whom,
Abbot Robert, who plays also a part in Calabria and Sicily, was at least as
turbulent as bountiful. But nothing would have more deeply grieved the
monastic soul of Orderic than the thought that any one could think more of
him than of the local saint and first founder. "Father Evroul," "Pater
Ebrulfus," the man of the world who turned hermit in the days of
Chlotocher, and around whose cell the monastery first grew up, lived in the
devout memory of his spiritual children. One asks whether Orderic,
"tenellus exsul" in his Norman monastery, like Joseph in Egypt hearing a
strange language, ever stopped to think of the true meaning of his patron's
name, how the softened Ebrulfus and Evroul disguised the two fierce beasts
which went to make up the name of Eoforwulf. Perhaps, indeed, Orderic the
Englishman, and all other Englishmen, had some right to see a kinsman,
however distant, in the saint who bore so terrible a name. For Ebrulfus
came of the city or land of Bayeux, and in Chlotocher's day, and long after,
the land of Bayeux was still the Otlingua Saxonica, an abiding trace of
those harryings and settlements of Sidonius's times, which planted the

Saxon on both sides of the Channel. Still, to us Orderic is more than Evroul,
even in the form of Eoforwulf. It is for his sake that we take our journey
through the wood of Ouche till we come to the little stream of the
Charenton, where the hermit chose out his solitary cell, where the
monastery twice arose in his honour, and where now the glass-works are
thought to be a greater attraction than the monastery.
The remains of the abbey soon catch our eye, as we draw near from the east
side, the side of Laigle. They are not placed quite at the bottom of the
valley; they gently climb up the hill to the west, the hill up which the small
low street of Saint-Evroul leads to the highest point, where we find another
sign of our own day in the railway station. The church of the monastery is a
mere ruin; but it at least stands open to the sky; it is not desecrated and
disfigured by being put to any profane use. Quite enough is left to put
together the whole plan of the building. There is perhaps a slight feeling of
disappointment at finding that here at Saint-Evroul there is nothing directly
to remind us of the man for whose sake we have come thither. We would
fain see something that had met the eyes of the island-born child in the first
years of his coming to his foreign home. We would fain see even the church
of Robert of Grantmesnil, much more the elder church from which the High
Chancellor of Duke Hugh the Great carried away the body of Saint Evroul
himself, as a piece of holy spoil which Normandy had to yield to France.[57]
We would fain see the cloister where in Orderic's day, King Henry of
England, victor of Tinchebray, sat a long time in thought, and the chapter-
house where the Lion of Justice conferred with the brethren, where he
praised their good order and devotion, and was, at his earnest request,
admitted to their spiritual fellowship. And truly nowhere in kingdom or
duchy had he a more loyal subject than the chronicler who knew so well
what a work it was to bring some approach to peace and order into a land
torn in pieces by noble brigands. Hopes of this kind, hopes of any
immediate memory of the days of Orderic or of days before Orderic are not
fated to be gratified; but we have done well to come to Saint-Evroul none
the less.
The ruined church offers us much to see and study. The only thing that
suggests itself as a possible memorial of Orderic's day is the foundation of
the apse. But as it is only a foundation and not a crypt, there is no need to
think that he ever saw it. The apse itself has fallen; but traces enough are

left to show that inside at least it was polygonal. But it was an apse of the
old simple pattern, without surrounding aisles and chapels. It could not have
been there when the young novice from Shropshire came to Saint-Evroul. It
may have been built in the latter part of his long sojourn. And the stumps of
the great round pillars of the choir are most likely of the same date. The use
of such pillars is a fashion English rather than Norman; but it is hard to
believe that the "tenellus exsul" from Ettingsham brought with him any
architectural tastes. The choir was of some length, and its length was broken
by an apsidal chapel on each side, pointing north and south, so as to form a
kind of small eastern transept. But the greater part of what is left is very
fine work of the thirteenth century, finished at the west end in the
fourteenth. The pillars and arches of the nave are broken down, leaving only
stumps; but enough is left at the west end and at the crossing to show the
design. Clustering shafts surrounded a central pillar; the mouldings of the
arches are, as often happens in Normandy, as well and deeply cut as they
would be in England. Above the arcade was a tall clerestory, seemingly
without any triforium or with the triforium thrown into the clerestory.
Altogether there is about enough left to suggest the memory of Glastonbury,
though Saint-Evroul is certainly not on the scale of Glastonbury, even
without the western church. The west front must have been very
remarkable. The first impression on approaching from outside is that two
western towers stood out in front of the nave, as at Holyrood, or as the
single towers at Dunkeld and Brechin. A second glance shows that what
seemed to be the lower part of a south-western tower is really a building in
advance of such a tower. That is to say, a large porch, or rather portico, with
three tall arches, stood out in front of the western towers and of the end of
the nave. It must have looked just enough like Peterborough to suggest
Peterborough, but also to suggest the contrast between Peterborough and
itself. At Peterborough the great portico stands indeed, as here, in advance
of a west front with two towers. But it may be said to have supplanted that
front. One tower was never finished; the other was thrown into
insignificance. The portico is of the full height, and became the real west
front. Here at Saint-Evroul the portico was not the whole of the west front,
but only part; the towers must have risen a long way above it. One would
like to be able to judge of the effect of such a design.

There is little or nothing left of the other buildings of the abbey, except the
gateway by which we enter, with a larger and a smaller pointed arch. The
field to the south of the church, where cloister, chapter-house, refectory, and
the rest must have stood, had a locked gateway, and the owner had gone off
with the key. But there seemed to be nothing, at least nothing standing up.
Yet we should have liked to see at least the traces of the cloister on the
southern wall. But Saint Evroul is not forgotten in his own place, or even
within the walls of his own abbey. For a little chapel has been made within
the buildings of the gate-house. He has also a cross and fountain, of which
the cross, a modern one, is more visible than the fountain. And in the parish
church on the opposite hill some relics of the abbey, indeed of the saint
himself, are still preserved. There is specially a good fragment of an ancient
triptych. The surviving small church looks down on the relics of the great
one below. And the thought comes, so different from any suggested by the
monastic ruins of England, how short a time it after all is since the great
church of Saint-Evroul was a living thing as well as the small one. A visitor
of no wonderful age could do a sum and find that his own father was at
least able to walk and talk while Robert of Grantmesnil had still a less
famous, but perhaps less unquiet successor.

TILLIÈRES AND VERNEUIL
1892

Our second excursion from Laigle has quite another kind of interest from
that of Saint-Evroul. We go more strictly to see places, and not as it were to
commune with a single man. And the places that we go to see are primarily
military, and not ecclesiastical. We do not go for a great church, not
knowing whether we shall find it perfect or ruined, or wholly swept away.
We go to see two castles or sites of castles, knowing that we shall find
something more than their sites, and with a notion that we shall also get
something ecclesiastical thrown into the balance. Our object is to see the
two border castles of Tillières and Verneuil, both easily reached by railway
from our central point at Laigle, and which by a more roundabout way, may
be reached from Evreux also. Tillières is famous in the early wars of
Normandy and France. Verneuil is best known in the days when Normandy
had become the battle ground of England and France, and when Scotland
threw herself on the French side. As a matter of fact, we saw Verneuil first;
we then went on to Tillières, and thence back to Laigle, getting of course a
second clear view of Verneuil by the way. But it will be more convenient to
speak first of the place of more ancient fame.
Tillières, Tillières on the Arve, if it were left in its ancient state, would be an
almost ideal border-fortress. It is close indeed on the border. When Wace
describes Alençon, he tells us that one side of the water was Norman and
the other side was Mansel. So here at Tillières one side of the water was
Norman and the other side was French. But the stream of Arve at Tillières is
so much narrower than the stream of Sarthe at Alençon that French and
Norman stood much nearer together at Tillières than Mansel and Norman
stood at Alençon. Alençon again, as far as its history goes back, has always
been a considerable town. Tillières is now a mere village, except so far as
so many of these villages put on the character of very small towns. But
town or village, Tillières is simply something which has grown up at the
foot of the castle, while at Alençon one might say that one object at least of
the castle was to defend the town. There is high ground on each side of the

stream; that on the north side is Norman soil, that on the south is French. A
projecting point of the Norman height was seized for the building of the
great border-fortress of Normandy. A few dwellings of men, dependants
doubtless of the castle and its lords, arose under its shadow, just within the
Norman border. That this was done while France and Normandy were still
foreign and hostile lands is shown by the western doorway of the church of
Tillières, a piece of plain Romanesque, of late eleventh or early twelfth
century. Meanwhile, it does not appear that the opposite height was
crowned by any French fortress. Tillières must have been a standing
menace to France, without there being any standing menace to Normandy
back again. Here are our topographical facts, very clear and simple, quite
enough to account for the part which Tillières plays in the history of the
Norman duchy.
That part may be told in a few sentences, but it is a striking story none the
less. Tillières, Tegulense castrum, bears a name cognate with the
Kerameikos of Athens and with the Tuilleries of Paris. It was first fortified
by Duke Richard the Good, the Duke who would have none but gentlemen
about him, and in whose days the peasants arose against their masters. He
gave his sister Matilda in marriage to Odo, Count of Chartres; he gave her
lands by the Arve as her dowry; but when she died childless, he held that he
had a right to take them back again. To this doctrine the widower naturally
did not agree; disputes arose between the two princes, and the fortress of
Tillières—one would like to know its exact shape in those days—arose as a
bulwark of Normandy, beneath whose walls the Count of Chartres
underwent a defeat at the hands of Duke Richard's lieutenants. They were
Neal of Coutances and Ralph of Toesny, speaking names in Norman history.
We next hear of Tillières in the young days of William the Great, when
King Henry could no longer endure such a standing menace to France as the
castle above the Arve. It is the Norman writers who tell us, and we have no
French tale to set against this, how the King of the French demanded the
castle of Tillières—how the young duke's guardians found it prudent to
yield to his demand—how its valiant governor, Gilbert Crispin, refused to
give it up—how the united forces of France and Normandy constrained him
—how the border-fortress was burned before all men, while the King swore
that it should not be set again for four years. But they go on to tell us how
the faithless King went on into the land of Exmes, how he burned Argentan,

and came back to fortify Tillières again as a bulwark of France against
Normandy.[58] Time passed on. King Henry fought with Duke William at
Val-ès-dunes, and fled before him at Varaville; and, as a fruit of the last
Norman victory, Tillières passed back again to its old use as the border
defence of Normandy.
With such a history as this, and with a site so well suited to the history, one
could wish that there was more at Tillières to describe than there actually is.
We should be best pleased of all if the castle hill of Tillières was still
crowned with an ancient donjon; next to that we should like to see it in the
same case as Exmes or rather as Almenèches. But the height is taken
possession of by a house of much more pretension than the harmless farm at
Almenèches, and the passing wayfarer can do little more than follow the
outer wall of the castle—a wall with work of endless dates—round a good
part of its compass. Looking down from the height, looking up from the
village, best of all perhaps from a point of the railway just west of the
Tillières station, the general relations of castle, village, stream, and the once
hostile hills beyond, can be well taken in; but not much more than the
general relations. And the village has little to show beyond its church; and
there the Romanesque doorway is the choicest thing, as being part of our
chain of evidence. But it seems not to be on this ground that the church of
Tillières is counted among "historic monuments," that is, forbidden to be
pulled about by any one else, but destined sooner or later, to be pulled about
by the national powers. Its qualification for admission into this class seems
to be the Renaissance choir. On the outside this is about as poor a jumble of
bad Gothic and bad Italian as can well be thought of; within it has a
somewhat better effect with a vault and rich pendants. Still they are nothing
like so striking as those in Saint Gervase at Falaise, which do really make
us wonder how they are kept up. More really interesting, perhaps, is the
wooden roof of the nave, evidently as great a feat as a French artist was
capable of in the way of wooden roofs. And an eye from Somerset looks
kindly at this outlandish attempt to make a kind of coved roof, and to paint
it withal. Such a one hopes that the French Republic will not turn diocesan
architect, and try to get rid of it. But he thinks that he could show better
coved roofs at home, and he wonders why, if the coved shaped was chosen,
a system of South-Saxon tie-beams and king-posts was thrust in as well.

We turn to the other famous border-fortress of Verneuil. Here the position,
as a position, is in no way to be compared to that of Tillières; but we have
one grand military tower; we have a much larger town, containing several
important churches and houses, and one ecclesiastical tower which may
claim a place in the very first rank of its own class. Verneuil is a border-
fortress; but it is not so ideal a border-fortress as Tillières. It is not so close
on the border; for here Normandy has a small Peraia, a certain amount of
territory beyond the river. And, as Verneuil presented no such commanding
point for a castle site as Tillières did, the fortress was not placed on a height
at all, but in the lower part of the town, to guard the stream. There is a
distinct ascent in Verneuil; but nothing like the slope at Tillières from the
Norman castle down to the border-stream and from the border-stream up
again to the French hills. But there is enough rise to make the grand
ecclesiastical tower on the high ground stand out as the most prominent
object in the approach, while the grand military tower down below makes
no show at all. We were a little puzzled by Joanne's account of Verneuil, in
which he said that the castle had been completely demolished, but that the
donjon existed still. It seems that at Verneuil, as at Argentan, castle and
donjon are distinguished; but at Verneuil castle and donjon are not, as at
Argentan, separate buildings joined only by a long wall; they stand close
together and formed part of one work. Nor is the castle as distinguished
from the donjon, completely demolished; there is a considerable fragment
standing very near. The donjon, called locally Tourgrise from the colour of
its stone, is a round tower, not quite a rival of Coucy, but tall enough and
big enough to have a very striking effect. It has been lately restored or set
up again in some way, perhaps cleared out and roofed in. Anyhow Verneuil
is not a little proud of the fact, and marks its thankfulness by a great number
of rather foolish inscriptions. The tower is proclaimed to be the work of
Henry I., our Henry of Tinchebray, not the developed rebuilder of Tillières;
but this seems out of the question, as the small doorways—we cannot
guarantee the windows—have pointed arches, which seem to be original.
But the ruined fragment of the castle hard by, with its ruder masonry and a
shattered round-headed window seemed certainly to be as early as Henry's
day and very likely a good bit earlier. Hard by the donjon seems to be a
small piece of town walls; otherwise the walls have vanished, and are, as
usual, marked by boulevards. That on the north side still keeps the character

of a rampart, and is a good place for studying the most visible ornaments of
the town.
Verneuil has much to show both in churches and houses. Of the latter,
besides a good many of timber and brick, which are always pleasant to see,
there are two which are more remarkable. One is a singularly good bit of
late Gothic with windows and a graceful tourelle. The other has a tourelle
of the same kind, but it runs off into Renaissance. Both have a curious kind
of masonry, squares alternately of brick and stone. The greatest church is
that of Saint Mary Magdalen, in the great open place in the upper part of the
town. Here is the grand tower, built between 1506 and 1530, a noble design,
and carried out without any infection of foreign detail. It is practically
detached, standing at the south-west corner of a low nave. If the nave had
ever been rebuilt, as was doubtless designed, to match the later and loftier
choir, the effect of the tower would have suffered a good deal. As it is, from
some points, where the nave is not seen at all, it reminded one a little of
Limoges Cathedral, as it stood before the rebuilding of the nave was begun.
It rises by two tall stages above the church; then the square tower changes
to an octagon, a very small octagon supporting one still smaller. It would
have been far better to have given the octagon more importance, as in most
of the other great examples, French and English, starting with Boston
stump. It is further complained, and the complaint is true, that the upper
part of the square tower looks top-heavy. It was just the same with the other
Magdalen tower at Taunton till its rebuilding. Since then, strange to say,
though no difference of detail can be seen in the rebuilt tower, the effect of
top-heaviness is gone. In both cases that effect was, doubtless, due to the
piling of stage upon stage, without making them gradually increase in
lightness and richness towards the top, as at Bishops Lydeard. But it is not a
case to find fault; the vast height, the grandeur of design, the purity of detail
at so late a time, all mark this tower as one of the noblest works of the late
French Gothic. A little way to the west is another tower, attached to a now
desecrated church, we believe of Saint John, which was clearly built as a
rival to the Magdalen tower. It is rather smaller, and in its lower stages
plainer—no fault in that; but a little higher it begins to Italianise, and then
stops altogether. An ugly modern top is all that answers to the upper stages
and octagon of the Magdalen. The people of the Magdalen parish must have

been strongly tempted to say of their nearest neighbours, "These men began
to build, and were not able to finish."
The church to which this most stately tower is attached is not of any great
interest, beyond a simple Romanesque doorway and window in the west
front, and some very plain arches to match in the transepts. The choir is
rather poor late Gothic, spoiled by a great blank space between arcade and
clerestory. Of the nave we hardly know what to say. As it stands, it is
plainly modern; the great round pillars are hollow; but the design is one
which we can hardly fancy coming into anybody's head, unless it
reproduced something older. It is something like Boxgrove, something like
some German churches, but not exactly. A pair of pier-arches are grouped
under a single arch containing a single clerestory window, and there is a
barrel-vault above all. A church in the hands of Huguenots, called "La Salle
des Conférences," seems to have a Romanesque shell and keeps three
windows in a flat east end. Not far from the donjon is the Decorated church
of Saint Lawrence, where the usual late Gothic dies off into Renaissance at
the west end. But the other great piece of ecclesiastical work in Verneuil,
besides the Magdalen tower, is the choir of the church of Our Lady, lower
down in the town. There is an east end, such as one hardly sees on so small
a scale out of Auvergne. Here is the apse, the surrounding aisle, the apses
again projecting from the aisle; and the varied outline is made yet more
varied by a round turret of the same date and style thrown in among the
apses. The general air is early, the work plain, the masonry simple; but the
clerestory windows have pointed arches. We gaze with delight on an outline
more thoroughly picturesque than we have seen for a long while, and which
carries back our thoughts to a land of which all the memories are pleasing.
We purpose to look at it once more before we finally turn away from
Verneuil; but good intentions are not always carried out. Let us dream of
another Arvernian journey, so planned as to take Verneuil on the road.

BEAUMONT-LE-ROGER
1892

The name of Roger of Beaumont must be well known to any who have
studied the details of the Norman Conquest of England, though Roger's own
position with regard to that event is a negative one. His sons play a part in
the Conquest itself, and yet more in the events that followed the Conquest.
In the reign of Henry I. Robert of Meulan, son of Roger of Beaumont, but
called from the French fief of his mother, is the most prominent person after
the King himself and Anselm. But Roger himself, the old Roger, stayed in
Normandy as the counsellor of Duchess Matilda, while his eldest son
followed Duke William to the war. There is interest enough about the man
himself and his belongings to give attraction to the place which specially
bears his name, and which, in truth, was his own creation. The man and the
place are called after one another. Roger is the Roger of Beaumont;
Beaumont is the Beaumont of Roger. He was not always Roger of
Beaumont; he first appears as Roger, son of Humfrey de Vetulis. One learns
one's map of Normandy by degrees. The description of De Vetulis is a little
puzzling; it has been turned into French and English in more ways than are
right. But get out at the Beaumont station of the Paris and Cherbourg
Railway—it comes between Evreux and Bernay—and walk to the little
town of Beaumont, and a fresh light is gained. Perhaps it strikes us for the
first time, perhaps it comes up again as a scrap of knowledge lighted up
afresh, when, between the station and the town, we pass through the
faubourg of Les Vieilles. How it came by the name we need not ask; the
name was there and is there, and we see that Humfrey de Vetulis is simply
Humfrey of Les Vieilles. We see that here down below was the earliest seat
of the house, till Roger climbed the Bellus Mons, to found his castle, to give
it his name, and to take his name from it. It is a pleasant process when these
small facts come out on the spot with a life that they can never get out of
books. A scoffer might ask whether it were worth while to go to Beaumont-
le-Roger simply to get a clearer notion of the meaning of the words
"Humfredus de Vetulis." But it is clearly worth while to go to Beaumont-le-

Roger, both for the association of the place and to see what Roger made and
what others have made since his day. At Hauteville we could simply guess
at the spot which may have witnessed the earliest wiles of Robert the
Wiscard: there is no doubt at all as to the scene of the earliest wiles of one
who might have been called Robert the Wiscard just as truly. Here were
spent the early days of Robert, son of Roger, great in three lands—Lord of
Beaumont, Count of Meulan, and Earl of Leicester, forefather in the female
line of the most glorious holder of his earldom.[59]
We walk from the station with the Bellus Mons plainly before us in a
general way, in the shape of a well-wooded range of high ground. But we
see no castle standing up. An abiding castle of Roger's day we hardly look
for; but we do not even see any special mount rising above the pass of the
hill, or standing out as a promontory in front of it. The most prominent
object is the parish church nestling at the foot of the hill. We see that it has a
rich tower; we presently see that it has also one of those wonderfully lofty
choirs, which seldom get westward as far as the tower, but which, if they
did, would cut down the tower to insignificance. We are used to these
things; we know that the work that we see must be late; but that does not
cut off the hope that the church may contain something of the age of Roger
or his sons. A building of Roger's youth would be something precious. It
would rank with Duchess Judith's Abbey at Bernay, with the long and
massive nave of the church at Breteuil, in which, notwithstanding modern
tamperings, we are tempted to see a work of William Fitz-Osborn, while he
was still only lord of Breteuil, and not yet Earl of Hereford. But of Roger
and his house the church of Beaumont has no signs; all is late, save the
pillars with Transitional capitals, which peep out. The choir is very late, and
in its details very bad; here, as in a hundred other places, we wonder how
men who had such grand general conceptions could be so unlucky in the
way of carrying them out. The aisles have some good Flamboyant windows,
and the tower, if it had been carried up to its full height, would have been a
fine example of the style. And against it now lean two memorial stones
commemorating founders and foundations, but not of the house of De
Vetulis. They are brought from the neighbouring abbey, of which we shall
presently have to speak.
Close above the church we take a road up the hill-side. It is well to turn
presently, to take in the strange grouping of the tower and the tall choir, as

seen from a point a little above them. But our object now is that which is
historically the central, physically the loftiest, point at Beaumont, the castle
on the Bellus Mons itself. We soon begin to see fragments of masonry rising
above us on the left hand. Here, then, is the castle; and so in a sense it is.
That is, it is part of its works, within its precincts; but it is not the head
work of all. We go on a little further, and we see signs of mound and ditch
plainly enough. But we do not take in their full grandeur, till we are kindly
admitted within the gate of one of the small holdings into which the site of
the fortress of Roger's rearing is now cut up. Then we see, indeed, why it
was that "Rogerius de Vetulis" was changed into "Rogerius de Bello
Monte."
It is, indeed, a "bellus mons" in the sense of commanding a wide and
pleasant outlook. The town and church of Beaumont, from some points the
abbey close below, the wide vale of the Rille and the hills beyond, make up
a cheerful landscape. But if by the "bellus mons" we were to understand a
fair natural hill, we should be led astray. The actual site of Roger's keep is
neither a natural hill nor an artificial mound. It is a piece of the natural hill
artificially cut off from the general mass. The founder chose a point of the
hill-side which suited his objects. Its southern face, towards the open
country, was steep enough for purposes of defence; for the rest, he cut off
the piece of ground that was to be fortified by a gigantic ditch in the form of
a horse-shoe. It is a ditch indeed, one that gladdens the eye that is looking
out for such things. There is not so much of it, but what there is seems as
grand as anything at Arques or Old Sarum. Lilybæum stands apart; Roger
must have had plenty of labour at his command; but he had not, like the
engineers of Carthage, to dig through the solid rock. It is a ditch to look
down on from above, and also to walk along in its depth, and to look up on
each side. The ground is not absolutely open all round; some obstructions of
farm-buildings, and the like, hinder one from stepping out the horse-shoe
quite as far as it goes; but the top of the mound—if mound is the right word
—is perfectly free. There are fragments of masonry left everywhere, but
there is no continuous wall anywhere, nor any scrap of detail by which we
could fix a date. Still, enough is left for all purposes of historical
association, enough to show in what kind of a place Roger of Les Vieilles
fixed his home. It is not exactly an eagle's nest; for that kind of dwelling
Normandy supplies fewer opportunities than some other lands. But it comes

much more nearly to an eagle's nest than the home of any lord of Laigle
who dwelled at Laigle. The exact ground-plan Mr. Clark, and few besides
Mr. Clark, could make out. But without making out the exact ground-plan,
we learn enough to teach us not a little about both Roger's Beaumont and
Beaumont's Roger.
Was the lord of Beaumont-le-Roger entitled to a sainte chapelle in his
castle? Perhaps he might seem to be so when he was also Count of Meulan
and Earl of Leicester. Perhaps it might seem so still more when Beaumont
had come into the hands of French kings, and had begun to be granted out
as a comté-pairie for their sons. But, seemingly before that time, which did
not come till the fourteenth century, a building arose which is not exactly a
sainte chapelle within the castle, but which is very near to the castle, and
which has very much the air of a sainte chapelle. When we speak of a
sainte chapelle we, of course, mean a sainte chapelle anywhere, whether at
Riom, Paris, or anywhere else. This building is the abbey church of
Beaumont, which stands just below the castle on the hill-side, a building
once evidently of remarkable beauty. Perhaps the most notable feature
about it is the ascent from the road below to the abbey buildings, a covered
passage lighted by large early Geometrical windows. We make our way up
and presently reach the abbey itself. It is plain that on this narrow ledge on
the hill-side it was no more possible than it was on the steep of Saint
Michael's Mount to put the several buildings of the monastery in their
accustomed relation to the church and to one another. Too much has
perished for any one but a specialist in monastic arrangements to attempt to
spell out the buildings of the monastery in detail; but it seems that a good
deal lay to the westward of the church which in ordinary cases would have
been placed to the north or south. The church is but a fragment; the north
and east walls are there, and from them we can reconstruct it. "East Wall" is
here a phrase that may be used; for we are a little amazed to find that the
church had no apse, but an English-looking flat end. The large east window
has lost its tracery, which should have been something of the pattern of the
Angels' Choir at Lincoln. The whole of the work that remains is of the best
French Early Gothic. Seen from below, from the bridge across the Rille at
no great distance, there is something wonderfully striking in this single side
of the church, an inside seen from outside, with its sheltered windows and
vaulting-shafts, standing against the side of the castle-hill. How was it when

both abbey and castle were perfect? As it is, the abbey is the more
prominent of the two. We can see at least a piece of it, while we have to
guess at the castle; none of its fragments stand out at any distance. Yet, even
looking thus, the abbey seems something subordinate, something
dependent; it seems crowded into an unnatural position in order to be an
appendage to something else. The parish church stands out boldly enough.
It has a right to do so; it came in the order of nature. It proclaims the
separate being of the town of Beaumont. The town of Beaumont doubtless
sprang up because of the presence of the castle; but it sprang up by an
independent growth; it was not the personal creation of any of its lords. The
abbey, on the other hand, placed on so strange a site, was clearly the
personal device of its own founder, who may have felt a number of very
different feelings gratified, as he saw an abbey of his own making at his
feet.
The result is an abbatial church unlike all other abbatial churches. The
abbey of Beaumont is very beautiful, while the abbey of Almenèches is
very ugly; yet Almenèches comes one degree nearer than Beaumont to one's
ordinary notion of an abbey church. The abbey of Beaumont must have
been a lovely chapel, but only a chapel. If it stood in its perfect state at
Caen, among that wonderful group of noble minsters and great parish
churches, it would strike us as a beautiful, but a small thing. This is not the
usual position of the church of an abbey. It was, in fact, a pious and artistic
fancy; while not, in strictness of description, a sainte chapelle or other
chapel of a castle, it has all the effect of being such. Or in its position
against the hill-side, it may call up the memory of Brantôme far away in
Périgord;[60] it has nothing in common with a typical abbey church like
Saint-Evroul, except the accident of being much of the same date and style.
One building still remains to be noticed in the Beaumont of Roger. That is
the church of his earliest home at Les Vieilles. It had, or was meant to have,
a pretty thirteenth-century tower. But the church is a mere fragment,
mutilated, desecrated, shut up. A decently kept ruin is far less offensive than
a church in such a state as this. But the thought again comes, as at Saint-
Evroul, how short a time has passed since the parish church of Les Vieilles
and the abbey church of Beaumont were both living things. No man now
alive can remember them such; but not so many years back many could. In
1861 we talked with one who remembered the abbey church of Bernay in

the full extent of its choir and Lady-chapel. We go back after thirty years to
find the church of the Conqueror's grandmother in other things much as it
was, still desecrated, but with no more of actual destruction. But we find
that the one genuine Roman shaft that was there, one of the very few such
north of Loire, has either perished or has been so covered up with timber
framework as to be quite out of sight. And one later, but still early capital,
had been knocked away to make a convenient resting-place for a wooden
beam. One would think that such a building as this, even if it cannot be
restored to divine worship, might at least be made monument historique and
taken care of. Only then the State would some day come and take away
every real shaft and every real capital, and put imitation shafts and capitals
in their stead. And that might be even worse than the wooden beams.

JUBLAINS
1876

We know not how far the name of Silchester may be known among
Frenchmen, but we suspect that the name of Jublains is very little known
among Englishmen. The two places certainly very nearly answer to one
another in the two countries. Both alike are buried Roman towns whose
sites had been forsaken, or occupied only by small villages; both have
supplied modern inquirers with endless stores both of walls and foundations
and of movable relics; and the two spots further agree in this, that both at
Silchester and at Jublains the history of the place has to be made out from
the place itself; all that we can do is to make out the Roman names; we
have no record of the history of either.[61] The names which the two places
now bear respectively illustrate the rules of French and English
nomenclature. Silchester proclaims itself by its English name to have been a
Roman castrum, but it keeps no trace of its Roman name of Calleva. But
Næodunum of the Diablintes follows the same rule as Lutetia of the Parisii.
The old name of the town itself is forgotten, but the name of the tribe still
lives. The case is not quite so clear as that of Paris; some unlucky
etymologists have seen in the name Jublains traces of Jules and of bains;
but a moment's thought will show that the name is a natural corruption of
Diablintes. The name is spelled several ways, of which Jublains is now the
one in vogue; but another form, Jublent, better brings out its origin. As for
the two places themselves, Jublains and Silchester, each of them has its
points in which it surpasses the other. At Silchester there is the town-wall,
nearly perfect throughout the whole of its circuit. Jublains fails here; but, on
the other hand, Silchester has no one object to set against the magnificent
remains of the fortress or citadel, the traditional camp of Cæsar. Silchester
again has the great advantage of being systematically and skilfully dug out,
while Jublains has been examined only piecemeal. This again illustrates the
difference between the state of ownership in England and in France.
Silchester is at the command of a single will, which happily is in the present
generation wisely guided. Jublains must fare as may seem good to a

multitude of separate wills, of which it is too much to expect that all will at
any time be wisely guided. But it is worth while to remember on the other
hand that a single foolish Duke may easily do more mischief than several
wise Dukes can do good, and that out of the many owners of Jublains, if we
cannot expect all at any time to be wise, there is a fair chance that at no
moment will every one of them be foolish.
At the present moment most certainly several of the owners of Jublains are
the opposite of foolish, and the most important monument of all is placed
beyond the individual caprice of any man. The great fortress is diligently
taken care of under the authority of the local Archæological Society; the
theatre is the property of M. Henri Barbe, a zealous resident antiquary and
the historian of the place; and the other chief remains are easily accessible,
and, as far as we can see, stand in no danger. But it is of course impossible
to dig up the whole place in the same way as Silchester has been dug up.
The modern Diablintes must live somewhere; no power short of that of an
Eastern despot can expel them all from the sites of their predecessors, even
to make the ways and works of those predecessors more clearly known.
But we have as yet hardly said what and where Jublains is. It lies in the old
county and diocese of Maine, in the modern department of Mayenne, on the
road between the towns of Mayenne and Evron. The site was, as the local
historian well points out, one admirably chosen for the site of a town,
standing as it does at the point of junction of the roads from various parts of
Central and Northern Gaul and from the Constantine and Armorican
peninsulas. It stands on a gently sloping height, with a wide view over the
flatter land to the south, and over the Cenomannian hills more to the east,
the peak of Montaigu, namesake of our own Montacute, forming a
prominent object. The traveller coming along the road from Mayenne, the
most likely point of approach, will hardly notice anything remarkable till he
reaches the parish church, a building of no special importance, but which
has a bell-gable of a type more familiar in Britain than in Gaul. Here, if he
has any eyes at all, he will see that the church is built on the foundations of
some much larger and earlier building. The masses of Roman masonry are
clear enough, with two round projections near the two western angles of the
church. These are the remains of the thermæ of Næodunum, and the
traveller has in fact passed through the greater part of the ancient city to
reach them. There are plenty of other and far greater remains; but this is the

only one which lies immediately on the road by which the traveller is likely
to come. The enclosed space of the town was an irregular four-sided figure,
with no distinct four streets of a chester, but rather with a greater number of
ways meeting together, like our Godmanchester. The whole eastern side of
the town is full of remains among the fields and gardens; not far from the
northern entrance, a field or two away from the road, are the very distinct
foundations of a temple locally known as that of Fortune. A walk over two
or three more fields, crossed by traces of foundations at almost every step,
brings the traveller to a more singular object, known locally as La Tonnelle,
which looks very much like the foundation of a round temple, such as that
of Hercules (late Vesta) at Rome. And something like the effect of such a
temple is accidentally preserved. A line of trees follows the circular sweep
of the foundations, and their trunks really make no bad representatives of
the columns of the temple. In short, when the traveller is once put upon the
scent, he finds scraps of ancient Næodunum at every step of his walk
through Jublains and its fields.
But the most important remains of all lie in the south-western part of the old
enclosure. To the extreme south of the city lies the theatre. This is happily
the property of M. Barbe, who lives and carries on his researches within its
precinct. Its general plan has been made out, and, as diggings go on, the
rows of seats are gradually becoming visible. It differs from the shape of
most other theatres, as its curved line occupies more than a semicircle, like
the shape of a Saracenic horse-shoe arch. It seems that no signs of an
amphitheatre had been found at Jublains; so M. Barbe is driven to the
conclusion that the same building must have been used for both purposes.
How far this is archæologically sound we must leave to those who are
specially learned in amphitheatres to determine. But we cannot forget the
dissatisfied audience in Horace who, between the acts, or even during the
performance itself, called for "aut ursum aut pugiles." The position, sloping
away to the south, is indeed a lovely one, and we may congratulate the man
who has found at once his home and his work on such a spot.
But the great sight of all at Jublains, that which gives its special character to
the place, but which has also a history of its own distinct from the place, has
yet to be spoken of. We have kept it for the last, both because of its special
history and because it seems to be the only thing which is locally
recognised as a place of pilgrimage. Tell your driver to take you to Jublains,

and he will at once take you to "le camp de Jules César." He knows the
other objects perfectly well; but, unless he is specially asked, he assumes
that this one point is the object of the journey. Nor is this wonderful; for the
camp, fortress, citadel, whatever it is to be called, though most assuredly
not the work of the great Dictator, is after all the great object at Jublains,
which gives Jublains its special place among Gaulish and Roman cities.
More than this, it is the one object which stands out before all eyes, and
which must fix on itself the notice of the most careless passer-by. Suddenly,
by the roadside, we come on massive Roman walls, preserved to an unusual
proportion of their height. Their circuit may in everyday speech be called a
square, though strict mathematical accuracy must pronounce it to be a
trapezium. Near the entrance we mark some fragments gathered together,
and the eye is regaled, as it so often is in Italy and so seldom in Britain and
Northern Gaul, with the sight of the Corinthian acanthus leaf. The wall
itself, on the other hand, is of that construction of which we see so much in
Britain and in Northern Gaul, but which is unknown in Rome itself. Here
are the familiar layers of small stones with the alternate ranges of bricks.
We enter where the eastern gate has been, and find a second line of defence,
a wall of earth, square, or nearly so, but with its angles rounded off, with its
single entrance near the south-east angle carefully kept away from either of
the approaches in the outer wall. Within this again is the fortress itself,
again quadrangular, with projections at the angles. The more finished parts
of its walls, the gateways, and the parts adjoining them, give us specimens
of Roman masonry whose vast stones carry us back, be it to the wall of
Roma Quadrata at one end or to the Black Gate of Trier at the other, and
which specially call back the latter in the marks of the metal clamps which
have been torn away. Details must be studied on the spot or in the works of
M. Barbe, which is nearly the same thing, as they seem to be had only on
the spot. But there are not many remains of Roman work more striking than
this, and it is more striking still if we try to make out its probable history
from the internal evidence, which is all that we have to guide us.
That this fortress does not belong to any early period of the Roman
occupation is clear from its construction, the alternate layers of brick and
stone, and the bricks with wide joints of masonry between them, as in all
the later Roman work. And again, the fact that among the materials of the
fortress have been found pieces of other buildings used up again might

suggest that it was not built till after some time of change, perhaps of
destruction, had come over the city. But it is the numismatic evidence
which clearly parts off the history of the fortress from the general history of
the city. Jublains has no inscriptions to show, but its numismatic wealth is
great. Among the many coins found, not many are earlier than the time of
Nero, and those which there are are chiefly coins of Germanicus. From
Nero to Constantine coins of all dates are common. It is M. Barbe's
inference that it was in Nero's reign that the place began to be of
importance, and that its great temple was built. But the numismatic stores of
the fortress taken by itself tell quite another story. There, not a coin has
been found earlier than Domitian, nor one later than Aurelian, saving a
chance find of two Carolingian pieces of Charles the Bald and a modern
French piece of Charles the Sixth. Again, though coins are found from
Domitian onwards, it is only with Valerian and Gallienus that they become
at all common, while the great mass belong to Tetricus and his son. One
alone is of Aurelian. That is to say, of 169 coins found in the fortress, 151
come in the twenty years from 258 to 273, while 110 belong to the single
reign of the Tetrici. After Aurelian there is nothing earlier than Charles the
Bald. It is clear then that the fortress must have been deserted in the reign of
Aurelian; it is clear that the time of its chief importance must have been just
before, in the time of Tetricus. It looks as if the fortress had had but a very
short life. The conclusion of the local antiquaries is that it was most likely
raised by Postumus, and that it perished in some revolt or sedition, or
merely as the result of the overthrow of Tetricus by Aurelian. A mere glance
at the building would have tempted us to put it a little later, to have set it
down as part of the defences of Probus, or even of some Emperor much
later than Probus. But the numismatic evidence seems irresistible; it seems
impossible to escape the conclusion that this splendid piece of Roman
military work belongs to the middle of the third century, and that it was
forsaken, most likely slighted, within a very few years after its first
building.
This is as curious and conclusive a piece of internal evidence as we often
light upon; but it must be remembered that all this applies only to the
fortress, and not to the town of Næodunum. That had a much longer life. It
began long before the fortress, and it went on long after. The diggings at
Jublains have brought to light a great number of Christian Frankish objects,

which shows that the place kept on some measure of importance long after
the Teutonic conquest of Gaul. It seems also to be looked upon as a kind of
secondary seat of the Cenomannian bishopric. But it must either have died
out bit by bit, or else have perished in some later convulsion. The local
inquirers seem to incline to attribute the final destruction of Næodunum, the
City of the Diablintes in the nomenclature of the time, to the incursions of
the Northmen in the ninth century. That they did a great deal of mischief in
Maine is certain; and is a likely enough time for the city to have been
finally swept away as a city, and to have left only the insignificant modern
village which has grown up amongst its ruins.
Jublains then, Diablintes, Næodunum, whatever it is to be called, has a
special place among fallen Roman cities. Aquileia and Salona once ranked
among the great cities of the earth; their destruction is matter of recorded
history. The destruction of Uriconium is so far matter of recorded history
that a reference to it has been detected in the wail of a British poet. The fall
of Anderida was sung by our own gleemen and recorded by our own
chroniclers. But the fall of Calleva and the fall of Næodunum are alike
matters of inference. Geography shows that Calleva fell in the northern
march of Cerdic, and the most speaking of all Roman relics, the treasured
and hidden eagle, abides as a witness of the day when our fathers overthrew
it.[62] Næodunum seems to have undergone no such overthrow as those
wrought by the Hun, the Avar, and the Saxon. But the evidence of buildings
and of coins reveals to us a most important and singular piece of the
internal history of the Roman province of Gaul. The city of the Diablintes
itself may have been finally swept away by Hasting or Rolf; but the greatest
thing in Næodunum, the Roman fortress, must have been, perhaps broken
down, certainly forsaken, by the hands of men who called themselves
Romans, while its bricks and stones were still in their first freshness.
Nowhere is the truth more strongly brought home to us that there is another
kind of evidence besides chronicles, besides even written documents, the
evidence of the works of the men themselves who did deeds which no one
took the trouble to record with the pen or with the graving tool.

THE CHURCHES OF CHARTRES AND LE
MANS
1868

It is sometimes curious to see how far the popular fame of buildings is from
answering either to their architectural merit or to their historic interest.
Take, for instance, the two cathedrals of Chartres and Le Mans, two cities
placed within no very great distance of one another, on one of the great
French lines of railway, that which leads from Paris to Brest. Chartres is a
name which is familiar to every one; its cathedral is counted among the
great churches of Christendom; men speak of it in the same breath with
Amiens and Ely. Le Mans, on the other hand, is scarcely known; we suspect
that many fairly informed persons hardly know where the city itself is; the
cathedral is hardly ever spoken of, and, we believe, is scarcely at all known,
except to professed architectural students. Yet, except that Chartres is nearer
Paris of the two, one is as accessible as the other; the historical associations
of Chartres, as far at least as Englishmen are concerned, certainly cannot be
compared to those of Le Mans; there is nothing at Chartres to set against the
early military and domestic antiquities of Le Mans; the secondary churches
of Le Mans distinctly surpass those of Chartres; though between the two
cathedral churches the controversy might be more equally waged. Each has
great and diverse merits; but for our own part, we have little hesitation in
preferring Le Mans even as a work of architecture; that it is a building of
higher historic interest there can be no doubt whatever.
Both cities belong to a class of which we have few or none in England. A
Celtic hill-fort, crowning a height rising steeply from a river-side, has
grown into a Roman city, and the Roman city has remained to our own
times the local capital, alike civil and ecclesiastical. It would be hardly
possible to find a single town in England whose history has run the same
course—a course which is by no means peculiar to Chartres and Le Mans,
but which they share with many other cities in all parts of Gaul. And Le
Mans especially has a local history of unusual interest, and that history is

written with unusual clearness on the site and the earliest remains of the
town. But on that history we shall not at present enlarge. Our present object
is to compare the churches of the two towns, especially the two great
cathedrals, which, as usual, stand within the earliest enclosure, and
therefore upon the highest ground in their respective cities.
Two or three events connect the cathedral of Chartres with general and with
English history. The first church of which any part survives is that raised by
Fulbert, the famous Bishop of Chartres in the early part of the eleventh
century, and the most diligent letter-writer of the time. To this work, of
which a vast crypt still remains, our great Cnut was a benefactor. The
dignity of the Lord of all Northern Europe has so deeply impressed the
writer of Murray's Handbook that he cuts him into two, and speaks of the
contributions of the Kings of England, France, and Denmark. In the latter
part of the next century, John of Salisbury, so famous in the great struggle
between Henry and Thomas, held the Bishopric of Chartres. It was the
spires of Chartres to which Edward the Third stretched forth his hands when
his heart smote him at the sound of the thunder, and he vowed to refuse no
honourable terms of peace. In was in this cathedral that Henry of Navarre
received the crown of France, a new holy oil of Marmoutiers being
extemporized to supply the place of the inaccessible holy oil of Rheims.
The history of the city and county in earlier times is closely mixed up with
those of France, Normandy, Anjou, and Champagne. The counts of Chartres
and Blois in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries were men of
importance in their day, and one of them directly connected himself with
England by a memorable marriage. Chartres was long the dwelling-place of
the excellent Adela, the daughter of the Great William, the mother of King
Stephen and of the famous Bishop Henry of Winchester. But, while
Chartres was thus closely, though indirectly, connected with our history, it
never, like Le Mans, actually formed a part of the dominions of a common
sovereign with England and Normandy.
The cathedrals of Chartres and Le Mans are about as unlike as any two
great mediæval churches well can be. Well nigh the only point of likeness is
that each possesses a magnificent east end of the thirteenth century, of the
usual French plan, with the apse, the surrounding chapels, the complicated
system of flying buttresses. But at Chartres this east end is part of a whole.
The crypt still witnesses to the days of Fulbert, the lower stages of the

western towers to those of Adela and to those of John of Salisbury; but all
the rest of the church, including of course all the interior, is of an uniform
style and design. The church throughout follows the usual type of great
French churches; the eye accustomed to the buildings of England or
Normandy misses the central towers of Lincoln or of Saint Ouen's, but
Chartres is not in England or in Normandy, but in France, and its church is
built accordingly. A fairer question of taste is raised by the unequal spires of
the west front—a French feature again, but occasionally extending into
Normandy and England, as at Rouen, Llandaff, Lynn, and Canterbury as it
was. But it is only in so long and varied a front as that of Rouen Cathedral
that it is at all satisfactory. At Chartres the great south spire is modern and
of iron, but we believe it very well reproduces the outline of the elder one
of wood, and it certainly comes down heavily and awkwardly upon the
towers and upon the roof of the church. The upper part of the north tower is
frittered away with work of a later style. Still, allowing for the diversity of
the towers, which of course does not appear inside, Chartres is a whole—a
consistent, harmonious whole, of great, though we cannot think of first-rate,
excellence. How does such a whole stand as compared with a building of
strange, and at first sight, unintelligible outline, formed by the juxtaposition
of two parts, each of admirable merit in itself, but which startle by their
absolute contrast in every way? Chartres was made, Le Mans eminently
grew; and different minds will be differently inclined in the comparison
between a single harmonious work of art and a union of two buildings
widely differing in date, style, and proportion. But, on the other hand, it
must be said that nothing at Chartres equals the parts of Le Mans taken
separately, and that, in the inside at least, the incongruity of Le Mans is far
from being felt in the unpleasant way that might have been looked for.

Le Mans Cathedral, N.W.
The general effect of Le Mans Cathedral, as seen from any point but the
east, is certainly perplexing. From the east indeed, from the open place
below the church and the Roman wall, once a marsh, the apse, with its
flying buttresses and surrounding chapels, rises in a grandeur before which
Chartres is absolutely dwarfed, and which gives Amiens itself a very
formidable rival. We here see the main source of our difficulties, namely
that the church has but a single tower, and that at the end of the south
transept. Viewed from any other point—looking up, for instance, at the old
town from the other side of the river—what one sees is a lofty body with a
tower at one end of it, which one is inclined rashly to assume to be the
nave, with a western tower, and a lower body joining it at right angles. This
last is the real nave of the church, and a magnificent building it is. The truth
is that, at Le Mans, as in various other churches in France, the Gothic
builders, from the thirteenth century onwards, designed a complete
rebuilding. They began at the east, they rebuilt the choir and transepts, but
they never got any further, so that the ancient nave remains. So it is at

Bordeaux and Toulouse; so it is at Beauvais, where the small but precious
fragment of early work, which looks like an excrescence against the
gigantic transept—the Basse Œuvre, as it is locally called—is really the
ancient nave—.[63] So it is in a certain sense at Limoges, where a gap
intervenes between the finished choir and transept and the western tower of
the original design. But in none of these cases, as far as we can see, can the
elder nave have at all approached the grandeur of the noble work at Le
Mans. It is a Romanesque building of the eleventh century, reconstructed in
the gorgeous style which prevailed towards the end of the twelfth. The outer
walls, except in the clerestory, are of the former date, and the contrast in the
masonry is very striking. Within, the whole has been recast in the later form
of Romanesque, but it has not been wholly rebuilt. Columns with rich and
highly classical capitals, supporting arches which are just pointed, have
been inserted under the massive round arches of the original church, but the
arches are still there and visible. The triforium and clerestory have been
wholly reconstructed, or so thoroughly disguised that the old work does not
appear. This nave is one of those buildings which, in the infancy of
vaulting, their builders found it convenient to vault with one bay of vaulting
over two bays of arcade, as in the choir of Boxgrove in the next century.
The result is that the piers are alternately columnar and clustered. Setting
aside a few of the very grandest buildings of the style—as one would hardly
compare this nave with Peterborough, Ely, or Saint Stephen's—this
Romanesque nave of Le Mans is one of the finest works of its kind to be
found anywhere. And its juxtaposition with the superb Gothic choir is less
incongruous than might have been looked for. The only fault is that, as it
now stands, the nave ends abruptly to the east with a mere vaulting rib,
without any proper choir-arch. But this fault is fully balanced by the
glorious view of the choir thus given to the whole church. That any one
could compare the inside of Chartres with the inside of Le Mans, thus seen,
seems incredible. The height of Le Mans is said to be a few feet greater than
that of Chartres. It looks half as high again. At Chartres the height is lost
through the great width, and through the use of a low spring for the vaulting
arch. At Le Mans everything soars as only a Gothic building, and pre-
eminently a French Gothic building, can soar. The pillars, of enormous
height, support the clerestory without a triforium. But the effect of the
triforium is there still. The aisles are double, and the inner range—itself of
the height of the nave of Wells and Exeter—is furnished with a complete

triforium and clerestory, which, seen between the pillars of the apses, allow
the sort of break which the triforium gives to be combined with the grand
effect of the full unbroken columns. Something of the same kind is found at
Bourges, and, on a much smaller scale, at Coutances. The effect of the
arrangement comes out in perfection at Le Mans. Altogether, little as the
building seems to be known, the thirteenth-century work at Le Mans
undoubtedly entitles it to rank among the noblest churches of the middle
ages. One point more on the Romanesque church of Le Mans. The original
design embraced two towers at the end of the transept, like Exeter, Ottery,
and seemingly Saint Martin's at Tours. These towers were destroyed by
order of William Rufus, who charged the Bishop Hildebert with having
used them to shoot at the neighbouring castle.[64] The north tower has never
been rebuilt; its ruins are there to this day. The southern tower was again
rebuilt at the end of the twelfth century and finished in the fifteenth. This is
surely as speaking a bit of architectural history as one often finds.

Interior of Le Mans Cathedral
The writer in Murray, in his zeal for the cathedral of Chartres, assumes that
no one will care to visit such inferior buildings as the other churches of that
city. Let no man be thus led astray. In the general view of the city from the
walks to the south-east, one of the most effective views to be had of any

city, two other churches stand out very strikingly, the cathedral crowning
all. Of these Saint Anian, we must confess, is somewhat of a deceiver. The
distant effect is good, but there is little to repay a nearer examination. It is
far otherwise with the Abbey of Saint Peter, whose apse, though on a far
smaller scale, is distinctly more skilfully managed than that of the cathedral.
The disused collegiate church of Saint Andrew has some good Transitional
work, and Saint Martin-in-the-Vale, just outside the town, is a gem of bold
and simple Romanesque. But the secondary churches of Chartres do not
equal those of Le Mans, while Chartres is still further behind Le Mans in
military and domestic remains. At Le Mans the Abbey of La Couture (de
culturâ Dei) is a perfect minster with two unfinished western towers, a nave
of Aquitanian width,[65] a fine Romanesque apse, in which, if later windows
have been inserted, some small fragments of some early work have also
been preserved. Beyond the Sarthe is another fine Romanesque church, also
a complete minster, the church of Notre-Dame-du-Pré. A fine hospital, the
work of Henry the Second, is now perverted to some military purpose, and
some military tomfoolery forbids examination, in marked contrast to the
liberal spirit which allows free access to everything that the antiquary can
wish to visit at Fontevrault and at Saumur. But the ecclesiastical remains of
Le Mans are far from being the whole of its attractions. Its military and civil
antiquities are endless, and they are more characteristic. We have not the
least wish to depreciate Chartres. It is a highly interesting city; it contains a
magnificent cathedral and several other remarkable buildings. But it cannot
compare with Le Mans.

St. Martin-in-the-Vale, Chartres

Apse of La Couture, Le Mans

LE MANS
1876

We spoke some years ago of the architectural character of the chief
churches of Le Mans, especially in comparison with those of Chartres. But
the comparison was of a purely architectural kind, and hardly touched the
general history and special position of the Cenomannian city among the
cities of Gaul. That position is one which is almost unique. The city of the
Cenomanni, the modern Le Mans, has never stood in the first rank of the
cities of Europe, or even of Gaul; but there are few which are the centres of
deeper or more varied interests. Le Mans has at once a princely, an
ecclesiastical, and, above all, a municipal history. It is true that its princely
and its ecclesiastical history are spread over many ages, while its municipal
history is a thing of a moment; yet it is the municipal history which gives
Le Mans its special character. Le Mans, in the course of its long history, has
been many things; but it is before all things the city of the commune.
Among cities north of the Loire—it might perhaps be unsafe to say among
cities north of the Alps—Le Mans shares with Exeter the credit of asserting
the position of a civic commonwealth in days when, even in more Southern
lands, the steps taken in that direction were as yet but very imperfect. And it
was against the same enemy that freedom was asserted by the insular and
by the continental city. The freedom of Exeter and the freedom of Le Mans
were alike asserted against the man who appeared in Maine as no less
distinctly the Conqueror than he appeared in England. Exeter, in her
character of commonwealth, checked the progress of William by the most
determined opposition that he met with in the course of his insular
conquest. Le Mans, conquered before William crossed the sea, threw off his
yoke when he was master of the island as well as of the mainland. Had the
men either of the island or of the mainland been capable of any enlarged
political combinations, England and Maine would have done wisely to unite
their forces against the common enemy. And it is just possible that those
obscure dealings of Earl Harold with the powers of Gaul, which are dimly
alluded to by the biographer of Eadward, may have had some object of this

kind. But, if so, nothing practical came of them. Maine and England did
nothing to help one another. In fact, when Maine was won back to William's
obedience, the work was largely done by English hands, and those the
hands of men who, there is some reason to think, had Hereward himself as
their captain. The actual relations between England and Maine in the
eleventh century were thus the exact opposite of what they ought to have
been. Englishmen appeared on the mainland as the ravagers and conquerors
of a district whose people ought to have been their closest allies. Still even
this kind of negative relation does establish a kind of connexion between
Maine and England. Above all, it establishes a special analogy between the
English city which withstood the Conqueror, and the Gaulish city which
revolted against him, in the name of the same principle which a century
later was to do such great things among the cities of Lombardy.
The moment then of greatest interest in the history of the Cenomannian city
is the moment of its short-lived republican independence. In the case of Le
Mans, as in the case of Exeter, we should be well pleased if we knew more
of the exact form of commonwealth which it was proposed to establish,
and, above all, of the relations which were to be maintained between the
city and the surrounding districts. Most likely nothing of the kind was ever
put into shape. The commonwealth of Le Mans and the commonwealth of
Exeter both sprang into being in a moment of patriotic enthusiasm, when
the city and the surrounding districts were fully united in a vigorous effort
against the common enemy. How the two were to get on together in more
settled times they most likely did not stop to think. What we do know is that
the citizens of Le Mans made a commune, that the people of the country at
large zealously supported them, that the nobles swore to the new
commonwealth unwillingly, and, in some cases, even dishonestly. All that
we know about the matter comes from the historian of the Cenomannian
Bishops, who first of all thinks the commune which the Norman Bishop
naturally opposed to be a very wicked thing, but who afterwards, when it
came to actual fighting, cannot help sympathising with the men of his own
city. There was a commune of Le Mans, a commune in which all Maine
shared, a commune which the Bishops and the nobles had to join against
their will, and which one of the nobles betrayed as soon as he could.[66]
That is about all our knowledge; it is just enough to make us wish to know a
good deal more. It is enough to throw over Le Mans and Maine an interest

which is shared by no other city and province of Northern Gaul; and it
makes us feel a kind of disappointment in the inevitable fact that the
greatest moment in the history of the city is exactly the one which has left
no trace in its existing monuments.
Of the times earlier and later than the republican movement of the eleventh
century Le Mans has abundant remains of all kinds. No city is more
distinctly the Gaulish hill-fort which has gradually swelled into the Roman,
the mediæval, and the modern city. Yet the height of Le Mans is neither so
lofty nor so isolated as those of many of its fellows. It is not a detached hill
at all, nor does the city stand on the highest ground in its own immediate
neighbourhood; and on the eastern, the inland side, the slope of the rising
ground is very gradual. Yet the site of the hill-fort which grew into the city
was happily chosen. It was pitched on the point where the high ground
comes close to the river Sarthe and rises precipitously above it. From the
river side then, the western side, Le Mans has most distinctly the character
of a hill city, which comes out much less strongly in the approach from the
east, while in the approach from the north, where there is an actual descent
into the ancient city, it is altogether lost. It is from the river side then that
those who wish—while there is yet time—to get a notion of what the
Cenomannian city was, either in Roman or in mediæval times, must go to
look for it. The city has extended itself on this side as well as on the others,
but it has extended itself in the form of an outlying suburb beyond the river.
To the west, the north, and the south, the spread of the modern town has
done much to wipe out the ancient landmarks.
The Roman remains of Le Mans show well how the conquering race in their
distant foundations knew how to adapt themselves to every kind of position.
There was one type of city which was preferred wherever the ground
allowed of it; but that type was freely forsaken whenever practical necessity
commanded that it should be forsaken. The hill of Vindinum, Suindinum,
Subdinnum, whichever form we are to choose, therein differing from the
hill of Isca, was not at all suited for the laying out of a city according to the
familiar type of a Roman chester. The high ground immediately
overlooking the river formed a long narrow ridge, and the space included
within the Roman walls—la Cité, as distinguished from the more modern
parts of the town—shows no approach to a square, but forms an irregular
figure, which only by a stretch of courtesy can be called even an oblong.

Within this again the chief ecclesiastical street, the Rue des Chanoines,
running parallel with the more secular Grande Rue, bears in mediæval
documents the strange title of Vetus Roma, which has been held to point to a
still earlier enclosure, that of the primitive Gaulish fort itself. Of the Roman
walls, whose construction, like that of most Roman walls in Gaul and
Britain, shows them to be not earlier than the third century, large portions
still remain; indeed a little time back it might have been said that the river
front of the wall, with its noble range of round bastions, was all but
absolutely perfect. On the other side, towards the modern town, the wall
was less perfect, but even there a great deal could be made out. But the
Roman walls did not take in the whole even of the mediæval city. In the
thirteenth century an outer range of wall was raised close to the stream,
taking in the suburb of La Tannerie; an extension to the south and south-
east took in the quarter of Saint Ben'et, and another suburb called L'Epéron.
More remarkably still, at the north-east corner of the Roman inclosure, the
growth of the cathedral of Saint Julian to the east, exactly as in the case of
Lincoln, overleaped the Roman wall and caused a further enlargement at
this corner. It should be noticed that, contrary to the general Gaulish rule,
the church of Le Mans stood in a corner of the original city, so as to make
somewhat of an ecclesiastical quarter after a fashion English rather than
Gaulish. In the Cenomannian state, the Prince, the Bishop, and the citizens
all held their distinct places, and it was reasonable that their geographical
quarters should be marked also. In fact, in the great days of Cenomannian
history the Bishop was a power independent alike of Count and city. He
owed temporal allegiance to neither, but held directly of the King at Laon or
at Paris. Had the development of things in Gaul followed the same course
as the development of things in Germany, Maine might have seen, like so
many German lands, the ecclesiastical and the temporal principality and the
free city, all side by side, bound together by no tie beyond such degree of
dependence as any of them might have kept on the common centre. But
when county, bishopric, and city all came under the strong hand of the
Norman, all tendencies of this kind were checked. And they perished for
ever when Normandy and Maine, instead of external fiefs, became
incorporated provinces of the French kingdom.
Within and around the walls of the city there arose in different ages a series
of buildings, ecclesiastical, military, and civil, which might claim for Le

Mans a place among the cities of Gaul and Europe next after those cities
which had been the actual seats of imperial or royal dominion. Above the
river rose the double line of walls and towers, Roman and mediæval, and
high above them the vast and wondrous pile of Saint Julian's minster. On
the side away from the river, the side pointing towards the hostile land of
Anjou, built on the Roman wall itself and seemingly out of Roman
materials, stood the palace of the Counts, well placed indeed for Count
Herbert, Evigilans Canem, to sally forth on the nightly raids before which
black Angers trembled.[67] And besides the dwellings of the temporal and
spiritual chiefs, the ancient streets of Le Mans were set thick with houses,
the dwellings of priests and citizens, which showed how well both classes
throve, and how each did something for the adornment of the city in every
form of art, from Romanesque to Renaissance. But a little time back the
traveller might have seen at Le Mans more houses of the twelfth century
than he would see anywhere north of Venice. And besides the works of her
own princes, bishops, and citizens, Le Mans had also once to show the
grimmer memorials of her conquerors. But, as not uncommonly happens,
the memorials of the earlier time have outlived those of the later. At the
northern end of the city William thought it needful to strengthen his greatest
continental conquest by two distinct fortresses. Close by Saint Julian's, just
outside the eastern line of the Roman wall, and formed, we may believe, out
of its materials, rose the Castle, the Regia turris. Some way to the north-
east, at a greater distance from the river, rose the fortress of Mons Barbatus
or Mont Barbet, this last standing on higher ground than the city and the
royal tower. But of the royal tower itself, and of the fortress into which it
grew in later times, a few fragments only have escaped the politic
destruction of the days of Richelieu. Of Mont Barbet nothing is left but the
motte or agger, dating doubtless from far earlier days, but which, as so
often happens, has outlived the buildings which were placed upon and
around it. One would have been well pleased to see the whole line of
defence, the double wall of the city, the double fortress of the Conqueror,
grouping, as they must have done, with the endless towers and spires of the
monastic and parochial churches of the city and its suburbs.
For, besides the great cathedral church within its walls, Le Mans was, as it
were, girded with great ecclesiastical buildings. Two noble monastic
churches, those of La Couture, on the south-eastern side of the city, and of

Le Pré, on the other side of the river, still remain; and we have spoken of
their architectural character in past years.[68] There were also the Abbeys of
Beaulieu, beyond the river, and of St. Vincent opposite to it beyond Mont
Barbet, of which the latter survives in the shape of a Renaissance
rebuilding. And far away in a distant suburb to the east is the hospital
founded by the last native prince of Le Mans, the great Henry, to whom his
native city might seem as a central point of his vast domain, insular and
continental. In him the blood of all the older rulers and enemies of Le Mans
was joined together. The stock of the old Counts and of the Norman
conquerors, the blood of Helias and of his Angevin representatives, all
flowed together in the veins of the King who was born within the walls of
Le Mans, and who, if he did not die within its walls, at least died of grief at
seeing them in the hands of his enemy.

Notre-Dame-du-Pré, Le Mans, N.E.
But it is painful for one who remembers Le Mans only eight years back to
speak of what it is now. It is hard to believe that within that time Le Mans
has beheld no slight or unimportant warfare beneath its walls, and that the

city of Herbert and Helias bowed but yesterday to the power of a third
conquering William. Le Mans has lost something through the foreign
occupation, but the traveller needs to have it explained to him what it has
lost. When we hear that the Bishop's palace got burned by the German
invaders, it almost sounds as if Germans and Normans had got confounded.
But the damage wrought by the last conquerors is being speedily made
good on another site. It is the damage which is doing to the city by the
merciless hands of its own people that never can be made good. One would
have thought that the Cenomannian city on its height, the proud line of its
Roman bulwarks, the noble works of later days which those bulwarks
shelter, might have moved the heart of the most ruthless of destroyers. It
might have been a good work to clear away the mean houses which cling to
the Roman wall, and to let the mighty rampart stand forth in all its majesty;
but among those who have the fate of the ancient city in their hands there is
no thought of preservation—destruction is the only object. We know not
who are the guilty ones. Perhaps there is some stuck-up Mayor or Prefect
who would think himself a great man if he could make Le Mans as ugly and
uninteresting as the dreary modern streets of Rouen or of Paris itself. It is at
all events certain that M. Haussmann was not long ago seen in Le Mans,
and such a presence at such a time is frightfully ominous. At any rate the
facts which can be seen by the traveller's own eyes are beyond doubt. The
later walls close by the river have been broken down to leave fragments
here and there as ornaments in a kind of garden, and, worse still than this,
the ancient wall has been broken through, and the ancient city itself cleft in
twain. By an amount of labour which reminds one of Trajan cutting through
the Quirinal, la Cité has been cut into two halves with a yawning gulf
between them; the Roman wall is broken through, and the very best of the
twelfth-century houses has been ruthlessly swept away. The excuse for this
brutal havoc is to make a road or street of some kind direct from the modern
town to the river. If the savages could have been persuaded to pay a visit to
Devizes, they might there have learned that the claims of past and present
may be reconciled. There the simple device of a tunnel carries the railway
under the ancient mound without doing the least harm; and a tunnel might
in the same way have connected the modern town with the Sarthe without
doing the least damage either to Roman walls or Romanesque houses. But
there are minds to which mere havoc gives a pleasure for its own sake. A
great part of Saint Julian's is more than seven hundred years old, and in the

eyes either of Bishop or of Prefect it may be ugly. The vast menhir which
rests against one of its walls has seen many more than seven centuries, and
the most devoted antiquary can hardly call it beautiful. When the Roman
walls of Le Mans are not spared, nothing can be safe. All that can be done is
for those in whose eyes antiquity is not a crime to run to and fro over the
world as fast as may be, and see all that they can while anything is left.

MAINE
1876

We have already spoken of the capital of the Cenomanni, and some mention
of the district naturally follows on that of the capital. In no part of Gaul, in
the days at least when Le Mans and Maine stand out most prominently in
general history, are the city and the district more closely connected. Maine
was not, like Normandy, a large territory, inhabited to a great extent by a
distinct people—a territory which, in all but name, was a kingdom rather
than a duchy—a territory which, though cumbered by the relations of a
nominal vassalage, fairly ranked, according to the standard of those times,
among the great powers of Europe. Maine was simply one of the states
which were cut off from the great duchy of France, and one over which
Anjou, another state cut off in the like sort, always asserted a superiority.
Setting aside the great though momentary incident of the war of the
Commune, the history of Maine during its life as a separate state consists
almost wholly of its tossings to and fro between its northern and its
southern neighbours, Normandy and Anjou. The land of Maine, in short, is
that of the district of a single city, forming a single ecclesiastical diocese. In
old times it contained no considerable town but the capital; and even now,
when the old county forms two modern departments, with Le Mans for the
chef-lieu of Sarthe and Laval for the chef-lieu of Mayenne, the more
modern capital is still far from reaching the size and population of the
ancient one. Normandy, with its seven ancient dioceses, its five modern
departments, cuts quite another figure on the map. With so many local
centres, Rouen never was Normandy in the sense in which Le Mans
certainly was Maine; and the strong feeling of municipal life which, as the
history of the commune shows, must have always gone on at Le Mans, may
have tended to make a greater concentration of the being of the whole
district in the capital than was found in other districts of the same kind. Add
to this, that, though the land of Maine contained but a single diocese, yet
that diocese was of much larger and greater extent than any of the seven
dioceses of Normandy. This is shown by the fact that, while in the modern

ecclesiastical arrangements of France, two of the Norman dioceses have
been united with others, the one Cenomannian diocese has been divided
into two.
In another point also Maine shows itself very distinctly as a Northern
district. This is in its architecture. As Anjou is the architectural borderland
between Northern and Southern Gaul, so Maine is again the architectural
borderland between Normandy and Anjou. But it shows its character as a
borderland, not by possessing an intermediate style, as the Angevin style is
distinctly intermediate between the styles of Normandy and of Aquitaine,
but rather by using the Norman and Angevin styles side by side. In the nave
of St. Julian's itself, an Angevin clerestory and vault is set upon an arcade
and triforium which may be called Norman. At La Couture the nave has
wholly given way to an Angevin rebuilding, while the choir remains
Norman, with a touch of earlier days about it. In the third great church of Le
Mans, that of Le Pré, the Angevin influence does not come in at all. In the
department of military architecture, Sir Francis Palgrave says that the
familiar Norman square keep was borrowed from Maine; but he brings no
evidence in support of this theory, nor have we been able to find any. It
seems far more likely that the fashion was originally Norman, and that it
then spread into the borderland, and it is certain that some of the most
historically famous castles in the land of Maine were the work of Norman
invaders.
Maine is, in one point, one of the parts of France in which an Englishman is
most inclined to feel himself at home. It shares, though perhaps in not so
marked a degree, the same English look which runs through a large part of
Normandy and Brittany. It has hedges and green pastures, a sight pleasing
to the eye after the dreary look of so many districts of France. The land is
also fairly wooded, and the vine, of which we hear so much in our accounts
of ancient Cenomannian warfare, is, to say the least, not so prominent a
feature as it was then. And we need not say that vines, except either on a
hill-side or against a house, do not add to the picturesqueness of a
landscape. The land, without being strictly hilly, much less mountainous, is
far from flat, and it contains some considerable heights, as the ranges
culminating in the peak of Mont Aigu, which forms a prominent object
from the theatre at Jublains, and the high ground at and near Le Mans itself,
some points of which proved of great importance in the last warfare which

Maine has seen. In short, without containing any very striking elevations,
there are many sites in Maine well suited for military positions in ancient
warfare, sites where the castle has not failed to spring up, and where a town
or village has naturally gathered round the fortress. But since the city of the
Diablintes was swept from the earth, Maine has, at least till quite modern
times, contained no place which can at all set itself up as a rival to the
ancient capital. The hill fort which grew into the city of the Cenomanni still
remains the undoubted queen of the land of Herbert and Helias.
It is well to enter the Cenomannian county by a point which is
Cenomannian no longer, but which not only plays a great part in the local
history, but gives a view of a very large part of the land from which it was
long ago severed. This is from the hill of Domfront, the fortress and town
which the Conqueror wrested from Maine and added to Normandy; but
which till the changes of modern times kept a sign of its old allegiance in
still forming for ecclesiastical purposes part of the Cenomannian diocese.
Domfront, the conquest of William, the cherished possession of Henry, is
indeed an outpost of the Norman land, placed like a natural watch-tower,
from which we may gaze over well nigh the whole extent of the land which
lay between Normandy and the home of the enemy at Angers. Like
Nottingham, town and castle stand on two heights, with a slight fall
between them, and the town itself is strongly fortified, with a noble range of
walls and towers which are largely preserved. The shattered donjon rises on
the height where the Varenne runs through a narrow dell between the castle
hill and a wild rock on the other side. Castle and town alike equally look
out in the direction of danger; from either height it needs no strong effort of
imagination to fancy ourselves on the look-out against the hosts of Geoffrey
of the Hammer coming from the South. Yet it is at Domfront that the
traveller coming from the land of Coutances and Avranches finds himself in
one important point brought back to the modern world. After going for
many days by such conveyances as he can find, he is there enabled to make
his journey into the land of Maine by the help of the railway which leads
from Caen to Laval. His first stage will take him to a spot which formed
another of William's early conquests, but which was not, like Domfront,
permanently cut off from the Cenomannian state.
This spot is Ambrières, a town of the smallest class, hardly rising above a
village, but which holds an important place in the wars of William and

Geoffrey. There William built a castle, and the shattered piece of wall which
overhangs the road running on the right bank of the Varenne may well be a
part of his building. The little town climbs up, as it were, to the castle, and
contains more than one house bearing signs of ancient date. It is clearly one
of those towns which grew up immediately round the fortress. But of the
castle itself so little is left that the most striking object now is the church,
which stands apart on the other side of the river. A large cruciform building
of nearly untouched and rather early Romanesque, it is thoroughly in
harmony with the memories of the place. But the church of Ambrières is
more than this. It tells us in what direction we are travelling; its aisleless
nave, though it would be narrow in Anjou, would be wide in England or
Normandy; and there is another feature which looks as if the men of
Ambrières had got on almost too fast in their tendencies towards a southern
type of architecture. The central tower is indeed low and massive, but so are
many others both in Normandy and England; nor would the wooden spire
with which it is crowned suggest that in the inside the four plain arches of
its lantern support as perfect a cupola as if we were on the other side of the
Loire. But both the arches of the lantern and the barrelled vault of the choir
keep the round arch. Maine was far off from the land of the Saracen, and
the pointed arch would here be a sign that later forms were not far off. From
Ambrières either the railway or, if the traveller likes it better, a road leading
up and down over a series of low hills, will take him to another scene of
William's victories at Mayenne. Here the town slopes down to the river of
its own name on both sides, and the castle, instead of crowning either
height, rises immediately above the stream. Eight years does much in the
way of building up as well as of pulling down; and we may note that since
we made an almost casual reference to Mayenne in 1868,[69] the eastern
part of the great church, a building remarkable rather for a strange and
picturesque outline than for any strict architectural beauty, has had its choir
rebuilt on a vast scale after the type of a great minster. No place after the
capital has a greater share in the history of the county.[70] It was the lordship
of that Geoffrey of Mayenne who played so prominent a part in all the wars
of William's day, a part which, both in its good and its bad side, well
illustrates the position of the feudal noble. A faithful vassal to his lord, a
patriotic defender of his country against an external invader, he could stoop
to play the part of a perjured traitor when nobles had been forced to plight
oaths against their will to be faithful to a civic commune. To the student of

the twelfth century Mayenne is full of memories; to the student of earlier
times its chief attraction will be that it is the most natural point of the
journey to Jublains.
Further down the stream which gives its name alike to the town of Mayenne
and the modern department, we come to the one place on Cenomannian
ground which, as having become in modern times a seat of both civil and
ecclesiastical rule, can alone pretend to any rivalry with the ancient capital.
Laval, the chef-lieu of the department of Mayenne and the see of the newly
founded bishopric, plays no great part in the early history of the district; but
though still much smaller than Le Mans, it has fairly grown to the rank of a
local capital as distinguished from a mere country town. It is one of the
towns which have grown up on a hill and around a fortress,[71] yet it is not a
hill city like Le Mans. The old town of Laval, as distinguished from the
later suburb on the other side of the river, does not stand on the hill, but
climbs up its side. While the Grande Rue of Le Mans runs along the ridge,
the Grande Rue of Laval finds its way up the slope. The castle, as at
Mayenne, rises above the river, and still keeps a huge round donjon,
patched somewhat, but still keeping several of its coupled Romanesque
windows. On the height, hard by a grand town-gate, is the now cathedral
church, uncouth enough in the external view, and we may fairly say
unworthy of its new rank, but which reveals one of the most instructive
pieces of architectural history to be found anywhere. Imbedded in later
additions, we still find the choir, transepts, and lantern of a comparatively
small Romanesque church, perhaps hardly on a level with Ambrières, but its
nave has given way to a vast Angevin nave as wide as the transepts of the
original building, and itself furnished with transepts to the west of them.
The antiquary will earnestly pray that no one may be led by zeal without
discretion to rebuild this church on a scale and style more worthy of its
present rank. Let the diocese of Laval, if anybody chooses, be furnished
with a new cathedral; but let the present building stand untouched, as one
that has undergone changes as instructive as any that can be found.
But the church of the new diocese, though perhaps, by virtue of its singular
changes, the most interesting, is hardly the most attractive ecclesiastical
building in Laval and its immediate neighbourhood. Not far off in a suburb
by the river-side is the church of Our Lady of Avesnières, not improved
certainly by its modern spire, but keeping a most stately Romanesque apse

with surrounding chapels. Inside it supplies one of the best examples of the
transition, the pointed arch having made its way into the great constructive
arcades, but not into any of the smaller arches. But the taste of those who
designed its capitals must have been singular. Any kind of man, beast, or
bird, it has been said, can put himself into such a posture as to make an
Ionic volute. When the volutes are made by the heads of eagles, well and
good; but it is certainly strange to make them out of the heads of cranes,
who are holding down their long necks to peck each one at a human skull
which he firmly holds down with one of his feet. And on the other side of
Laval will also be found the church of Price, an almost untouched
Romanesque building the masonry of which seems to carry it back to days
before the growth of either Angevin or Norman taste. And the land of
Maine too is full of other spots at which we can barely glance, many of
which are famous in the history of the district. On the railway between
Laval and Le Mans, Evron has its abbey, with portions both of the earlier
Romanesque and of the later Gothic, but where one little transitional chapel
on the north side is undoubtedly the most attractive feature of the church.
Evron too opens the way to St. Susanne, the one castle which the Conqueror
himself could never take, and where the shattered shell of the unconquered
donjon, with its foundations raised on a vitrified fort of primitive times,
rises on a rocky height, with the stream of the Arne winding in a narrow
dell beneath it. Somewhat nearer to the capital, Sillé-le-Guillaume, a spot
famous in the war of the commune, has a castle and church which should
not be passed by, though it is only the under-story of the church which
keeps any portions which can belong to the days when Sillé was besieged
by the armed citizens of the Cenomannian commonwealth. North of Le
Mans, on the upper source of the Sarthe, Beaumont-le-Vicomte keeps the
shell of its castle, a castle which long withstood the Conqueror, rising in a
lovely position over the river Beaumont, too, has seen warfare in later days,
and he who looks down from the castle which withstood the Conqueror
may hear the tale of the stout fighting which went on by the banks of the
Sarthe, when Maine was invaded by the armies of a later William. The
church too with some genuine Romanesque portions, is more curious for a
kind of rude Renaissance which really reproduces a simple kind of
Romanesque. In short, there is hardly a spot in the historic land of Maine
which has not its attractions for those who can stoop to scenery which,
though always pleasing, is never sublime, to buildings of which perhaps one

only in the whole province reaches the first rank, and to a history which,
though in itself it is mainly local, has not been without its influence on the
destines both of England and of France.

Sainte-Susanne, Keep

INDEX
A

Abbaye Blanche, near Mortain, 109, 110

Almenèches, 139 et seq.;
its church, 150, 151;
site of the castle, 152

Ambrières, fortress of, 57, 229;
architectural significance of its church, 230

Amiens, 8, 9, 23, 24, 47

Architecture in Normandy, its points of likeness with that of England, 23,
27, 28, 31, 46;
Romanesque, at Bayeux, 28, 29;
at Exmes, 147;
at Le Mans, 206, 207, 209;
transitional period well marked in Fécamp Abbey, 48

Argentan, 125–138

Arletta [Herleva], mother of William the Conqueror, 10

Arnulf of Montgomery, 141, 142

Arques, fortress of Count William at, 59, 60;
battle of, 60

Avranches, historical associations of, 75;
its position, ib., 81, 82;
its ecclesiastical territory merged in the diocese of Coutances, 81

B

Barbe, M. Henri, quoted, 191, 194, 196

Bayeux, retention of the Danish tongue and religion at, 2, 6;
Richard the Fearless educated at, ib.;
Saxon and Danish colonies at, 5, 6;
its cathedral church, 8, 22–30;
the seminary chapel, 8, 30;
compared with Coutances, 25–28;
Bishop Odo's work at, 26, 28;
later Romanesque at, 29;
its English character, 30

Beaumont-le-Roger, 179 et seq.

Beaumont-le-Vicomte, castle and church, 234, 235

Beauvais, 9, 23, 24

Bernay, Judith's Abbey at, 8, 182, 188

Bigod, use of the name, 105

Brionne, character of the building, 97, 98

C

Caen, 2;
its ecclesiastical buildings, 8;
destruction of churches at, 19;
burial-place of William the Conqueror, 51

Cæsaris Burgus, 67. See Cherbourg

Calleva, its fall, 199. See Silchester

Carentan, 72

Castles, beginning of in England, 14;
in Normandy, earlier and later sites of, 58;
question as to the earliest date of stone castles in Normandy, 97

Caudebec, Teutonic origin of the name, 6

Cerisy, 8

Chandos, Sir John, building of the keep of St. Saviour attributed to, 71

Channel Islands, their relation to England, 65

Chartres, contrasted with Le Mans, 200 et seq.;
its historical associations, 202, 203;
architectural features of its cathedral church, 203, 204;
why it differs from Le Mans, 204;
its height, 207;
its secondary churches, 209

Cherbourg, name probably cognate with Scarborough, 68

Churches, Norman, French and English, compared, 9, 23, 24, 46, 111

Cintheaux, 53, 54

Colomby, 70

Côtentin, derivation of the name, 62;
its peninsular character, 64, 65;
acquired by William Longsword, 66

Coutances, cathedral church of, 22 et seq., 82;

its sham west front compared with that of Wells, 25;
its internal architecture compared with that of Bayeux, 26, 27;
men of, at Senlac, 66;
its position, 72, 73, 75, 83;
aqueduct at, 73, 88;
its diocese enlarged, 81

D

Diablintes, tribal name survives in Jublains, 190

Dieppe, meaning of the name, 6

Dinan, 22, 54, 55

Dive, river, battle by, 60

Dol, church of, 22, et seq.;
compared with S. Canice at Kilkenny, 25, 30;
its position suggests St. David's, 30;
east end compared with Wells, 31

Domfront, fortress of, won by William, 56, 228;
compared with Falaise, ib.

Dumaine, l'Abbé L.V., his history of Tinchebray, 117, 118

E

Eadgar the Ætheling, at Tinchebray, 121;
taken prisoner and released, 123

Ecclesiastical foundations, choice of sites for, 42, 43

Emma, Abbess of Almenèches, sister of Robert of Bellême, 140–143

England, likeness of Normandy to, how accounted for, 5–7

Eu, its historical associations, 58, 59

Evreux, 4, 8, 24

Evron, abbey at, 234

Exeter, commonwealth of, compared with Le Mans, 212, 213

Exmes, 139 et seq.;
site of the castle, 144, 145;
its church, 146–149

F

Falaise, birthplace of William the Conqueror, 10, 12;
its historical associations, 11, 12;
probable date of the castle, 15;
its position, 16, 17;
origin of the name, 16;
spoiled by so-called restoration, 18–20, 53;
compared with Domfront, 56

Fécamp, abbey of, 43 et seq.;
transitional period well marked at, 47, 48;
its fourteenth century alteration compared with Waltham, 49, 50

Flers, 113

G

Gally Knight, Mr., quoted, 82, 86, 106

Geoffrey of Mowbray, Bishop of Coutances, 67, 80

Geoffrey, Count of Mayenne, his betrayal of the Commune of Le Mans,
214, 231

Geoffrey Malaterra, quoted, 93, 94

Granville, 73

H

Harold, son of Godwine, received by William at Eu, 58;
the guest of William Patey, 114, 115

Harold Blaatand, his settlement in the Côtentin, 5, 66;
delivers the Norman Duchy, 60

Hauteville-la-Guichard, 90 et seq.

Helias of La Flèche, Count of Maine, at Tinchebray, 121, 122

Henry I. of England, 54;
Avranchin held by, 76;
wins back Saint James, 78;
victorious at Tinchebray, 115, 120, 123;
his treatment of Robert, 123;
at Saint-Evroul, 164

Henry II. of England, homage paid him at Falaise by William the Lion, 11;
his hospital at Le Mans, 209, 220

Henry I. of France, helps William against his rebellious vassals, 35;
his personal experiences at Val-ès-dunes, ib.;
sees the slaughter at Varaville, 61;
burns Argentan, 128, 130, 171;
fortress of Tillières burned by, 171;

re-fortifies Tillières, ib.

Henry of Beaumont, Earl of Warwick, 91

Herbert Wake-Dog, Count of Maine, 218

Herlwin, Abbot of Saint Peter's, Orleans, pillages Abbey of Saint-Evroul,
164

Hildebert, Bishop of Le Mans, ordered to pull down the towers of Saint
Julian's, 132, 208

Holy Trinity, Abbey church of, at Beaumont-le-Roger, 185–187

Hubert of Rye receives William on his escape from Valognes, 114

Humfrey de Vetulis, father of Roger of Beaumont, 180

Hundred Years' War, personal nomenclature in Normandy, affected by, 5

J

Jublains and Silchester compared, 189–191;
origin of the name, 190;
its position, 191, 192;
its Roman remains, 192, et seq.;
numismatic evidence for date of fortress, 196–199

L

La Lande-Patry, 114, 115

Laigle, surname misunderstood, 154–156

Langlois, significance of the name, 5

Laval, 231, 232

Le Mans, contrasted with Chartres, 200, et seq.;
Saint Julian's keeps its ancient nave, 205–207;
its thirteenth century choir, 207, 208;
destruction of its towers ordered by William Rufus, 208;
its secondary churches, 209, 220;
Henry the Second's hospital at, 220;
owes its special character to its municipal history, 210–214;
its analogy with Exeter, 212, 213;
no existing monuments of the time of the Commune, 215;
its position, ib.;
Roman and mediæval walls, 216, 217, 218;
position of Saint Julian's, 217, 218;
early greatness of its ecclesiastical and civil rulers, 217;
its buildings, 218, 219;
William's fortresses at, 219, 220;
birthplace of Henry the Second, 220;
German occupation of, 221;
ruthless destruction at, 222;
menhir at, 223

Les Vieilles, faubourg of, at Roger-le-Beaumont, 180;
church of, 187, 188

Lessay, 72

Lewis-from-beyond-Sea, King of the West-Franks, taken captive by Harold
Blaatand, 60

Limay, 52, 53

Louise of Silly, Abbess of Almenèches, 150

M

Maine, its history, 224 et seq.;
its modern division, 225;
architectural borderland between Normandy and Anjou, 226

Malger, Count of Mortain, 104

Mantes, 51, 53

Matilda of Flanders, Queen, her church of the Holy Trinity at Caen, 8;
married to William at Eu, 58

Matilda, daughter of Richard the Fearless, marries Odo of Chartres, 170;
dispute about her dowry, ib.

Matilda, Abbess of Almenèches, 143

Mayenne, 57, 58, 225, 230, 231

Montacute, siege of, raised by Geoffrey of Mowbray, 67;
Norman name of Leodgaresburh (Lutgaresburg), 105

Mortagne, 101

Mortain, its position, 101, 102;
site of the castle, 103;
its history, 104;
foundation of Saint-Evroul at, 105

Mortemer, battle of, 35;
its position, 38, 39;
reason for its historic interest, ib.;
surprise of the French at, 40

N

Næodunum, 190, 198. See Jublains

Neufbourg, 110

Neufchâtel-en-Bray, its hills and cheeses, 39

Names, confusion of, 100, 101, 154, 155

Nomenclature, personal, in Normandy, affected by Hundred Years' War, 5;
local traces of Danish, in Normandy, 6;
in Gaul, 63

Normandy, its points of likeness with England, 3, 4, 41;
compared with France proper, 3;
Teutonic elements in, 5, 6;
traces of Danish local nomenclature in, 6;
its ecclesiastical buildings, 8;
compared with those of France proper, 9, 23, 24;
restoration and destruction in, 17–20, 29;
importance of its early history, 33;
its political absorption by France, 41, 218

Normans and English, original kindred of, 5–7;
in England, English fusion of, 15;
in Normandy, French fusion of, ib.

Notre-Dame, Avesnières, 233

Notre-Dame, Domfront, 57

Notre-Dame, Saint-Lo, 83–85

Notre-Dame, Verneuil, 178

Notre-Dame de La Couture, Abbey of, Le Mans, 209, 220, 226

Notre-Dame de la Place, Argentan, 136

Notre-Dame-du-Pré, Le Mans, 209, 220, 226

O

Odelerius, sends his son Orderic to Saint-Evroul, 162

Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, his work at Bayeux, 26, 28

Odo II., Count of Chartres, refuses to give up his wife's dowry, 170;
defeated, 171

Orderic (Vital), at Neufbourg, 110, 119;
at Saint-Evroul, 143, 160, 162

Oximenses, use of the name, 140

P

Palgrave, Sir Francis, quoted, 39, 64, 101, 226

Periers, 72

Petit, Mr., quoted, 1

Puiseux, M.L., quoted, 33

Q

Querqueville, church of, 68, 69;
origin of the name, 69

Quilly, 53, 54

R

Rennes, 55

Richard the Fearless, Duke of the Normans, educated at Bayeux, 2

Richard the Good, Duke of the Normans, fortifies Tillières, 170;
his dispute with Odo of Chartres, ib.

Richer of Laigle, his character and death, 156

Robert the Magnificent (the "Devil"), Duke of the Normans, castle of
Falaise attributed to, 13–15

Robert, Duke of the Normans, eldest son of William, 54;
his march to Tinchebray, 119;
his captivity, 123;
defeated by Robert of Bellême, 143

Robert, Count of Meulan, son of Roger of Beaumont, 91, 179, 181, 184;
at Tinchebray, 122

Robert, Count of Mortain, 103, 105, 106

Robert of Bellême, at Tinchebray, 120, 121;
banished by Henry, 141;
his treatment of Almenèches, 142;
defeats Robert, 143;
his imprisonment, ib.

Robert of Grantmesnil, Abbot of Saint-Evroul, 162

Robert of Torigny, quoted, 122, 137

Robert the Bigod, accuses William of Mortain of treason, 105

Robert Wiscard, 91, 92, 98, 181

Roger I., Count of Sicily, 92, 98

Roger of Beaumont, 91, 179, 180

Roger of Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury, 140, 141

Roger of Poitou son of Earl Roger, 137, 141, 142

Rolf, his settlement, 5, 36

Rouen, its French character, 2, 6;
death of William the Conqueror at, 51

S

Saint Andrew, Chartres, 209

Saint Canice, Kilkenny, central tower of, compared with that of Dol, 25

Saint Cross, Saint-Lo, 85–87

Saint-Evroul, 143; his story, 162;
his name, 163;
memorials and relics of, 167

Saint Evroul Abbey, home of Orderic, 143, 160, et seq.;
restored by families of Geroy and Grantmesnil, 162;
pillaged by order of Hugh the Great, 164;
its architectural remains, 165–167

Saint-Evroul, Mortain, its foundation, 106;
its architectural features, 106–108

Saint German, Argentan, 127, 131–136

Saint Gervase, Falaise, 16, 173

Saint James, topographical use of the name, 77;
fortified by William the Conqueror, ib., 78;
won back by Henry the Ætheling, ib.;
its position, ib.;
site of William's castle, 79

Saint John, Verneuil, its tower, 176, 177

Saint Julian's, Le Mans, contrasted with cathedral church of Chartres, 200 et
seq.;
Romanesque work at, 206, 207;
Angevin style in, 226. See also Le Mans.

Saint-Lo (Manche), town and church of, 83–87

Saint-Lo, Rouen, 80

Saint Martin, Argentan, 131, 134–136

Saint Martin, Laigle, 157, 158

Saint Martin-in-the-Vale, Chartres, 209

Saint Mary Magdalen, Verneuil, its fine tower, 175, 176

Saint Michael in Peril of the Sea, 44, 55

Saint Nicolas, Beaumont-le-Roger, 181, 182

Saint Nicolas, Coutances, 87, 88

Saint Peter, Abbey, Chartres, 209

Saint Peter, Coutances, 85, 87, 88;

compared with Saint German, Argentan, 131

Saint Price, near Laval, 234

Saint Ouen, Rouen, 24

Saint Remigius, Tinchebray, 119

Saint Saviour, castle and abbey of, 70, 71

Saint Stephen's, Caen, 8, 26

Sainte-Susanne, 156, 234

Saxons, settlement of, at Bayeux, 5

Silchester and Jublains, compared, 189–191

Sillé-le-Guillaume, 234

Surnames of places, 91, 92;
misunderstood, 100, 101, 154–156

T

Talbot, John, Earl of Shrewsbury, his tower at Falaise, 11, 15, 16

Tancred of Hauteville, his home, 90, 95, 97, 98

Tillières, its position and history, 169–171;
church at, 172, 173

Tinchebray, battle of, an English victory, 115, 116, 120;
site of the battle, 117

V

Val-ès-dunes, battle of, a victory of the Roman over the Teuton, 35;
site of the battle-field, 36, 37

Valognes, 69, 70

Varaville, battle of, 60

Verneuil, its position, 173;
castle and donjon at, 174, 175;
churches at, 175–178

Vimont, M. Eugène, his book on Argentan, 128, 136

Vire, 112

W

Wace, value of his description of the battle of Val-ès-dunes, 37, 38;
quoted, 114, 169

Wells, west front of cathedral church compared with that of Coutances, 25;
east end compared with Dol, 31

William Longsword, Duke of the Normans, Danish education of his son, 2;
wins the Côtentin, 66

William the Conqueror, his church of S. Stephen at Caen, 8;
his birthplace, 10, 12;
his attempt at learning English, 12;
modern estimate of in Falaise, 13;
present at the dedication of Odo's church at Bayeux, 28;
results of his personal qualities, 34;
seeks help of Henry I. of France, 34, 35;
burns Mantes, 52;

his marriage to Matilda at Eu, 58;
Domfront submits to, 56;
fortifies Ambrières, 57;
his conquest of Mayenne, ib., 230;
takes Arques, 59;
his surprise of the French at Varaville, 61;
his escape from Valognes, 70, 114;
fortifies Saint James, 77–79;
gives the lands of William of Mortain to his half-brother Robert, 105;
opposition of Le Mans to, 212

William Rufus, bids Bishop Hildebert pull down the towers of Saint
Julian's, 132, 208

William, Count of Arques, his fortress, 59

William, Count of Mortain, 104;
his lands given to Robert, 105;
founds l'Abbaye Blanche, 109;
with Duke Robert at Tinchebray, 119, 120, 121;
taken prisoner, 123;
his alleged blinding, ib.

William of Saint-Calais, use of the surname, 155

William Patry, receives Harold at La Lande, 115

William the Lion, King of Scots, does homage to Henry II. at Falaise, 11

THE END.

RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BUNGAY

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Lecture viii. p. 314.
[2] Methods of Hist. Study, Lecture vi. p. 235.
[3] Crewkerne Inaugural Address, 1871.
[4] Life of E.A. Freeman, vol. i. p. 293.
[5] Ibid., vol. ii. p. 137.
[6] See Petit's Architectural Studies in France, p. 2.
[7] Cf. the following passage in Mr. Freeman's article in The Saturday Review,
August 3, 1867: "The primitive Saxons of Bayeux, the Danes of Rolf and of
Harold Blaatand, the English colonists who remained in the fifteenth century,
have among them left a marked stamp on the people. This last cause cannot have
been an unimportant one, when we hear that in the town of Caen alone there are
twenty-four families bearing the name of Langlois. French and Norman are not
very uncommon names in England, but they are hardly found in the same
proportion."
[8] On the foundation of the abbeys of St. Stephen and of the Holy Trinity, see
Norman Conquest, vol. iii. (2nd ed.), p. 106, et seq.
[9] See Mr. Freeman's article on "Beauvais and Amiens" in Sketches from French
Travel (Tauchnitz edition), and History of the Cathedral Church of Wells, p. 116.
[10] See Mr. Freeman's article on "Restoration and Destruction in France,"
Saturday Review, June 8, 1861.
[11] On Odo's work see also Norman Conquest, vol. ii. p. 209, and note, p. 210.
[12] See Norman Conquest, vol. iii. pp. 235, 236.
[13] Mr. Freeman alludes to M.L. Puiseux's Siège et Prise de Rouen par les
Anglais, &c., which was reviewed by him in The Saturday Review, June 8, 1867.
[14] See Norman Conquest, vol. ii. p. 249, et seq.
[15] See Norman Conquest, vol. iii. 154, et seq.
[16] On the foundation of Fécamp, see Norman Conquest, vol. i. p. 253.
[17] See Norman Conquest, vol. ii. p. 286.
[18] See also p. 228.
[19] See also p. 229.
[20] See also p. 230.

[21] See Norman Conquest, vol. iii. p. 226.
[22] Norman Conquest, vol. iii., p. 122, et seq.
[23] See Norman Conquest, vol. i. pp. 216, 217.
[24] See Norman Conquest, vol. iii., p. 175.
[25] For the story of this derivation see Mr. Freeman's article on "South
Pembrokeshire Castles" in English Towns and Districts, p. 46.
[26] On French nomenclature see also Mr. Freeman's article on "French and
English Towns," pp. 35, 36, in Historical Essays, fourth series, and Sketches
from French Travel, p. 99.
[27] On the relation of the Channel Islands to England, see Norman Conquest,
vol. i. p. 187.
[28] On the relief of Montacute by Bishop Geoffrey, see Norman Conquest, vol.
iv. p. 278.
[29] See Norman Conquest, vol. ii. pp. 242, 243.
[30] See above, p. 21.
[31] See also p. 88.
[32] See Norman Conquest, vol. iii. p. 233, note.
[33] Cf. S. James, near Taillebourg. (Sketches from French Travel, p. 296.)
[34] See The Reign of William Rufus, vol. i. p. 321.
[35] See above, p. 75.
[36] See above, p. 67.
[37] See Sketches from French Travel, p. 35.
[38] See p. 179.
[39] Historical Essays, third series, pp. 446–451.
[40] See Norman Conquest, vol. ii. pp. 261, 607.
[41] See Norman Conquest, vol. ii. p. 287.
[42] See Norman Conquest, vol. ii. p. 288.
[43] See Norman Conquest, vol. iv. pp. 170, 272. For the legend of the Holy
Rood see Old English History, p. 271, and Mr. Freeman's article on "Montacute"
in The Saturday Review, September 9, 1871.
[44] See Mr. Freeman's account of Kirkstall in English Towns and Districts, p.
294.
[45] See p. 119.
[46] Norman Conquest, vol. ii. p. 246.

[47] See Norman Conquest, vol. iii. p. 466.
[48] See Norman Conquest, vol. v. p. 175.
[49] See Historical Essays, Fourth Series, pp. 139, 140.
[50] See p. 208.
[51] See The Reign of William Rufus, vol. i. pp. 463, 464.
[52] See The Reign of William Rufus, vol. ii. p. 96.
[53] On the force of the word tyrant see History of Sicily, vol. ii. p. 50.
[54] See above, p. 123.
[55] See above, pp. 110, 119.
[56] See Norman Conquest, vol. iv. p. 496
[57] See Norman Conquest, vol. ii. p. 227.
[58] See Norman Conquest, vol. ii. pp. 201–203.
[59] See The Reign of William Rufus, vol. i. p. 184.
[60] See Sketches from French Travel, p. 266.
[61] See Mr. Freeman's article on "Silchester" in English Towns and Districts, p.
159.
[62] See English Towns and Districts, p. 163.

[63] See article on "Beauvais and Amiens" in Sketches from French Travel, p. 87.
[64] See The Reign of William Rufus, vol. ii, pp. 297, 298, 654.
[65] See Sketches from French Travel, pp. 114, 117.
[66] On the foundation of the commune of Le Mans and the treachery of
Geoffrey of Mayenne, see Norman Conquest, vol. iv. p. 551, et seq.
[67] See Norman Conquest, iii. p. 192.
[68] See above, p. 209.
[69] See above, p. 57.
[70] See Norman Conquest, vol. ii. p. 209, et seq.
[71] See comparison of Laval with Guildford in Mr. Freeman's article on "Some
Early Buildings in Sussex and Surrey" in The Guardian, August 22, 1883.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and
variant spellings. Obvious typographical errors in punctuation have been fixed. Corrections [in
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Page 14 Val-des-dunes [Val-ès-dunes]
Page 15 Bayeaux [Bayeux]
Page 57 Ambières [Ambrières]
Page 64 Cotentin [Côtentin]
Page 238 Edgar [Eadgar]
Page 240 Alminèches [Almenèches]

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