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 SKETCHES OF TRAVEL 
 
 NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tlie Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028218836 
 
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 
 
 Uontion 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited 
 
 KEW YOEK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1897 
 
 Ail rights reserved 
 
A. ( 0Z-2>1 O 
 
 Richard Clay and Sons, Limited, 
 london and bungay. 
 
EDITOR'S NOTE 
 
 The first eight and the last four of these sketches 
 appeared in the Sahcrday Bevieiv, the others in the 
 G^iardicm. They are here reprinted with a few omis- 
 sions, 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 ^ 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 
 1 Lecture viii. p. 314. 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 principles and upon the study of great subjects, he 
 delighted in the details of local history and local build- 
 ing. " 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 joart 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 docu- 
 ments of almost any other kind."'- 
 
 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." ^ 
 
 Thus the keenness of his interest in the architecture 
 and the history that could be studied and learnt in 
 
 1 Methods of Hid. Study, Lecture vi. p. 235. 
 ^ Crewkerne Inawjx(,ral Address, 1871. 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 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 him- 
 self 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 delight- 
 ful 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 mo 
 to point out the breadth or the accuracy of his know- 
 ledge 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 ho did nothing better 
 than this. He never " writes down " to his readers : he 
 expects to find in them something of his own interest 
 
X PREFACE 
 
 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 owti 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." ^ 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 " 2 William Rufus, and again in 1879 with Mr. J. T. 
 
 ' if/e (/ E. A. Freeman, vol. i. p. 293. 
 2 Ibid., vol. ii. p. 137. 
 
PREFACE xi 
 
 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. Ho 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 charac- 
 teristic sketches which he has left it had been easy to 
 
xii PREFACE 
 
 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 LSS-i, and whose privilege it was to attend 
 many of the lectures which he delivered as Professor, 
 I speak, if without any claim, yet very gi-atefully and 
 sincerely. And since his lectures illustrate so well 
 the work which made his sketches so admirable, I 
 
PREFACE xiii 
 
 may be suffered to say a word from my memory of 
 them and of himself 
 
 In his lectures on the text of medieval 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 sonae- 
 times 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, 
 
xiv PREFACE 
 
 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 Avith 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 mth 
 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. 
 
PREFACE XV 
 
 It is true that Mr. Freeman was distinctly a con- 
 servative 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, Coutanoes, and 
 
 DoL [8. R. 1867] . . . -21 
 
 Old Norman Battle-grounds [S. R. 1867] . . . 33 
 
 Feoamp [S. R. 1868] . . . . -12 
 
 Footsteps op the Conqueror [S. R. 1868] ... 51 
 
 The C6tentin [S. R. 1876] 6-2 
 
 The Avranohin [S. R. 1876] . . 74 
 
 Coutances and Saint-lo [G. 1891] , 80 
 
 Hauteville-la-Guichard [6. 1891] . .. . , 89 
 
 Mortain and its Subroondinos [G. 1892] ... 100 
 
 MoRTAiN to Argentan [G. 1892] ... 112 
 
 Argentan [G. 1892] . . . . .... 125 
 
 ExMES and Almeneches [G. 1892] 139 
 
 Laigle and Saint-Evboul [G. 1892] 154 
 Tillieres and Verneuil [6. 1892] . .168 
 
 Beaumont-le-Rogbr [G. 1892] . . . . 179 
 
 Jublains [S. R. 1876] . 189 
 
 The Churches of Chartres and Le Mans [H. R. 1868] 200 
 
 Le Mans [S. R. 1876] . . ... 211 
 
 Maine [S. R. 1876] . . .... . . 22-1 
 
 h 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 1. S. Stephen, Caen, E. . . ... FroiUisjnece 
 
 2. Falaise Castle . . . 11 
 
 3. S. Gervase, Falaise, S.W. 16 
 
 4. COUTANCES Cathedkal, Centkal Toweb . il 
 
 5. Interior of Coutances Cathedral . . 27 
 
 6. Capitals in Bayeux Cathedral . . . 29 
 
 7. Abbey or Fecamp, N.E. .... . . 45 
 
 S. Limay Church, Tower, S.E. . .... 53 
 
 9. DoMFRONT Castle . 57 
 
 10. Eu Chi rch, S.E. . .58 
 
 11. Valognes Church, N.E. . 69 
 
 12. Abbey of Lessay, S.W. 7'i 
 
 13. Notbe-Dame, Saint-Lo, S.E. . . . .83 
 
 14. S. Nicolas, Coutances, Interior 88 
 
 15. Le Mans Cathedral, N.W. . . . 205 
 
 16. Interior of Le Mans Cathedral 206 
 
 17. S. Martin-in-the-vale, Chartres . . 209 
 
 18. Apse of La Couture, Le Mans . 209 
 
 19. Notre-Dame-du-Pre, Le Mans, N.E. . 220 
 
 20. Sainte-Susanne, Keep . . . . 234 
 
SKETCHES OF TEAVEL 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.^ 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 
 ^ See Petit's Architectural Stitdies in France, p. 2. 
 
 B 
 
2 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 tji^ical 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, RoUo's son, sent his son to 
 Bayeux to learn Danish. There the old Northern 
 tongue, and, we fancj^ the old Northern religion too, 
 still flourished, while at Rouen nobody spoke anything 
 but French. 
 
 A tour in Normandy has an interest of its ovm, 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 o^vn land. 
 Let him go next to some country which will be utterly 
 strange to him — as we are talking of France, say Aqui- 
 taine or Provence. He will there find everything 
 different firom what he is used to — buildings, food, habits, 
 dress, as unlike England as may be. If he tries to talk 
 
NORMANDY 3 
 
 to the natives he will perhaps make them understand 
 his Languc cVoil ; 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 lot a man go through 
 Southern Gaul fii'st, 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 visit- 
 ing the more distant province first. Otherwise the 
 very important phenomenon of the strong likeness be- 
 tween 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- 
 
 B 2 
 
4 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 vege- 
 tables, 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 pajTiient 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 ^vi'ong side of the Channel. 
 You are almost surprised at hearing anji;hing but your 
 
NORMANDY 5 
 
 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 ^vTung its final confirmation from the gTeatest 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.^ 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 Baj'eux were ; 
 but Saxons of some sort were there, even before another 
 Teutonic wave came in with Rolf Ganger and his 
 
 ^ Cf. the following passage in Mr. Freeman's article in The 
 Saturday Revietv, 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. Tlais 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." 
 
C TRAVELS IN KORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 Northmen. Bayeux, as we have said, was the Scandi- 
 navian 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 Lincoln- 
 shire must be as nearly as possible the same. The 
 only difference is, that one has quite forgotten his 
 Teutonic speech, and the other onlj' 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 to\vn 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 
 
NORMANDY 7 
 
 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 fif- 
 teenth 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 
 hundi-ed 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 sejDaration has not effaced, while between 
 English and Gascons there was no sort of kindred, but 
 a mere political connexion which chanced to be con- 
 venient for both sides. The Gascons, to this day, have 
 not wholly forgotten the advantages of English con- 
 nexion, 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 
 
8 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 Carnbridge — 
 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 predomi- 
 nant. It is a town which never was a Bishop's see, but 
 which contains four or five chui'ches 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 mis- 
 fortunes. There is the smaller but richer minster, 
 part of which at least is the genuine work of the Con- 
 queror's Queen. 1 Around the town are a group of 
 smaller churches such as not even Somerset or North- 
 amptonshire 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, ynth a minster so shattered 
 and desecrated that the traveller might pass it b}- 
 without notice, but withal retaining the massive piers 
 and arches of the first half of the eleventh century. 
 
 ' On the foundation of the abbeys of St. Stephen and of the 
 Holy Trinity, see Noi-mKii Conquest, vol. iii. (2nd ed.), p. 106, 
 et seq. 
 
NOKMANDY 9 
 
 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 owti 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.^ A Norman minster, like an English 
 one, is satisfied "with a comparatively moderate height, 
 but \vith its three towers and full cruciform shape, it 
 seems a perfection of outline to which no purely French 
 building ever attains. 
 
 1 See Mr. Freeman's article on " Beauvais and Amiens " in 
 Sketches from French Travel (Tauchnitz edition), and History of 
 the Cathedral Chuich of Wells, p. 116. 
 
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 Pal- 
 grave sums up the story, " Arietta's pretty feet twink- 
 ling 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 ^vith unfairly if it had not contrived 
 to find its way into her most striking pages. And 
 certainly in this respect Falaise has nothing to com- 
 plain o£ 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 
 
FALAISE 
 
 history of England, France, and Scotland. The si 
 by Hemy the Fourth was in a manner local ; it 
 part of a warfare within the kingdom of France. ] 
 that warfare was one in which all the Powers of Eur 
 felt themselves to be closely inteiested; it was a v 
 fare in which one at least of them directly partook 
 was one in which the two great religions of West 
 Europe felt that their own fates were to be in a man 
 decided. In the earlier warfare of the fifteenth cent 
 Falaise plays a prominent part. To'wn and castle w 
 taken and retaken, and the ancient fortress itself 
 ceived a lasting and remarkable addition from the hi 
 of one of the greatest of English captains. The 
 round tower of Talbot, a model of the military maso 
 of its time, goes far to share the attention of the vis: 
 with the massive keep of the ancient Dukes. The 
 we leap back to the earliest great historical ev 
 which we can connect, with any certainty, with ; 
 part of the existing building. It was here, in a 1; 
 beyond the borders of the Isle of Britain, but in a c( 
 .paratively neighbouring portion of the wide domini 
 of the House of Anjou, that the fullest homage ■ 
 paid which ever was paid by a King of Scots to a K 
 of England. Here William the Lion, the captive 
 Almvick, became most effectually the " man " of He 
 Fitz-Empress, and burdened his kingdom with new i 
 onerous engagements from which his next overl 
 
12 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 found it convenient to relieve him. Earlier in the 
 tvsrelfth 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 Belleme, 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. 
 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 modem French style calls on us to reverence the 
 spot where the " legislator of ancient England " " fut 
 engendr^ 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 sug- 
 gested. 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 
 
FALAISE 13 
 
 simple formula 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 repre- 
 sent 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 abs- 
 tractions and antitheses has departed from the simple 
 and vigorous speech of the Roman de Eou ? 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 o^\'n people in 
 his own birthplace, we can only say that, while demur- 
 ring 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 Eobert 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 
 
14 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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-des-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 kno-svn 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." 
 
FALATSE 15 
 
 On the whole, the evidence is in favoiir of the belief 
 that the present castle of Falaise is of the twelfth 
 centurj^ 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 tjq^e 
 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 Rolfs Danes and of the older Saxons of Bayeaux 
 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 Nor- 
 mandy 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 
 
16 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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. 
 
 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 gi'ound 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 felscn — the honest 
 Teutonic word still surviving, and giving its name to 
 the town itself, and to its distinguishing feature. The 
 
To face page i6 
 
 Sff, 
 
 C/rl4t/4 , ^tUlbUt 
 
 f'ik)' 
 
FALAISE 17 
 
 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 I'olled 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 isnow 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 verj^ 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 ^mst, 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 
 
18 TRAVELS IN KORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 Perigueux, 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. 
 Euprich 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 -svill 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 nine- 
 teenth. We shall no longer sec the dwellingplace 
 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 cajjitals 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 
 
FALAISE 19 
 
 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.^ 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 under- 
 stand 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 OAvn 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 reserva- 
 tion to be made at all. In the castle of Falaise we may 
 
 1 See Mr. Freeman's article on " Restoration and Destruction 
 in France," Saturday Bevdew, June 8, 1861. 
 
 c 2 
 
20 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 degi'ees 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 archi- 
 tecture or an3'1;hing else, is best pleased when he gets 
 most completely out of the reach of his own country- 
 men. 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 harm- 
 less 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 
 
22 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 notices in the \\'indows 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 resi- 
 dents, 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 vfish to 
 speak a few words are respectively known to English- 
 men 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 
 
BAYEUX, COUTANCES, DOL 23 
 
 from the Greater Britain since the days of the Amaorican 
 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 t}'pe 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 unkncvvn 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 
 
24 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 just- 
 ness 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. 
 
 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 narrowne.ss. 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 
 
To face page 24 
 
BAYEUX, COUTANCES, DDL 26 
 
 really the most justly proportionerl of the three, though 
 in many points its outline is the one which would least 
 commend itself to popular taste. Tlie 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 accus- 
 tomed. The west front of Dol is imperfect and 
 irregular ; the southern has been cari'ied up and finished 
 in a later style, while the northern one, whose rebuild- 
 ing 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 
 
26 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 croviTiing 
 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. 
 
 Looked at within, the precedence of Bayeux is less 
 certain. The first glance at Coutances, within as with- 
 out, 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 impres- 
 sion 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 aiTangement which is 
 
BAYEUX, COUTANCES, DOL 27 
 
 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 con- 
 siderably, 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 
 
28 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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. 
 
 The interior of Bayeux, besides its greater spacious- 
 ness 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.^ The rest was destroyed by fire, 
 like so many other churches in Normand}', 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 
 
 ' On Odo's work see also Norman Conquest, vol. ii. p. 209, 
 find note, p. 210. 
 
7 c.y. 
 
 ho :d^ 
 
 liiuiu^ UOni 
 
 To face page 29 
 
BAYEUX, COUTANCES, DOL 29 
 
 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 iato 
 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 produc- 
 tions 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 anywiiere of the 
 later and more ornamented Romanesque. The arches 
 are of unusual and very irregular -width ; the irregu- 
 larity 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 coujDled lancets 
 of enormous height, with the faintest approach to 
 tracery in the head. The effect is striking, but cer- 
 tainly somewhat incongruous. The choir is one of 
 
30 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 compe- 
 tition mth such formidable Norman rivals.^ 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 some- 
 thing 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 jnarked 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 
 • See Norman Conquest, vol. iii. pp. 235, 236. 
 
BAYEUX, COUTANCES, DOL 31 
 
 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 mode- 
 rate 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 com- 
 pletely together in composition. The nave we might 
 fairly call Early English. It is not quite so character- 
 istic 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 charac- 
 ter, with a beautifully designed triforium and clerestory. 
 
32 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 distract character, and that by no 
 means wholly to its loss, through the use of a somewhat 
 rugged material. 
 
OLD NOEMAN 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 imme- 
 diately concerned — those events of the Hundred Years' 
 War, on which so much light has lately been thrown 
 by the researches of M. Puiseux.i But he should not 
 forget that, besides being the scene of these events in 
 the great struggle between England and France, Nor- 
 mandy, independent Normandy, has also a historj' of its 
 own, in which both England and France had a deej] 
 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 
 
 1 Mr. Freeman alludes to M. L. Puiseux's Siefje et Prise de 
 Roiien par les Anglais, &c. , which was reviewed by him in The 
 Saturday Review, June 8, 1867. 
 
 D 
 
;:!4 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 j^ersonal character of the gi-eat Duke of the Nor- 
 mans 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 Duch}-. Succeeding with a very 
 doubtful title, at once bastard and minor, it is wonder- 
 ful 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 
 ^\'as 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 \assal the possession of the valley 
 and mouth of the Seine. William, in short, before he 
 conquered England, iiai) 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 
 
OLD NORMAN BATTLE-GROUNDS 35 
 
 the help of Normandy. The King of the French acted 
 as his ally against his rebellious vassals, and those 
 rebellioiis 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 arc marked by 
 two battles, the sites of which are appropriately placed 
 on the two opposite sides of the Seine. At Val-es- 
 dunes William of Normandy and Henry of France 
 overcame the Norman rebels.'- Afterwards, when Hemy 
 had changed his policy, the Normans smote the French 
 with a great slaughter at Mortemer, neither of the con- 
 tending princes being personally present. Val-es-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 obedi- 
 ence the sturdy Saxons of the Bessin and the fierce 
 Danes of the Ccitentin. The men of the peninsula 
 boasted, in a rhyme which is still not forgotten in the 
 neighbourhood of the fight, how 
 
 De Costeiitin 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 
 
 * See Norman Conrpiest, vol. ii. p. 249, d seq. 
 
 D 2 
 
36 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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. to wards 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-es-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 ej-e 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 vnld- 
 ness of the sterner portions of the Cotentin. A range 
 
OLD NORMAN BATTLE-GROUNDS 37 
 
 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 comics or 
 valleys. The churches of Valmera}^ 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. La^vrence, 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 Allemagiie, the great quany of 
 Caen stone. Over all the ground in this dii-ection the 
 rebels were scattered, multitudes of them being earned 
 away, we are told, by the stream of the Orne. 
 
 The spot, as we have said, is not in itself j)articularly 
 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 meldc of mounted 
 knights, a tournament in earnest. And it is quite 
 
38 TKA\ELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 topogi-aphical details. And it 
 is pleasant to find how well the events of the day are 
 still remembered by the peasantry of the neighbour- 
 hood. 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, jn-oud 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-es-dunes, but, as an 
 historical spot, it is chiefly remarkable from the event 
 of the battle having, so to speak, \\'iped out all traces 
 of itself.^ The spot where the French invaders received 
 so heavy a blow lies appnipriately 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 
 ' See Noiitiiin Cominpst, vol, iii. 1.54, et seq. 
 
OLD NORMAN BATTLE-GROI^NDS 3'J 
 
 Lyons-la-foret, in that famous wood of which Sir Francis 
 
 Palgrave has so much to tell. Both the one and the 
 
 other Moi'temer happily lie quite out of the beat of 
 
 ordinary tourists. The Mortemer of the battle lies on 
 
 the road between the small towns of Neufchatel and 
 
 Aumale. Neufchatel-en-Bray, a Neufchatel without 
 
 lake or watches or republic, can nevertheless boast of 
 
 surrounding hills which, if not eqiial 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 Neufchatel 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 histoiic 
 
 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 
 
40 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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. Morte- 
 mer was apparently an open towTi, not defended by 
 walls or a castle, or the French could hardly have 
 occupied it, as they did, Avithout resistance. But it 
 must have been a town, as to'\\Tis 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 sur- 
 rounding countr}' surprised the French on the morning 
 after they had entered Mortemer, while they were still 
 engaged in revehy 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 to\\Ti, almost 
 every village, has its tale to tell. From Eu to Pontorson 
 there is hardly a spot which does not make some con- 
 tribution to the history of those stirring times when 
 Normandy had a life of its own. and when the Norman 
 
OLD NORMAN BATTLE-GROUNDS 41 
 
 name was famous from Scotland to Sicily. After six 
 hundred years of incorporation with the French mon- 
 archy, Normandy is still Norman ; " Ic Due 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 bj' France was remarkably speedy — the 
 feelings and memories of the days of independence 
 have lingered on in a way which is the more remark- 
 able 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 Ba3'eux, and to Northern 
 Germany is still preserved. 
 
FECAMP 
 
 1868 
 
 It has sometimes struck us that the mediaeval 
 foimders 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 ecclesiasti- 
 cal foundations, the convenience of the near neigh- 
 bourhood 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 \-enture to think that it was not merely 
 accident, because we often come upon descriptions of 
 sites in mediasval writers which seem to show that the 
 men of those times were capable of appreciating the 
 
FECAMP 43 
 
 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 
 mediaeval Latin. In the like sort, we have come across 
 one or two descriptions of the Abbey of Fecamp which 
 clearly show that the writers were struck, as any man 
 of taste would be, with the position in which that gi-eat 
 and famous monastery had arisen. And, to lea^i to 
 scenes which far surpass either Fecamp 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. 
 
 Modern taste might possibly make one objection to 
 
44 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 the site of Fecamp. Though near the sea, it is not 
 within sight of the sea. The modern watering-place of 
 Ft^camp 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 modem, and, 
 in the days in which our old towns, castles, and monas- 
 teries 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 Fecamp 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 Fecamp or else- 
 where 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 Fe^camp, either of abbey, 
 town or palace.^ They chose them a site which gave 
 them the practical advantages of the sea without the 
 dangers of its immediate neighbourhood. Fecamp 
 then lies a little way inland. Two parallel ranges of 
 
 1 On the foundation of P(5camp, see Norman Conquest, vol. i. 
 p. 25:?. 
 
Fl;CAMP 45 
 
 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, cro^vned 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 
 
46 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 boundless length which is the characteristic of the build- 
 ing. 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 Nor- 
 mandy, 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 them- 
 selves 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 mediaeval building, need not be in 
 itself either ugly or mean, but this front of Fecamp is 
 conspicuously both. The other loss is that of the jiM 
 or roodloft, which, from the fragments left, seems to have 
 been a magnificent piece of later Gothic work, perhaps 
 almost ri\-alling the famoias one at Alby. The destruc- 
 tion of roodlofts has been so general in France that one 
 is not particularly struck by each several case of de- 
 struction. But there is something singular about this 
 Fecamp case, as the juM was pulled down at the res- 
 
FfiCAMP 47 
 
 toration of religion, through the influence of the then 
 cure, in opposition to the wishes of his more conserva- 
 tive or more ritualistic parishioners. With these two 
 exceptions Fecamp 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, mth smaller portions both 
 of earlier and of later date. On entering the church, 
 Ave 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 Avest 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 Roman- 
 esque feeling still hanging about them. At Fecamp 
 this is far stronger. The large triforium, the un- 
 
48 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 traceried windows, the squareness of everything except 
 a few English round abaci in some bays of the tri- 
 forium, the external heaviness and simplicity, all make 
 the early Gothic of Fecamp 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 ex- 
 cellence both of composition and detail as it is at 
 Fecamp, it is much more than historically interesting, 
 it is thoroughly satisfactory in artistic effect. We say 
 nothing against the style, except that, as being essen- 
 tially imperfect and not realising the ideal of either 
 of the two stylos between which it comes historically, 
 we cannot look on it as a proper model for modem 
 imitation. Several diversities of detail may on minute 
 examination be seen in the different bays of the nave 
 of Fecamp, 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 st3de but 
 
FECAMP 49 
 
 of taste. The eastern limb of Fecamp — strictly the 
 presbytery and not the choir — is more remarkable in 
 some ways than the nave. It is here tliat we find 
 the only remains of an earlier chiirch, and these are 
 of no very remarkable antiqviity. M. Bouet, in a 
 short account of Fecamp, addressed to the Norman 
 Antiquarian Society, records his disappointment at 
 finding at Fecamp no traces of the days of the earh- 
 Dukes, or even of days earlier still, such as he found 
 at Jiimieges. This oldest part of F&amp 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 \ery 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 ba}-, 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 any- 
 thing ever was done anpvhere, was at F^camji at 
 least done '_very cleverly. Without meddling with the 
 vaulting or the vaulting-shafts, the pier-arches and 
 
 E 
 
50 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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, oEisthetical and mechanical, with 
 which the change was made, and it is the more 
 striking from the contrast with the ^vl•etched " botch " 
 at Waltham. 
 
 The church is finished to the east by a fine Flam- 
 boyant 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 Fecamp that we have no space left to 
 add anything on its history. But the local history of 
 Fecamja naturally connects itself with several other 
 more general points at which we shall perhaps have 
 some future opportunity uf glancing. 
 
FOOTSTEPS OF THE CONQUEROR 
 
 1868 
 
 Many of the great events of Norman history, many 
 of the chief events in the Hfe of the Great WilHam, 
 happened conveniently in or near to the great cities of 
 the Duchy. But many others also happened in some- 
 what 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 soarchings 
 of heart how to get there, and have not accomplished 
 
 E 2 
 
52 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 vnth special delight on such 
 ei/s 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 msh 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 Mortenier 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 
 
To /ace page 53 
 
FOOTSTEPS OF THE CONQUEROR 53 
 
 might seem that, ^vith such a height as it has, the 
 building ought to have fully doubled its actual length. 
 The third tower, that of a destroj'ed church, is worth 
 study as an examjale 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 Komanesque 
 tower in the suburb of Limay, and the lover of pictur- 
 esque effect will not fail to dwell on the mediaeval 
 bridge which leads thither from the town. 
 
 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 birth-place 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-es-dunes, and of the victory won for him by 
 others at Mortemer. We may, however, suggest tlr^t 
 any one who visits Val-es-dunes, will not do amiss if 
 he extends his ramble as far as the churches of Cin- 
 theaux 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 cure, 
 the historian of Val-es-dunes, is doing his best to bring 
 it back to its former state, without subjecting it, like 
 
54 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 Normand}^ contains so much fewer 
 examples than either England or Aquitaine. Cin- 
 theaux = Centella, has also a certain historic interest in 
 the generation after William. There, in 1105, King 
 Henry and Duke Robert, "duo gcrmanifratres," had a 
 conference. We forget who it was who translated 
 " duo germani fratrcs " 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 Anjovi, 
 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 disj^ose of Of Dol and 
 Dinan we ha\'c 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 
 
FOOTSTEPS OF THE CONQUEROR 55 
 
 preserve the general effect of an ancient town. It still 
 rises grandlj^ 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 mthout sacrificing the walls 
 to their creation. Eennes, the furthest point reached 
 by the two comrades so soon to become enemies, is now 
 wholly a modern citj'. Saint Michael's Mount has 
 become a popular lion, which can only be seen imder 
 the vexatious comiDanionship 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 sti'ange 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 \vith the names 
 alike of British and of West-Saxon heroes. And the 
 
56 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 vast expanse of sand brings vividly before us the scene 
 in the Tapestry where the giant strength of the Enghsh 
 Earl is shown lifting with ease the soldiers who found 
 themselves engulfed in the treacherous stream. 
 
 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 
 AlenCj'on.i 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- 
 to-wns, 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 
 1 See Norman Conrpicsf, vol. ii. p. 286. 
 
fti-).^ 
 
 r\ 
 
 L 
 
 i)^7kj^/V^ ^c^ 
 
 %Uc ^/i-^ C /^' /2w6^ t £y 
 
 To face page 57 
 
FOOTSTEPS OF THE CONQUEROR 57 
 
 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 an)^ 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.^ 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. 
 
 After Domfront had submitted to William and had 
 become permanently incorporated with Normandy, he 
 himself founded the fortress of Ambi^res, as a border 
 stronghold.^ 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 battlefield, of Norman and Angevin. •' 
 The site of Mayenne, sloping, like that of Mantes, down 
 
 1 See also p. 228. 2 See also p. 229. ^ gee also p. 230. 
 
58 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 command- 
 ing 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 Diich}'. 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.i 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 
 ' See Niinnaii Cimqiiest, vol. iii, p. 226. 
 
FOOTSTEPS OF THE CONQUEROR -59 
 
 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 
 thp site still reminds one of the days of Rolf rather than 
 of the days of William. It can hardly be said to com- 
 mand the town ; it is itself commanded by higher 
 ground immediately above it ; towoi, 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 Rolfs 
 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.-' The little town, with a 
 church of later date, but of striking outline, lies low, 
 lower than Eu ; but the castle soars above it, cro"wning 
 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 
 
 1 Norman Conquest, vol. iii. , p. 122, et seq. 
 
60 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 Na\'arre to which Arques now owes 
 most of its renown, and which has gone some w^ay 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.^ 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 rijyalty of Paris as the 
 Danish ally of his forefathers had struck against the 
 elder royalty of Laon.^ The French invaders of Nor- 
 mandy, King Henry at their head, had gorged them- 
 
 ' See Norman Conquest, vol. i. pp. 216, 217. 
 ^ See Norman Conquest, vol. iii., p. 175. 
 
FOOTSTEPS OF THE CONQUEROR 61 
 
 selves with the plunder of the lands west of the Dive 
 and were now carelessly advancing towards the high 
 gi-Qund 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 irre- 
 sistible 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 ^mtten 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 rush- 
 ing down to give them help which must have proved 
 wholly in vain. The heights from which he looked dowTi 
 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 COtENTIN 
 
 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 Constcmiinus " and 
 the French Cotentin are simply the same word. For 
 we have seen a French geography-book in which 
 Cotentin was explained to mean the land of coasts ; the 
 peninsular shape of the district gave it " trois cotes," 
 and so it was called Cotentin. We cannot parallel this 
 with the derivation of Manorbeer from " man or bear";i 
 because this last is at least funny, while to derive 
 Cdtentin from cote is simply stupid. But it is very 
 like a derivation which we once saw in a Swiss geo- 
 graphy-book, according to which the canton of Wallis 
 
 ' For the story of this derivation see Mr. Freeman's article 
 on "South Pembrokeshire Castles" in Encjlish Toiims and 
 Districts, p. 46. 
 
THE COTBNTIN 63 
 
 or Valais was so called '' parce que c'est la plus grande 
 valUc 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 et3anology of the name is not than to 
 say what it is ; but in the case of the Cdtentin one 
 would have thought that it was as clear as the sun at 
 noon-day the other way. How did he who derived 
 Cotentin from cote deal with other names of districts 
 following the same form ? The JScssin, the land of 
 Bayeux, might perhaps be twisted into something- 
 funny, but the AvrancMii could hardly be anything 
 but the district of Avranches, and this one might have 
 given the key to the others. But both Cotentin and 
 Bessm illustrate a law of the geogTaphical 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, Perigueux and Perigord, 
 Le Mans and Maine.^ So C'onstantia has become 
 CoMtances ; but the adjective Constantinus has become 
 
 ^ On French nomenclature see also Mr. Freeman's article on 
 "French and English To^vns," pp. 35, 36, in Historical Essays, 
 fourth series, and Sketches from French Travel, p. 99. 
 
64 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 Cotentin. City and district then bear the same Im- 
 perial 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 ^vriter this may 
 be a sign that, in his day, Coutances was spoken of in 
 England as Constance. In a modern -writer this judg- 
 ment of charity is hardly possible. It really seems as 
 if some people thought that the Conqueror was accom- 
 panied to England by a Bishop of the city where John 
 Huss was burned ages afterwards. 
 
 We have called the C6tentin a peninsula, and so it 
 is. Sir Francis Palgrave points out, vnth a kind of 
 triumph, that the two Danish peninsulas, the original 
 Jutland and this of the Cotentin, are the only two in 
 Europe which point northward. And the Cotentin 
 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 
 
THE c6TENTIN 65 
 
 further to forget that the whole of that west coast is 
 not C6tentm. A\Tanches 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 Avi'anches. 
 
 Part of the Cotentin then is a true peninsula, a 
 peninsula stretching out a long finger to the north-west 
 in the shajoe of Cape La Hague ; and this most charac- 
 teristic part of the land has impressed a kind of penin- 
 sular character on the whole region. But we must noi ' 
 forget that the land of Coutances is not wholly penin- 
 sular, 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.^ 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 
 
 1 On the relation of the Channel Islands to England, see 
 Norman Conquest, vol. i. p. 187. 
 
 F 
 
66 TRAVELS IN XORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 
 wholl}- 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 duchj^ 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 ^Ethelred, shown themselves as invaders 
 and ravagors. But before the men of the C6tentin 
 could show themselves as avengers at Senlac, they had 
 first to be themselves overthrown at Yal-es-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 
 STibdued 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 
 
THE COTENTIN 61 
 
 Cotentin with England should be those of their two 
 Bishops, Geoffrey of Mowbray, for a while Earl of North- 
 umberland, 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,^ if we could believe that, according 
 to a legend which is even now hardly exploded, the exist- 
 ing 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 j^ear 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 Cotentin so miraculous a 
 development as this, the district was at all times fertile 
 in men who could build in the stjdes 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 
 
 1 On the relief of Montacute by Bishop Geoffrey, see Na>-inan 
 Cunquest, vol. iv. p. 278, 
 
 F 2 
 
68 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 (district is indeed more favoured by nature than by art. 
 In the name of Cherbourg mediseval 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 Ccesaris 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 uninterest- 
 ing 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 Cotentin 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 prae-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 gi'eater, church, the two stand- 
 ing side by side, and with the outline of the greater — 
 the same triapsidal form marking both — clearly sug- 
 gested by the smaller. Of the smaller, which is very 
 

 To face page 69 
 
THE CUTENTIN 69 
 
 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 
 Aries, but far ruder. But at Querqueville the name is 
 part of the argument ; the building gi\ es its name to 
 the place. The first sjdlablc of Querqueville is plainly 
 the Teutonic hirk ; and it suggests that it got the 
 name from this church having been left standing when 
 most of its neighbours were destroyed in the Scandi- 
 navian 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 I'emains of a building 
 older than the settlement of Rolf 
 
 From the rocks of the Norman Scarlorongh, one of 
 the only two railways which find their way into the 
 Cotentin 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 
 
70 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 gi'ouping 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-es-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- Vicomtc, 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.^ 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 founda- 
 tion 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 
 ' See NiniivMi Cviuiiiesl, vol. ii. pp. 242, 243. 
 
w 
 
 THE c6tENTIN 71 
 
 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 gi'eat one specially 
 hich some one surely must have set down as 
 Phcenician — the great feature is the huge square tower 
 which fonns 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 ? Anj'how, 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 talc, bore the fleet of iEthebed 
 when the elder Neal drove back English invaders 
 
72 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 more than three hundred years before Sir John 
 Chandos. 
 
 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 
 
The cotentin ?3 
 
 in some detail ; ^ 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 mediosval aqueduct. 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 Flamboj^ant and Renaissance die away into a 
 kind of Romanesque most unlike that of Ragusa, and 
 the Cotentin has been gone through from north to 
 south. The modern department and the modern dio- 
 cese 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. 
 
 ^ See above, p. 21. 
 '^ See also p. 88. 
 
THE AVRANCHIN 
 
 1876 
 
 The towTi 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 do^vn to a tablc-dlwtc 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, with- 
 out 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 witli it a degi'ee of civilisation in many 
 points such as is not alwaj's found in towns of much 
 gi'eater size which our countrymen do not frequent. 
 But to the historical traveller Avranches is almost 
 dead. A few stones heaped together arc all that 
 
THE AVRANCHIN 7o 
 
 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 Bee 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 A\'ranches 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 ha\'e 
 been glorious beyond words. It might have beenLaon, 
 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. 
 
76 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 And if Avranches gave a lord to one gi'eat district 
 of England, England presently gave a lord to Avranches. 
 The Avranchin formed part of the fief of the iEtheling 
 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 water- 
 falls. 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. 
 
THE AVRANCHIN 77 
 
 When we write " Saint James," we are not trans- 
 lating.i Tlie " 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 puzzHng history of 
 the various forms of the apostoUc names Jacobus and 
 Johannes and their diminutives. Jacques and JacJc 
 must surely be the same ; how then came Jaclc to be 
 the diminuti\-e of John f 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 proces,s of 
 this kind. And it is onlj^ as applied to the place itself 
 that the form " James"- is used ; the inn is the " H6tcl 
 Saint-Jacques,'' and " Saint-Jacques " is the acknow- 
 ledged patron of the parish. Anyhow the effect is to 
 give the name of the place an unexpectedly English air. 
 PerhajDS such an air is not wholly out of jilace in the 
 name of a spot which was fortified against the Breton 
 by a prince who was to become King of the English, 
 
 1 See Norman Conquest, vol. iii. p. 233, note. 
 
 2 Cf. S. James, near Taillebourg. {Sketches from French Travel, 
 p. 290.) 
 
78 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 and whose fortification led to a war in which two 
 futiTre 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 Aery 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 conse- 
 crated Mount. In this way Saint James plays an 
 indirect part in English historj', and it plays another 
 when it was one of the first points of his lost territory 
 to be won back by Henry the ./Etheling after his 
 brothers had driven him out of the Mount and all else 
 that he had.'^ 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 Sec/j— that is the right word in 
 the land which contains Caude^ec and Bee 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 
 1 See Th, BeUjn of William Enfvs, vol. i. p. 321, 
 
THE AVRANCHIN 79 
 
 seems the best point for commanding the whole valley, 
 
 and we may perhaps guess that a less devout piince 
 
 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 chdteau. If he does, 
 
 he will be sent to the other side of the valley, to a 
 
 modern house, on a lovely site certainlj', and working 
 
 in some portions of mediaeval 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 "\efort." 
 
 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, ap- 
 pears once in Domesday as Bishop of Saint-Lo, but it 
 must not therefore be thoixght that he had his bishop- 
 stool 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 Kouen. There, when 
 the Cotentin was over-run by the still heathen North- 
 men, the Bishops of Coutances took refuge, carrying 
 with them Saint-Lo himself — Sanctiis Laudus, a pre- 
 decessor in the bishopric — in the form of his relics. 
 When heathen Northmen were turned into Christian 
 Normans, the Bishops of Coutances went home again, 
 
COtTANCES AND SAINT-LO 81 
 
 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 sjjeech was not wonderful. But, 
 setting aside times of havoc, when there was nothing 
 left to be head of, Coutanccs always remained the 
 formal head, ecclesiastical and civil, of the Cotentin, the 
 " pagus Constantinus," which took its name from the 
 city. The town of Saint-Lo has now outstripped Cou- 
 tances 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 ei)is- 
 copal 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 ecclesi- 
 astical temtory 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 
 
 o 
 
82 TKAVELS TN NDRMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 Mount of the Archangel in its bay, and the rocks of 
 Cancale beyond.^ 
 
 There is no need to describe anew a building so well 
 known as the cathedral church of Coutanccs. There is 
 no need to argue against, there is hardly need to wonder 
 at, the strange belief against which Gaily Knight and 
 others had to fight, that this beautiful example of the 
 fully developed Early Gothic was really the work of that 
 Bislmp Geoffrey who blessed the Norman host on its 
 march from Hastings to Scnlac.^ 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 de- 
 veloped style of the thirteenth — that this great dis- 
 covery 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 Bur- 
 gundy, began to make many, and at first not very 
 successful, attempts to imitate what the men of one 
 spot in the Cotentin 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 
 
 \ See above, p. 75. 
 2 Sec fibovc, jj. 67. 
 
COUTANCES AND SAINT-LO 83 
 
 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. 
 
 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 
 
 G 2 
 
84 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 sjDires 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 Avranchcs must ha\'e been, like 
 Durham, on the brow of the hill. There is a consider- 
 able 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 
 bej'ond 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 ^Joints 
 the towers, and even the spires, are lost among the 
 houses, before we find out how comimratively small they 
 are. And in the body of the church we sec a marked 
 example of an opiDortunity thrown awa}\ 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 
 
COUTANCES AND SAINT-LO sn 
 
 church of Saint Peter at Coutances, miich smaller than 
 that of Saint-Lo, will illustrate this position. And there 
 arc plenty of instances, from graceful miniatures like 
 Norrey and Les Petits Andelys up to churches of con- 
 siderable 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 
 swccQssinlhallenkirche, 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 Gaily 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. Gaily 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 centurj'; but 
 he took it for the eleventh instead of the twelfth, No 
 
80 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 one can blame him for that at the time when he ^vrote. 
 But both Gaily 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 di'awing. Here 
 it is, if an}^vhere, that one would look for the earlier 
 date of Romanesque. But all outside the church itself 
 has perished. The church itself has, since De Cau- 
 mont'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 Avhich Gaily 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 
 
COUTANCES AND SATNT-LO 87 
 
 creature, said to be a toad, witli his head downwards. 
 The ^york of subjugation is done bj' 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 featui'e of the episcopal church. This 
 is the grand central octagon, with its quasi-doraicixl 
 treatment inside. But in both of the smaller churches 
 it is coupled with a single western tower. This arrange- 
 ment 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 dis- 
 
88 TRAA^ELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 continvTous impost, the ugliest invention of French 
 Flamboyant, may perhaps be endured in some subor- 
 dinate 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 trans- 
 lated into an Italianising style. In short we have here, 
 as we have seen in many places, specially at Troyes,^ as 
 we shall see again in a most marked form at Argentan, 
 that curious process of transition from mediteval to 
 Renaissance detail which in England wc 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 medifeval 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 piity 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. 
 
 1 Sec Shetches from French Travel, p. 35. 
 
To /ace page i 
 
HAUTEVILLE-LA-CUICHARD 
 
 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 iind- anything 
 on the site. Suppose one is castle-stalking in Maine, 
 suppose one is looking for primaeval 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. 
 
90 TRziVELS TN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 one of tlie most memorable sites, in its own way of 
 being memorable, to be found in all Western Normand}'. 
 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 ^vl'ought which made 
 the name of the site flimous. 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-siM'-mcr ; 
 it is the namesake that bears the speaking surname of 
 H:\ntcvi\\e-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 shejDherds of the j)eople, 
 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 Sp'acuse as the brother- 
 in-arms of George Maniakes and Harold Hardrada. 
 
 As an episode in the history of the world, one is 
 tempted to think that the fellowship of three such 
 
HAI^TEVTLLE-LA-GUICHARD 91 
 
 warriors as those, each representing the tongue, the 
 speech, and the mode of warfare of his own folk, is the 
 most striking scone 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 Haute\dlle-/« 
 Guichanl, 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 staj'ed 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 onlj^ fair that his Beaumont 
 should be kno^^^l back again as the Beaumont of Roger.^ 
 His sons are of Meulan, of Leicester, of Warwick, rather 
 1 See p. 179, 
 
1)2 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MATNK 
 
 than of Beaumont. Bennmont-k-Itogcr is felt at once 
 to be the becoming name of his home. Nearer to 
 Haute\'ille, Saint-Jean, between Avranches and Gran- 
 ville, cradle of all who have written themselves dc 
 sando lohanne, is Qaint-^Qaxi-le-Thomas, after Thomas, 
 its lord in the daj's of Henry the First. His name is 
 ^vl■itten 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 
 Landc-Patry and Lwigucvillc-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 Apulianduchyand indirectly of the Sicilian 
 kingdom, the ally of Gregory the Seventh, the deliverer 
 or the destroyer of Rome, the invader of Eastern 
 Exirope, 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.^ The 
 1 Ilhtoiicfd Essaija, third series, pp. 446 — 451, 
 
HAUTEVILLE-LA-GUICHARD 93 
 
 Great Count was the younger brother and the liegeman 
 of the Duke. It was hxter events which caused the 
 youngest branch of the house of Haute ville to outstrip 
 all that had gone before it, to rise in the next genera- 
 tion 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, Hautc- 
 villc-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 Statistiquc Boutierc dc la Basse, Xormandic. 
 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 ha^e thought 
 that the mere fact of the setting up of the new statues 
 would have awakened the writer of the Coutances guide- 
 book to the fact that such a spot was not far off Any- 
 how, 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 mentis in quo 
 
01 TRAVELS IN NORBIANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 o'svn 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 
 nationalc, with a fine view of the towers of Coutances 
 for those who look backwards, we turn off into a route 
 (Upartemcntale. And all who are used to French roads 
 know well that a route nationale is always excellent, 
 
HAUTEVILLE-LA-GUICHARD 05 
 
 and thai a roiUc departcmcntcde is always endurable and 
 something more. We have one or two gentle tips 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 chureh with a good example of 
 the usual saddleback tower, and with a few houses 
 around it. We are told, and the ordnance map con- 
 firms 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, ^vc arc 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 
 Basscville 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 chateau. 
 But cJidteau, 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 
 
Of) TrxAVEL« IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 us ; nor did we, as sometimes happens, light on some 
 intelhgent 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 themseh'cs as the remains of a chateau in 
 the later French sense, or perhaps only of its outhouses. 
 The modem chdteait, 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 
 cast, there is some ground rather higher than the 
 village itself; but we .sec 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 cJidtcaii, which has taken the place 
 
ITAUTEVILLR-LA-GUICHARD 9V 
 
 of a chdtcau-fort. And, hard by, some of our company 
 are led, perhaps by their noses, to an undoubted ditch, 
 though not exactly a follow of Arquos, 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 
 Gloiicestcrshire 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 unsavour}' 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 b}- 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 clefensahilis," 
 as distinguished from the castle. And, as the famous 
 one at Brionne, which so long defied the arms of Duke 
 
 H 
 
98 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 William, is defined as " aula lapidea," ^ it seems implied 
 that a " domus defcnsabilis " might be only " lirjnca." 
 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 wo 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 gi-eat width, compassing 
 a square field, is a poor find after the hopes %\T.th 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 chdtcau. It may be then — we 
 hope it is not so, but it ma}- be — that it was ^vithin 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 chil- 
 dren ; that was the reason whj' they went to seek their 
 ' See Nonitan Ouiujuasl, vol. ii. pp. 261, 607, 
 
HAUTEVILLE-LA-GUICHARD 99 
 
 fortunes so far off. If they had stayed at home, the 
 estate might possibly have grown ; for we are told by 
 their own biograjiher that it was the nature of the sons 
 of Tancred, when they saw that anybody else had any- 
 thing, to take it to themselves. Perhaps this dangerous 
 tendency extended only to misbelievers, schismatics, or 
 at least men of other tongues. Othei'wise 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 Gaily Knight's, but it is only the 
 Norman book. But he ^vrote another book, in which 
 the house of Hauteville f)lays 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. 
 
 H 2 
 
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 w^e 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, 
 
MORTAIN AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 101 
 
 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 Morlain, Morc- 
 tolium or Moretoniwn, 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 
 i-egion which does not aspire to the sublimity of moun- 
 tain 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 towTi itself in a strange way suggests 
 Taormina. It stands in somewhat the same sort on a 
 kind of ledge on a hillside, with higher hills rising 
 behind it. But while Taormina looks straight do^vn on 
 the Ionian Sea, Mortain looks down only on the narrow 
 dale of the little river Cancc, with its steep banks 
 
102 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 overhang- 
 ing 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 Ai'changel 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 Demeter 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 Gregor}' of Tours still knew as abiding on the 
 Puy de Dome 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 jDroj action of 
 a bold peninsular rock, joined by a kind of isthmus to 
 the main hill on which the town stands. Here stood 
 
MORTAIN AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 103 
 
 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 commonl}' 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 clidtemi, that is, on the 
 site of the clidteaif,-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 
 
104 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MA[NE 
 
 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 
 mediaeval 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.^ 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 umrlocJc 
 which Gibbon saw to a wiseacre in the surname of 
 Robert Wiscard. We have also a natural curiosity to 
 ' See Nunnan Conqtiest, vol. ii. p. 287. 
 
MORTAIN AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 105 
 
 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 
 Warliag too was the first recorded Bigod.^ That is, he 
 was the first who bore that name as a surname ; for 
 Normans in general were scoffed at by Frenchmen 
 as higods, bigots, — never mind the spelling or the mean- 
 ing — and also as driakers 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.^ 
 
 The West-Saxon knew Count Robert only as a 
 spoiler, the Norman of Mortain knew him as a great 
 
 1 See Norman Conquest, vol. ii. p. 288. 
 
 2 See Nonnan 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. 
 
106 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 chinxh first and then founded the 
 canons to serve in it. There was a time — it seems not 
 so very long ago — when Gaily Knight had to fight 
 against people who believed that the present church 
 was of Count Robert's o\\'n building. So to believe 
 was indeed one degree less grotesque than to believe 
 that the far more advanced church of Coutances was 
 earlier still. Gaily 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 
 
MORTAIN AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 107 
 
 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 ex- 
 treme 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 un- 
 touched 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 
 mth'out, Mortain may pass for Bourges in small. And, 
 just as at Bourges, the external outline is less satisfac- 
 tory 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 centi-al tower of 
 a great Norman church could not be ; but neither has 
 
108 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 Saint Evi-oul the two Western towers of Saint-Lo and 
 Seez ; the arrangement designed was rather a develop- 
 ment 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 good- 
 ness 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 
 
MORTAIN AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 109 
 
 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 I'Ahhatje 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 Gaily 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 
 chm-ch carries Cistercian severity to its extremest 
 point. One thinks of Kirkstall ; but Kirkstall, plain as 
 it is, drew majesty from its grand and simj)le 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.^ 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 
 
 1 See Mr. Freeman's account of Kirk.stall in Enrjlish Toxnis 
 and Districts, p. 294. 
 
110 TRAVELS IN N(JRMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 re- 
 mains of the cloister have small single shafts, not the 
 Saracenic coupling to which we have got used in Italy, 
 Sicil}^ 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 ver}' 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 con- 
 tending 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.^ 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 
 ' See p. 119, 
 
MORTATN AND ITS SURROUNDINGS 111 
 
 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 North- 
 amptonshire. 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. Mor- 
 tain 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 
 
MORTAIN TO ARGENTAN 113 
 
 side and of no great height. We would foin 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 penin- 
 sular 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, wc imagine, 
 is as old as other j^laces ; but there seems to be nothing 
 to say about it. It has no church of any importance, it 
 has a respectable castle of late mcdiajval 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 
 
 I 
 
114 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 
 Fontairic dc Fatry. 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 our- 
 selves that we have lighted on the site. He who has 
 read Wace's story of Duke William's ride from Valognes 
 and of his gi'eeting by Hubert of Rye will remember 
 h(jw Hubert was standing " entre le moutier et la 
 mottc." ' 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 gTound with a slope to 
 tlie south-east, we run do\vn a lane and into a field to 
 the north-west, and there find a charming site for the 
 ' Nunnan Gonqucsl, vol. ii, p. 246, 
 
MORTAIN TO ARGENTAN 115 
 
 " motte." The little hill rises with a fair amuunt 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.^ 
 
 But Tinchebray is much more than La Lande-Patr}', 
 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.^ England had been won bj^ 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 Hemy's host was most likely far more 
 largely Norman — specially West-Norman — than Eng- 
 lish ; the chief men above all were Norman ; still there 
 
 1 See Norman Conquest, vol. iii. p. 466. 
 
 2 See Norman Gonqued, vol. v. p. 175. 
 
 I 2 
 
116 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 were Englishmen in it, and those EngUshmen 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 ; wo 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 wo shall not find a castle standing up as at 
 Falaise. 
 
 The railway takes us from Flers to Montsecret junc- 
 tion, 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 }"et 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, Stii'ling, 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 Black- 
 
MORTAIN TO ARGENTAN 117 
 
 water, which gives a surname to that Conde 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 withdra^iMi to a greater dis- 
 tance ; 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 gi-adually 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 jaitched 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 j^oints, 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 contemjjorary 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 Abbi^ L. V. 
 Dumaine (Paris: 1883). It is a book most praise- 
 worthy for bringing together all manner of local facts 
 
118 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 of all manner of dates. And it is full of plans and 
 2]lales to illustrate jDarticular 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 Belk- 
 Noe, and on the hill on the opposite site of the valley 
 was Bcaulieu. 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 Henrv''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 under- 
 standing what we want to understand. In other lines all 
 that Tinehubray has to show is a desecrated fragment of 
 
MORTAIN TO ARGENTAN 119 
 
 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 in- 
 clined to assign it to a time a good bit earlier than the 
 day of Tinchebra}'. 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 Pevense}-. 
 
 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 Landc-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 
 
120 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 tho 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. Onl3' 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 armj^, with William 
 of Mortain and the terrible Robert of Belleme, must have 
 gone round to some other point. The name of Champ 
 Hcnrict, borne by a site to the west of the town, therefore 
 awa}' from the castle, does not seem to prove much. The 
 north side seems to furnish the best fighting-gi-ound, 
 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 English- 
 
MORTAIN TO ARGENTAN 121 
 
 mun and their King-, and the fiohting 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 ^theling who had 
 marched on York with Waltheof and Mserleswegen now 
 marched on Tinchebray with William of Mortain and 
 Robert of Belleme. 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 gi-andson 
 of ^thelred, born in Hungary, and fighting along- 
 side 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 Belleme, no longer of Shrewsbury or Arundel. 
 With King Henry came the Count of Maine, Helias of 
 La Fleche. 
 
122 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 Oi'deric 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 Anglo- 
 rum," 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 im- 
 mediate command had in some sort to become English- 
 men 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 gi'ound, 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 foi'ce till Count Helias, with 
 his reserve, chose a happy moment and bi'oke in on their 
 
MORTAIN TO ARGENTAN 123 
 
 assailants witli his horsemen. The lord of Belleme 
 fled for his life ; the Duke of the Normans and the 
 Count of Mortain became the prisoners of their con- 
 queror 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 fete was equally hard. 
 But Henry was far too Avdse to commit so useless a 
 crime. The captive Duke spent the remaining twenty- 
 eight years of his life in this castle, and that, treated 
 vfith all honour, but kept under such restraint as was 
 needful, sjDecially 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 
 ease as Henry III. was at the hands of Earl Simon. 
 To be carefully looked after at Bristol or Cardiff must 
 have been didl 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 crowired 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 
 
124 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 age as to bo a pensioner of Henry II., (jr whctlier 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 
 Tenarccbrai is -written in our own Chronicles ; so is that 
 of Argcntscs ; only is that really Argentan or only 
 Ai-gences ? 
 
ARGENTAN 
 
 1892 
 
 A GOOD many of the places which we go through on 
 such a journey as we are now taking in Western 
 Normand}', 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 anti- 
 quarian 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 dc 
 Bou. Even at Tinchebraj' the strictly historic interest 
 is all. Unless we except that single arcade on the 
 tower of St. Remigius, there is really nothing memor- 
 able to show in the shape of either church or castle. 
 With Ai-gentan the case is different. Any one who 
 has a turn for mediaeval 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 to\\Ti itself is remarkable, and 
 
126 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 its existing monuments are of various kinds and in- 
 structive 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 Seez, and for what will to most peoj)le be 
 the less familiar names of Exmos and Almeneches, 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 eccle- 
 siastical foundation ; such importance as it has in 
 history seems to have come from the presence of a 
 castle which not uncommonly received princely so- 
 journers. 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 groat 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 arc surprised to find that 
 
ARGENTAN 127 
 
 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 Ai-gentan ; 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 fclsen, 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 Ai'gentan does not at once lead us to some Gaidish 
 tribe or to some Roman prince ; but it does not, like 
 that of Falaise, at once carry its owIlJ meaning with it 
 in the speech of some or other of the Teutonic con- 
 querors 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 chapclh 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 Ai-gentan therefore to be set doAvn 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 
 sci'uple may be felt by one who has come from Saint- 
 Lo, from Coutances, or from Avranches. Yet the 
 
128 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 o^vvn 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 to'wns, 
 outstripped its boundaries ; it spread itself in whatever 
 directions suited its inhabitants ; lastly, the suburbs 
 which thus grew uj) were taken into the towTi, 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, 
 Lc Vicil Argentan, by M. Eugene Vimont, it is distinctly 
 asserted that the case is the other way. The wider 
 circuit, lie 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 
 ))y William of Jumieges. But M. Vimont's inference 
 
ARGENTAN 129 
 
 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 
 Perigueux, 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.^ 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, haA'^e 
 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 to\vns. 
 
 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, 
 ■ See Historierd Essays, Fourth Series, pp. 1.39, 140. 
 
 K 
 
130 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 that the narrower circuit, taking in only the higher 
 erounfl 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. Some- 
 what lower down is the chdteau, 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 neighbour- 
 
ARGENTAN 131 
 
 hood, both inner and outer, are still standing; and near 
 the chdtcKu is the desecrated chapel of Saint Nicolas, 
 keeping some good windows. 
 
 The chateau, 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 centi'al and western 
 towers, though the central tower of Saint German's 
 is not octagonal, but square. But the western tower at 
 Arffentan 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 i-eceived their last finish after the 
 days of pure Gothic had passed away, is essentially the 
 
 K 2 
 
132 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 grossc to%m\ 
 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 jmssed, but which has no distinctly He- 
 naissancc 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 Hildebcrt of 
 Le Mans to pull down his pair of newly built towers.^ 
 The liindrance 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 3'ears, 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 
 1 See p. 208. 
 
ARGENTAN 133 
 
 large panelled triforiura 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 
 jjanel work of the time. The transepts are of the same 
 style. They are finished north and south with apses, 
 which arc 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 
 
134 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 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 mthout a single 
 correct Gothic detail. Here not only the conception, 
 but the great mass of the internal detail, is piurely 
 Gothic ; the new fashion thrusts itself in only in par- 
 ticular parts. 
 
 This last remark is specially true of the smaller 
 church of Argentan, that of Saint Martin. Here we 
 
ARGENTAN 135 
 
 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 23eculiarity 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 
 Saiat German, simply a matter of detail, an arrange- 
 ment 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 ap- 
 proaches, and it has its lesson to tell in the history of 
 art. 
 
 One is surprised to hear that in the old days Argentan 
 
136 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 had but a single ci07'd, 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 Argeutan, only it is in quite 
 another wa}-. 
 
 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 mediaeval 
 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 Notrc-Dame de la Place. We relieve 
 ourselves by finding fault with M. Vimont, who 
 
ARGENTAN 137 
 
 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 
 Belleme, 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 Argcntscs, which Florence of 
 Worcester translates by Argentinum castrum} 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 Ai'gentan 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 
 ^ See The Reign of William Rnfus, vol. i. pp. 463, 464. 
 
138 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 England to Henry the Fourth of TSTavarre and France. 
 The traveller is most likely to sojourn at the Hotel 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 Hotel chi 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 ALMEN^ICHES 
 
 1892 
 
 ExMES and Almeneches; one fancies that those 
 names will sound strange to almost any one save those 
 who have been lately reading the eleventh book of 
 Ordeiic the Englishman. Exmes indeed is one of those 
 unlucky places which, even in the year 1891, remain 
 without the comfort of a railway. But Almeneches 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 Almeneches too one may go on one's o^Ya account ; 
 each place makes a pleasant drive from Ai-gentan. 
 There is nothing very striking on the road to either, but 
 the road to Almeneches 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 
 
140 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 has outlived the fortress. And this is more to be 
 noticed at Almeneches, 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 f)lace. In special Norman 
 history Exmes, under some or other of the forms of its 
 name, Oximum, Hicsmcs, anything else, often shows 
 itself; its early importance is noticed by its giving 
 its name to the large district, Prt/7«s Oxinicnsis, Oivmrix, 
 Hiesmsis. And the Oxiincnses are sometimes spoken of 
 in a special way, as if they were a distinct people, 
 capable of acting for themselves. Of Almeneches we 
 hardly hear anything but at one particidar moment, 
 and then we hear of Exmes along with it. 
 
 In short, the history of Almeneches, as far as we are 
 concerned with it, might be summed up under a sen- 
 sational 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 owti 
 brother. She was daughter of Roger of Montgomery, 
 afterwards Earl of two shires in England, and of his 
 first wife, Mabel of Bellenie, 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 Belleme who is 
 
EXMES AND ALMENfeCHES 141 
 
 charged with a ci-ime 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 there- 
 fore not have been wholly unfit for the post in which 
 she was set when her father put her at the head of his 
 newty 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 j'ear 
 1102, when hei' brother Robert was hai:)pily driven out 
 of England, with his brothers and his whole followings 
 and belongino's. It mis'ht 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 fore.stalling, not the Eighth of his 
 name, but the Fifth. We did not want alien priories 
 in England. Robert came back to his native Nor- 
 mandy, 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. ^ 
 Roger the Poitcvin, so called from his marriage, had 
 ' See The Beign of William Bnfiis, vol. ii. p. 96. 
 
142 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 been lord of that land between Mersey and Kibble, 
 which afterwards went to patch up the modern shire of 
 Lancaster. Presently the brothers (puirre'lled, Robert 
 of Bellenie 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 Almeneches, 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 theii' horses in the 
 church. Then Robert of Bclleme, looking on the abbey 
 as a hostile fortress, comes do^vn on Almeneches, bums 
 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 ; the}' are killed, 
 mutilated, or kept in hard bonds. Robert of Belleme, 
 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 tp-ant — " odihilis 
 tyrannus " he is called, a phrase in which we must 
 not forget the ancient sense of " tyrannus." i Counts 
 
 1 On the fcii'ce of the word tyrant see History of Su-ily, vol. ii. 
 p. TiO. 
 
EXMES AND ALMEN^CHES 143 
 
 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 tyi-ant ; 
 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 virginunl conventus 
 misere dispersus est." Some sought shelter with 
 kinsfolk and friends. The Abbess herself and three 
 nuns went to Saint-Evxoul, 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 Almeneches 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.^ 
 ' See above, p. 12.3. 
 
144 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 Our present business is to see the sites of all these 
 events. We hardly dared to ho^Je 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 Belleme seized on standing up as they 
 were in their day. Both Exmes and Almeneches, 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 ban-ack 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 
 
EXMES AND ALMENECIIES 146 
 
 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 st;md, 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.. Wc 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, wc have called 
 a ditch. But it is safer to say that the hillside 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 hillside at different points supplies a bank on 
 the other side. It is on the side towards the to\\'n 
 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 luther go away 
 
 L 
 
146 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 
 iVi'gentan than from the top of the hill itself The eye 
 ranges over a \'ast space chiefly to the north-west, over 
 the great forest of Gouffers, o\ev plains and undulating 
 ground, a wide ami striking \'iew, but in which no 
 remarkable object rises up to catch the eye. We look 
 forth with the special hojjo of getting a distant glimpse 
 uf 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 out see it from Exmes. 
 
 The other object in the little to^\Ti of Exmes, now 
 hardly moie 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 trom what it has to show and from what it has 
 not. At first sight it seems utterly shapeless. What 
 
EXMES AND ALMENECHES 147 
 
 first catches the eye is a very pretty apse of good 
 Flamboyant worlc, 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 some- 
 thing j list 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 Pi-imitive traces 
 hanging about it, such as we see at Jumieges. 
 
 The perfection of the Norman nave seems to have 
 
 L 2 
 
148 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 been tampered with in later days bj' 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 dovm. 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, cei'tainly 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- 
 \ault 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 de- 
 .signers alwaj-s meant or hoped to have a vault ; the 
 \vooden 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 
 
EXMES AND ALMENECHES 149 
 
 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 Almeneches 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 to'wn 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 o^vn 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 Almeneches, 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 Almeneches, 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 cle la Motte," 
 which has a very tempting sound. On the ordnance 
 map we can find nothing of this manor ; but we do 
 find " Almeneches " and " le Chateau d' Almeneches " 
 marked as two distinct cmmmcnes. This is encouraging ; 
 we seem to have lighted on what at home we should 
 call " Abbess Almeneches " and " Castle Almeneches." 
 
150 TRAVELS IN NORMAKDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 roach Almeneches, Abbess 
 Almeneches, 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 merel}' a 
 parish church, and have we to look for the abbey else- 
 where ? 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 Almeneches boasts of its church ; 
 but it doth flilsely 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 est^ ruine par I'aiitiquit^ fut commence 
 ii reeilifier I'a" de grace 15.34 et fut perfaict I'a" 1550 par 
 revere^dc dame Madame Loyse de Silly abbesse de cea^s. 
 Gloirc et hon''. soyt au .seigneur." 
 
 Loui.se of Silljf'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 
 
EXMES AND ALMENfiCHES 151 
 
 Matildas — in 1674 That is the lowest depth of all ; it 
 is the dejDth 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 
 unifoniis and — we were going to say modern bonnets, 
 only we are told that the bonnets of 1S49 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 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 Chateau d'Almeneches. Our driver pro- 
 tests that there is no chateau there, only a commune. 
 So much the better. If there is no chcUecm there in 
 his sense, that is, no intruding modern house, we are 
 more likely to find the site of the real chateau, the 
 
152 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 munitio. And we presently do find it. We are geing 
 on in some difficulties, amidst a good deal of rain ; but 
 we see something in a field by the roadside, between 
 Almeneches and the chiu-ch of Le Chateau d'Almen- 
 eches 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 I'ain has stoj)ped, and we are able to 
 study our mound and ditch without let or hindrance. 
 Here is the castle, the munitio, of Almeneches, whence 
 the Duke's followers first troubled Abbess Emma. But 
 yet more, here is Joanne's " hcau iumulm " thro^vn 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 chdteau 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 cleaidy the "hcau 
 timiulus." ^^'e do not like to be too positive about 
 prtc-historic tumps, but this certainly looks very like 
 
EXMES AND ALMENECHES 153 
 
 one. Indeed it need not be pi'iT-histrji-ic, 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 pro23er ; 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 Almeneches. 
 We understand the scene of the f)etty war which drove 
 Abbess Emma to Saint-Evi-oul. 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.Exmos 
 thro^vn in eV irapep'ya). 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 
 Rillc that runs out to flow by Brionne and the Bee of 
 Herlouin. We choose it as a halting-place less from 
 any merits of its OAvn 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 s<i many in England to understand that 
 these Norman to-svns 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 
 railwa}^ is open. There is the reno\vned Bishop William 
 of Durham in the days of the Conqueror and the Red 
 
LATGLE AND SATNT-EVROUL 155 
 
 King, the greatest name in the history of Romanesque 
 art. He is Wilhlmus de Sando Carilefo, just like 
 William of Malmesbury or William of Newburgh, 
 simply because he had been monk and prior in the 
 monastery of Sandus 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'Aiglc 
 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 
 
156 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 Arimathsea " ; 
 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 imj^lj-ing 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 Con- 
 queror, 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 couu-adcs, and died. 
 
LAIGLE AND SAINT-EVROUL 157 
 
 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 some- 
 thing of an eagle's nest. But alas, when we reach 
 Laigle from Argentan, we find that, with all its liistoric 
 associations, it is in itself far from being a town of the 
 same interest as Argentan. The jiosition of the twcj 
 is quite different. The chief building.s of Argentan 
 cover a small hill in the midst of scenery in no wa}- 
 strongly marked. Laigle covers the slope of the hill 
 which forms one side of the valley of the J'oung Rillc, 
 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 thei-e is nothing more 
 to see. The large brick house known as h vieux chateau, 
 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 
 fi-om castle and church, has little or nothing to show ; 
 
158 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 some- 
 thing, one hardly knows what, a ^-ery 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 Roman- 
 esque 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 bo 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 cast ends of the northern and southern 
 bodies, of which the northern takes the form of a kind 
 
LAIGLE AND SAINT-EVROUL 159 
 
 of transept. They are in the worst stjde of the late 
 French Gothic, with windows of the same wretched 
 Perpendicular as those of Almeneches. 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 sec 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 
 chdteau 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 com- 
 paratively little harm. Or rather we cherish a hope 
 that the vietu: chdteau may not be the true castrum dc 
 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 
 
160 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 than the centre itself. There are the famous border 
 castles of Verneuil and Tillieres, 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-E\Toul, even the 
 road seems too modern. It is essentially a place of pil- 
 grimage, not a Canterbury pilgrimage, lint 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 E\Toul; we do think first of all of Orderic 
 the Englishman, called in religion Vital.i 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 fi-o, 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 
 \ery liard to find out whether his home had anything 
 lelt to show us. Not a word could we find in any 
 ^ See above, pp. 110, 119. 
 
LAIGLE AND SAINT-EYROUL ICl 
 
 guide-book to say whether the abbey was living oi- 
 ruined or desecrated or wholly swept away. It might 
 be as unlucky as Avranches or as lucky as Saint Petcr- 
 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-E\TOul 
 a church in which Orderic may have worshipped, but it 
 would be better to find a later church — we had almost 
 said one mth 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 mil at least see the place where the Ecclesiastical 
 History of Normandy was ^^^■itten. One little incident 
 of the journey may be mentioned. We reached Saint- 
 E^TOul ; we saw more of Saint-Evr(jurs Abbey than ^ve 
 had ventured to hope that we should find there. But 
 before we reached it our driver stopped neai- a house 
 and buildings which seemed in no way attractive. 
 Asked why he stopped there, he said that that was 
 where the landlady at Laigle had told him to stop. There 
 were the great glass-works for which Saint-E\T.'oul is 
 now best knowTi. And it was the Saint-E\Toul 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 fethor and an English 
 
 M 
 
](i2 TUAYET.S TN KORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 mother, born by the banks of the Severn ten years after 
 King William came into England, in the year of the 
 martjTdom 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 child- 
 hood. He was sent in his childhood to be a monk 
 of Saint-Evronl ;i 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. Him.self 
 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, 
 1 See Norman Conquest, vol. iv. p. 496 
 
LATGLE AND SATNT-EVrvOl'L 163 
 
 like Joseph in Egypt hearing a strange language, ever 
 stopped to think of the true meaning of his patron's 
 name, how the softened Ehrulfm and Evroul disguised 
 the two fierce beasts which went to make up the name 
 of Eofommlf. 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 Sarconica, 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 Chai-en- 
 ton, 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 o-svn day in 
 the railway station, The church of the monastery is a 
 
 M 2 
 
1C4 THAYELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 mere ruin ; but it at least stands oix-n to the sk}' ; 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- 
 E\i-onl 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 ej-es 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 cliurch 
 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. 1 We would fain see the cloister where in 
 Orderic's day, King Henry of England, victor of Tinche- 
 bray, 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 ap- 
 proach to peace and order into a land torn in pieces 
 by noble brigands. Hopes of this kind, hojDes of any 
 immediate memory of the days of Orderic or of days 
 ' See Nonaan Co7iquest, vol. ii. p. 227. 
 
LAIGLE A?s^D SAINT-EVROUL 165 
 
 before Oi'deric 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 sec 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 gi-eat 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 choii- was of some length, and its length was 
 brcjken 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 dowai, 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 
 
l(iG TRA^'ELS IN KURMANDY AXD MAINE 
 
 happens in Norniand}', as well and deef)ly cut as they 
 would be in England. Above the arcade was a tall 
 clerestory, seemingly without any triforium or with the 
 triforium thro^vn into the clerestory. Altogether there 
 is about enough left to suggest the memory of Glaston- 
 bury, though Saint-EvToul 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 
 HoljTOod, 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 tike 
 Peterborough to suggest Peterborough, but also to 
 suggest the contrast between Peterborough and itself. 
 At Peterborough the great portico stands indeed, as 
 here, in ad\'ance of a west front with two towers. But it 
 may be said to have supplanted that front. One tower 
 was 2iever finished ; the other was thrown into insigni- 
 ficance. The portico is of the full height, and became 
 the real \vest 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. 
 
LAIGLE AND SAINT-EVROLL KIT 
 
 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 OAvner 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 o-wn abbey. For a little chapel 
 has been made mthin 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 gi-eat 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 Grant- 
 mesnil had still a less famous, but perhaps less unquiet 
 successor. 
 
TILLIERES AND VERNEUIL 
 
 1892 
 
 Our second excursion from Laigle has quite another 
 liind of interest from that of Saint-Evroul. We go 
 in(jrc strictly to .see places, and not as it were to com- 
 mune with a single man. And the places that we go 
 to see are primarily militaiy, and not ecclesiastical. 
 We do not go for a great church, not knowing whether 
 we shall find it jJerfect 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 Tillieres and Verneuil, both easily 
 reached by railway from our central point at Laigle, 
 and which by a more roundabout way, may be reached 
 from EvTCux also. Tillieres is famous in the early wars of 
 N(jrmandy and France. Verneuil is best known in the 
 days when Normandy had become the battle ground of 
 England and France, and when Scotland thr(n\- herself 
 
TILLIKRES AND YERNEUIL 169 
 
 on the French side. As a matter of flict, -we saw Verneuil 
 first ; we then went on to Tillieres, and thence back to 
 Laigle, getting of course a second clear view of ^'erneuil 
 by the way. But it Avill be more convenient to speak 
 first of the pUice of more ancient fame. 
 
 Tillieres, Tillieres 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 
 Alen^on.hc tells us that one side of the water was Norman 
 and the other side was Mausel. So here at Tillieres one 
 side of the water was Norman and the other side was 
 ■French. But the stream of Arve at Tillieres is so much 
 narrower than the stream of Sarthe at Alen^on that 
 French and Norman stood much nearer together at 
 Tillieres than Mansel and Norman stood at Alen(,-on. 
 Alen(^on again, as far as its history goes back, has 
 always been a considerable town. Tillieres is now a 
 mere village, except so far as so many of these "\ illages 
 put on the character of very small towns. But town or 
 \'illage, Tillieres is simply something ^\■hich has grown 
 up at the foot of the castle, while at Alen^on one might 
 say that one object at least of the castle was to defend 
 the town. There is high gi-ound 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 fur the building of the great border- 
 fortress of Nomiandy. A few dwellings of men, dependants 
 
170 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 Tillieres, 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. Tillieres 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 Tillieres 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. Tillieres, Tegulense 
 castrum, bears a name cognate with the Keramcikos 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 Tillieres — 
 one would liki; to know its exact shape in those days — 
 
TILLIERES AND VERNEUIL 171 
 
 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 Tillieres 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 Tillieres — 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-forti'ess 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 ho burned 
 Argentan, and came back to fortify Tillieres again as a 
 bulwark of France against Normandy.^ Time passed 
 on. King Henry fought with Duke William at Val-es- 
 dunes, and fled before him at Varaville ; and, as a fruit 
 of the last Norman victory, Tillieres 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 
 1 Sec Nviinan Cunqnetit, vol. ii. pp. 201-203. 
 
172 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 more at Tillieres to describe than there actually is. We 
 should be best pleased of all if the castle hill of Tillieres 
 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 Almeneches. But the height is taken 
 possession of by a house of much more pretension than 
 the harmless farm at Almeneches, and the joassing way- 
 farer 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 Tillieres 
 station, the general relations of castle, \'illage, stream, 
 and the once hostile hills beyond, can be well taken in ; 
 but not much more than the genei-al relations. And 
 the village has little to show beyond its church ; and 
 there the Romanesque doorwa}' is the choicest thing, as 
 being part of our chain of e\'idence. But it seems not 
 to be on this ground that the church of Tillieres is 
 counted among " historic monuments," that is, forbidden 
 to be ])ulled aboiit 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 i.s about as 
 poor a jumble of bad Gijthic and bad Italian as can well 
 be thought of; within it has a somewhat better effect 
 with a vaidt and rich pendants. Still they are nothing 
 
TTLLTKRES ANT) VERNEUTL IT.T 
 
 like so sti-ikino- as those in Saint Gervase at Falaisc, 
 which do realljr 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 e}'c from Somerset looks kindl}' 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 bettor 
 coved roofs at home, and he wonders wh}-, if the coved 
 shaped was chosen, a sj'stem of South-Saxon tie-beams 
 and king-posts was thrust in as well. 
 
 We turn to the other famous border-fortress of 
 Verneuil. Hero the position, as a position, is in no 
 way to be compared to that of Tillieres ; but, we have 
 one grand military tower ; we have a much larger to\\'n, 
 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 
 Tillieres. It is not so close on the border ; for here 
 Normandj' 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 Tillieres 
 did, the fortress was not placed on a height at all, but 
 in the lower part of the town, to guard the stream. 
 
174 TRAVELS TN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 There is a distinct ascent in Verneuil ; but nothing like 
 the slope at Tilli^res 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, com- 
 pletely demolished ; there is a considerable fragment 
 standing very near. The donjon, called locally Tour- 
 grise 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 re- 
 stored 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 Tillieres; 
 
TTLLTKRRS AND VERNKUIL 175 
 
 but this seems out of the question, as the small door- 
 ways — 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 alwaj's 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 to^vn. 
 Here is the gi-and tower, built between 1506 and L530, 
 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 
 
170 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 re- 
 building 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 iictagon more importance, as in most of the other 
 great examples, French and English, starting with 
 Boston stump. It is further complained, and the com- 
 plaint is true, that the upper part of the scjuare tower 
 looks top-heav}'. 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-hea\-iness 
 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 
 
TILLIERES AND YERNEUIL 177 
 
 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 tu\ver 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 clerestor}'. Of the 
 nave we hardly know what to s&y. As it stands, it is 
 plainly modern ; the great round pillai's arc 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 grou]3ed 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 Conferences," 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 
 
 N 
 
178 TRAA^ELS TN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 of ecclesiastical work in Verneuil, besides the Magdalen 
 tower, is the choir of the church of Our Lad}^ 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 pro- 
 jecting from the aisle ; and the ^'aried 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 memoi'ies are 
 pleasing. A\'e purpose to look at it once more before 
 we finally turn away from Verneuil ; but good inten- 
 tions are not always carried out. Let us dream of 
 another Ar^'ernian journey, so planned as to take 
 Vernevul on the road. 
 
BEAUMONT-LE-ROGER 
 
 1892 
 
 The name of Roger of Beaumont must be well 
 kno^vn to any who have studied the details of the 
 Norman Conquest of England, though Roger's o\ra 
 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. 
 
 N 2 
 
180 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 He was not always Roger of Beaumont; he first 
 appears as Roger, son of Humfrey cle Vctulis. One 
 learns one's map of Normandy by degrees. The de- 
 sciij^tion 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. Perhajos 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 to^\'Tl, we pass through the 
 faulou.rg of Les Vieilks. How it came by the name we 
 need not ask ; the name was there and is there, and we 
 see that Humfrey de Vchdis is simply Humfrey of Les 
 Vieilles. We see that here do'ftTi 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 
 
BEAri\rONT-LP;-ROGER 181 
 
 day. At Hauteville we conld simply guess at the sput 
 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 
 glorioiis holder of his earldom.^ 
 
 We walk from the station with the Bcllus lions 
 TjA-Ainly before us in a general wa)^ 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 jiromontory 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 chou's, 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 
 Avould be something precious. It would rank with 
 1 See The Eeinn of IVllUnm Riifus, vol, i, p. 184, 
 
182 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 Duchess Judith's Abbey at Bernay, with the long and 
 massive nave of the church at Brcteuil, in which, not- 
 Avithstanding 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 con- 
 ceptions 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 abbe}', of which we shall presentl}' 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 ; 
 
BEAUlNrONT-LE-ROGETJ 183 
 
 and so in a sonso 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 moimd and 
 ditch plainly enough. But we do not take in their full 
 grandeur, till we are kindly admitted within the gate 
 t if one of the small holdings into \\'hich the site of the 
 fortress of Roger's rearing is now cut up. Then we see, 
 indeed, why it was that " Rogerius de ^'etulis " \\as 
 changed into " Rogerius de Bello Monte." 
 
 It is, indeed, a " bellus mons " in the sense of com- 
 manding 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 " hilhts 
 mons" we were to understand a fair natural hill, wo 
 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 artificialljr cut off from the 
 general mass. The founder chose a point of the hill- 
 side which suited his objects. Its southern face, towards 
 the ojoen countr}', was steep enough for purposes of 
 defence ; for the rest, he cut off the piece of gi'ound 
 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. Lilybjeum stands 
 
]S4 TRAVELS TN NORMAKDY ANT) MAINE 
 
 .apart ; Rog'cr 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 do\vn 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 horso-shoe quite as far as it goes ; but the top 
 of the mound — if mound is the right word — is perfectlj^ 
 free. There are fragments of masonry left everywhere, hut 
 there is no continuous wall an3'where, 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 lauds. But it comes much more 
 nearly to an eagle's nest than the home of any lord of 
 Laiglc who dwelled at Laigle. The exact ground-plan 
 Mr. Clark, and few besides Mr. Clark, could make out. 
 But without making out the exact gTound-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 
 saintc cluqxlle 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-LE-ROOETl 185 
 
 Beaumont had come into tlio hands of French 
 kings, and had begun to be granted out as a comU- 
 2iairic for their sons. But, seemingly before that time, 
 which did not come till the fourteenth century, a build- 
 ing arose which is not exactly a sainte chapclle within 
 the castle, but which is very near to the castle, and 
 which has Yery much the air of a sainte cJuqjeUc. When 
 we speak of a sainte chapellc we, of course, mean a sainte 
 cJiapelle anywhere, whether at Riom, Paris, or anywhere 
 else. This building is the abbey church of Beaumont, 
 which stands just belr)w the castle on the hill-side, 
 a building once evidently of remarkable beauty. Per- 
 haps 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 presentlj' 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 
 23erished 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 
 
186 TRAVRTiS IN NORIMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 ai'o thoro, 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 jiattern of the Angels' Choir at Lincoln. The 
 whole of tlie W(jrk that i-emains is of the best French 
 Earl)' 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 ^\'indows 
 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 promi- 
 nent of the two. We can see at least a piece of it, 
 while we have to guess at the castle ; none of its frag- 
 ments stand out at any distance. Yet, even looking 
 thus, the abbey seems something subordinate, some- 
 thing 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 pro- 
 claims the separate being of the towTi of Beaumont. 
 The town of Beaumont doubtless sprang up because of 
 tlic presence of the castle ; but it sprang up by an inde- 
 pendent growth ; it was not the personal creation of 
 an}' of its lords, The abbey, on the other hand, placed 
 
BEAU]\rONT-LE-ROGETl 187 
 
 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 chm-ches. The abbey of Beaumont is very 
 beautiful, while the abbey of Almeneches is very ugly ; 
 yet Almeneches comes one degree nearer than Beau- 
 mont to one's ordinary notion of an abbey chiucli. 
 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 abbe}'. It was, in fact, a 
 jjious and artistic fancy ; while not, in strictness of 
 description, a saints cJuq^ellc 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 
 Brantome far away in Perigord;' it has nothing in 
 common with a typical abbey church like Saint-Evroul, 
 except the accident of being much of tlie 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 
 ■ See Skeh-hes from French Tniirl, p. 2C0. 
 
18S TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 pretty thirteenth-century tower. But the church is a 
 more 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 
 jiarish church of Lcs 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 Lad3'-chapel. We go back after 
 thirty j-ears to find the chm-ch 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 ^\'ith 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 rest<irod 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 
 everjr real shaft and every real capital, and put imitation 
 shafts and capitals in their stead. And that might be 
 c\'en worse than the wooden beams, 
 
JUBLAINS 
 
 1876 
 
 We know not how far the name of Silchester may be 
 kno%vii among Frenchmen, but we suspect that the 
 name of Jublains is very little known among English- 
 men. The two places certainly yevy nearly answer 
 to one another in the two countries. Both alike ai'e 
 buried Roman to^\ms whose sites had been forsaken, 
 or occupied only by small villages ; both have suj^plied 
 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 wc can do is to make 
 out the Roman names; we have no record of the 
 history of cither.^ The names which the two places 
 now bear respectively illustrate the rules of French 
 and English nomenclature. Silchester proclaims itself 
 
 1 See Mr. Freeman's article on " Silchester " in Emjlish Tonus 
 ((ltd Districts, p. 159. 
 
100 TRAVELS IK NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 by its English name to have been a Roman castrum, 
 but it keeps no trace of its Roman name of Calleva. 
 But NiBodunum 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 
 Jublaiiis traces of Jules and of hains ; but a moment's 
 thoTight will show that the name is a natural corruj)tion 
 of Diablintes. The name is spelled several ways, of 
 which Jitblains is now the one iu vogue ; but another 
 form, JuUent, better brings out its origin. As for the 
 two places themselves, Jublains and Silchester, each of 
 them has its points in which it surjDasses the other. At 
 Silchester there is the town-wall, nearly perfect through- 
 out 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 Caesar. 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 oAvnership 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 
 
JUBL.MNS 191 
 
 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 airy time to be -wdse, 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 Archjeological Society ; the theatre is the 
 property of M. Henri Barbc, 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 clanger. But it is of course impossible 
 to dig up the whole place in the same waj' as Silchestcr 
 has been dug ujj. 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 Maj-enne, on 
 the road between the towns of Ma3'enne and Evron. 
 The site was, as the local historian well points out, 
 
192 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 Constantino and Armorican peninsulas. It stands 
 on a gently sloping height, with a wide view over the 
 flatter land to the south, and ONcr the Cenomannian 
 hills more to the east, the peak of Montaigu, namesake 
 of our own Montacute, forming a jorominent 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 impoi'tance, 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 arc the remains of the thcrmw of Nseodunum, 
 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 iiTegular four-sided figure, 
 with no distinct four streets of a Chester, but rather 
 with a gi-eater number of ways meeting together, like 
 our Godmanchester. The whole eastern side of the 
 
JUBLAINS 193 
 
 to-wn is full of remains among the fields and gardens ; 
 not far from the northern entrance, a field or two away 
 from the road, arc 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 stop, biings the traveller 
 to a more singular object, known locally as La Tonnclh, 
 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 rejDresentatives of the columns of 
 the temple. In short, when the traveller is once put 
 upon the scent, he finds scraps of ancient Nasodunum 
 at every step of his walk through Jublains and its fields. 
 But the most imjjortant 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 
 
 
 
1!>4 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 M. Barbe is driven to the conclusion that the same 
 building must have been used for both purposes. 
 How far this is archfeologically sound we must leave 
 to those who arc specially learned in amjjhitheati'es 
 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 
 jjugiles." The position, sloping away to the south, 
 is indeed a lovely one, and we may congi'atidate 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 si^oken of. We have kept it for the last, both be- 
 cause 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 lake }-ou to "le camp de Jules 
 Cesar." 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 Dicta- 
 tor, 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 
 
JUBLAINS 195 
 
 out before all ejX'S, and which must fix on itself the 
 notice of the most careless passer-by. Suddenly, by the 
 roadside, wc come on massive Roman walls, prescr\'e(l 
 to an unusual proportion of their height. Their circuit 
 may in everydaj' speech be called a square, though 
 strict mathematical accuracy must ])ronounce it to be a 
 trapezium. Near the entrance we mark some frag- 
 ments gathered together, and the e^x' is regaled, as it 
 so often is in Italy and so seldom in Britain and 
 Northern Gaul, with the sight of the Corinthian acan- 
 thus 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 la}-ers 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 ^vall 
 <jf earth, square, or nearly so, but with its angles rounded 
 off, with its single entrance near the s(juth-east angle 
 carefully kept away from either of the apprcjaches 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 gateway.s, 
 and the parts adjoining them, give us sjiecimens of 
 Roman masonry whose vast stones carry us back, be it 
 to the waW oi Ruma 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 
 
 u 2 
 
if)6 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 sjpot. But 
 there are not many remains of Roman work more strik- 
 ing 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 
 wdth 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 destruc- 
 tion, had come over the city. But it is the numismatic 
 evidence which clearly parts off the history of the for- 
 tress 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 arc chiefly coins of Germanicus. From Nero to 
 Constantino coins of all dates are common. It is M. 
 Barbc's inference that it was in Nero's reign that the 
 place began to be of importance, and that its great 
 temple \vas built. But the numismatic stores of the 
 fortress taken by itself tell quite another story. There, 
 
JUBLAINS 197 
 
 not a cnin lias been fonnrl carlior than Domitian, mir 
 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 gi-eat 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 im- 
 portance 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 conclu- 
 sion that this splendid piece of Roman military work 
 belongs to the middle of the third century, and that it 
 
198 TRAVELS IN NDRMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 was f(5r,saken, iiiDst like]}' sliohtcfl, witliin a very few 
 ycai'H after its first building. 
 
 This is as curious and conclusive a piece of internal 
 evidence as we often light upon; but it must be J-e- 
 monibered that all this applies only to the fortress, and 
 not to the town of Nasodunum. 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 Prankish 
 objects, which .shows that the place kept on some mea- 
 sure of importance long after the Teutonic conquest of 
 tJaul. It seems also to be looked upon as a kind of 
 secondary scat of the Cenomannian bishoiDric. But it 
 nmst 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 Na^odunum, the City of the Diablintes in the nomen- 
 clature of the time, to the incursions of the Northmen 
 in the nintli century. Tliat 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 ordy the insignificant modern vil- 
 lage which has grown up amongst its ruins. 
 
 Jublains then, Diablintes, Nreodunum, 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 
 
JUBI.AINS 199 
 
 recorded histrirj'. The doslruction of Uriconium is so 
 for 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 recordecl 
 by our own chroniclers. But the fall of Calleva and 
 the fall of Nceodunum 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 wit- 
 ness of the day when our fathers overthrew it.^ Nreodu- 
 num seems to have undergone no such overthrow as 
 those wi'ought 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 Ga\\\. The city of 
 the Diablintes itself may have, been finally swept away 
 by Hasting or Rolf; but the greatest thing in Na?odu- 
 num, 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. 
 1 See EiUjlish Tou-ns and Districts, p. IG.'i 
 
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 sjaeak of it in the same breath with Amiens and 
 Ely. Le Mans, on the other hand, is scarcely kno^vn ; 
 we suspect that manj' fairly informed persons hardly 
 know where the city itself is ; the cathedral is hardly 
 ever spoken of, and, we believe, is scarcely at all kno'wn, 
 except to jDrofessecl architectural students. Yet, except 
 that Chartres is nearer Paris of the two, one is as 
 accessible as the other ; the historical associations of 
 
THE CHURCHES OF CHARTRES AND LE MANS 201 
 
 Charti'cs, as far at least as Eiiglislimcii are concemed, 
 .certainly cannot be comi)ared to those of Lo Mans; 
 there is nothing at Chartrcs 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 conti'oversy might be more equally waged. Each 
 has gi-eat 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 man}- 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 to'wn. 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 
 
202 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MATNK 
 
 earliest enclosure, <and therefore upon the highest 
 ground in their respective cities. 
 
 Two or three events connect the cathedral of Chartrcs 
 with general and with English history. The fii-st 
 church of which any part survi^'cs is that raised by 
 Fulbert, the flrmous Bishop of Chartres in the early 
 part of the eleventh centniy, and the most diligent 
 letter-^vriter of the time. Tij this work, of which a vast 
 crypt still remains, our great Cnut was a benefactor. 
 The dignity of the Lord of all Northern Eui'ope has so 
 deeply impressed the wTiter of Murray's Handbook 
 that he cuts him into twii, and speaks of the contribif- 
 tions of the Kings of England, France, and Denmark. 
 In the latter part of the next century, John of Salis- 
 biiry, 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 Henr)- of Navarre received the crown of France, a 
 new holj' oil of Marmoutiers being extemporized to 
 supply the jDlace 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 Cliartres and 
 Bl(.)is in the tenth, ele\'enth, and twelfth centuries were 
 
THE CHURCHES OF CHArvTKER AND I.E MANS 20n 
 
 men of iinpoi-tancu in their day, and one of them directly 
 connected himself with England by a memorable mar- 
 riage. Chartres was long the dwelling-place of the 
 excellent Adela, the daughter of the Great William, 
 the mother of King Stephen and of the f;xm()us Bishop 
 Henr}' 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 
 Normand}'. 
 
 The cathedrals of Chartres and Le Mans are about 
 as unlike as any two great medineval churches well 
 can be. Well nigh the only point of likeness is that 
 each jjossesses 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 t}'pe 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 
 
2f)4 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 church is built accordingly. A fairer question of taste 
 is raised by the unequal sj^ires of the west front — a 
 French feature again, but occasionally extending into 
 Normandy and England, as at Eouen, Llandaff, LjTin, 
 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 do-\vn 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, har- 
 monious 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 ouiline, 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 
 
THE CHURCHES OF CHARTRES AND LE MAN8 205 
 
 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. 
 
 The general effect of Le Mans Cathedral, as seen 
 from any point but the cast, 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 \cry for- 
 midable 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 na\'c, 
 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 on- 
 Avards, designed a complete rebuilding. They began 
 at the east, they rebuilt the choii- and transepts, but 
 they never got any further, so that the ancient nave 
 remains. So it is at Bordeaux and Toulouse; so it 
 
206 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 is at Beauvais, where the small but precious fragment 
 of early work, which looks like an excrescence against 
 the gigantic transept — the Basse CEuvrc, as it is locally 
 called — is really the ancient nave — } So it is in a 
 certain sense at Limoges, where a gap intervenes 
 between the finished choir and transejjt 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 biiilding of the 
 eleventh century, reconstructed in the gorgeous style 
 ^\'hich prevailed towards the end of the twelfth. The 
 outer walls, except in the clerestory, are of the former 
 date, and the contrast in the masomy 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, sup- 
 porting arches which are just pointed, have been 
 inserted under the massive round arches of the original 
 church, but the arches arc 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 con- 
 venient to vault with one bay of vaulting over two 
 
 1 Soe article on " Bc;iuvais and Amiens" in Skekhi's from 
 French Tracel, p. 87. 
 
Tofa^-i P'^^ 
 
THE CHURCHES OF CHARTRES AND LE BIANS 207 
 
 bays of arcade, as in the choir of Boxgrove in the 
 next century. The result is that the piers arc alter- 
 nately columnar and clustered. Setting aside a few 
 of the very grandest buildings of the style — as one 
 would hardly compare this nave with Peterborijugh, 
 El}^, or Saint Stejjhcn'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 faidt is that, as it now stands, 
 the nave ends abru]jtly to the cast with a mere vaulting 
 rib, without any proper chctir-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 inci'edible. 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 every- 
 thing 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, 
 
208 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 Lc 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 Hildcbert with having used them 
 to shoot at the neighbouring castle. ^ The north tower 
 has never been rebuilt ; its ruins are there to this da.y. 
 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. 
 
 The writer in Murray, in his zeal for the cathedral of 
 Chartrcs, 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 
 
 1 Sue The Hfiijii (if ]rinMm lx}ifius, vol. ii. pp. 297, 298, 654. 
 
To face page 209 
 
THE CHURCHES OF CHARTRES AND LE MANS 209 
 
 most effective views to be had of any city, two other 
 churches stand out very strikingly, the cathedral cro"\\ai- 
 ing all. Of these Saint Anian, we must confess, is 
 somewhat of a deceiver. The distant effect is good, 
 but there is little to repaj' 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 Charti-es is still 
 further behind Le Mans in military and domestic 
 remains. At Le Mans the Abbey of La Couture 
 (de cultunl Dei) is a perfect minster with two unfinished 
 western towers, a nave of Aquitanian width, ^ 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-Pre. A fine 
 hospital, the work of Henry the Second, is now per- 
 verted to some military purpose, and some military 
 tomfoolery forbids examination, in marked contrast to 
 the liberal spirit which allows free access to everjiihing 
 ' See Sketches fiviii French Trued, pp. 114, 117. 
 
 P 
 
210 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 that the antiquary can wish to visit at Fontevrault 
 and at Sanmur. 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. 
 
LE MANS 
 
 1876 
 
 We spoke some j-ears ago of the architectural 
 character of the chief churches of Le Mans, especially 
 in comparison with those of Chartres. But the com- 
 parison 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 raunicij^al 
 history, It is triie 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 
 
 p 2 
 
212 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 commune. Among cities north of the Loire — it might 
 perliaps be unsafe to say among cities north of the 
 Alj^s — Le Mans shares with Exeter the credit of assert- 
 ing the j^osition of a civic commonwealth in days when, 
 even in more Soutliern lands, the steps taken in that 
 direction were as j-et but very imperfect. And it was 
 against the same enemy that freedom Avas asserted by 
 the insular and by the continental city. The freedom 
 of Exeter and the freedom of Le Mans were alike as- 
 serted 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 deter- 
 mined 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 ha\'e done wisel}- to unite their forces 
 against the common enem}-. And it is just possible 
 that those obscure dealings of Earl Harold with the 
 powers of Gaul, which are dimly alluded to by the 
 biogxapher 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 
 
LE MANS 213 
 
 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 dis- 
 trict 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 Con- 
 queror, and the Gaulish city which revolted against 
 him, in the name of the same princijjle which a cen- 
 tury 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 common- 
 wealth which it was proposed to establish, and, above 
 all, of the relations which were to be maintained be- 
 tween 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 
 
214 TRAVELS IN iSrORBIANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 
 coimtry 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 Ceno- 
 mannian 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 
 comiiimie 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 coidd.i 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 o\er Le Mans and ilaine an interest 
 whicli is shared by no other city and province of 
 Northern Gaul ; and it makes us feel a kind of dis- 
 a])pointment in the inevitable fact that the greatest 
 
 ' I )ii tlio fiuindution of the (■<jiiiiimne of Lc Blans and the 
 treachery of Geoffrey of M.iyeiine, see Noiiikoi Coitqiicst, vol. iv. 
 p, 5.">1, ' / fcip 
 
LE IMANS 215 
 
 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 gi-adually 
 swelled into the Roman, the mediaeval, 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 jjitched 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, Lo 
 Mans has most distinctly the character of a hill city, 
 Avhich 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 mediasval 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 
 
216 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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, Suindi- 
 num, Subdinnum, whichever form we are to choose, 
 therein differing from the hill of Isca, was not at all 
 suited for the l&ymg out of a city according to the 
 familiar type of a Roman chcstcr. The high ground 
 immediately overlooking the river formed a long narrow 
 ridge, and the space included within the Roman walls — 
 la CiU, 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 Riic dcs Chanoincs, run- 
 ning parallel with the more secular Grande Bite, bears 
 in mediasval documents the strange title of Vdus Emna, 
 which has been held to point to a still earlier enclosure, 
 that of the ^jrimitive Gaulish fort itself Of the 
 Roman walls, whoso construction, like that of most 
 Roman walls in Gaul and Britain, shows them to be 
 
LE MANS 217 
 
 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 mediajval city. In the thirteenth 
 century an outer range of wall was raised close to the 
 stream, taking in the suburb of La Tanncric ; an 
 extension to the south and south-east took in the 
 quarter of Saint Ben'et, and another suburb called 
 L'Epiron. 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 fm'ther 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 reason- 
 able that their geogi^aphical quarters should be marked 
 also. In fact, in ■ the great days of Cenomannian 
 history the Bishop was a power independent alike 
 of Count aud cit}'. He owed temporal allegiance to 
 
218 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 tic 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 ten- 
 dencies 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, Koman and 
 mediteval, and high above them the vast and wondrous 
 pile of Saint Julian's minster. On the side away from 
 the I'iver, 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 i^laccd indeed for Count Herbert, Evigikms Cancm, 
 
LE MANS 219 
 
 to sally forth on the nightly raids before which black 
 Angers trembled.^ And besides the dwellings of the 
 temporal and spiritual chiefs, the ancient streets of 
 Le Mans were set thick ^vith 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 Ecncdssance. 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 ha23pens, the memorials of 
 the earlier time have outlived those of the later. At 
 the northern end of the city William thought it need- 
 ful to strengthen his greatest continental conquest 
 by two distinct fortresses. Close by Saint Julian's, 
 just outside the eastern line of the Rijman wall, and 
 formed, we may believe, out of its materials, rose the 
 Castle, the Bcgia hirris. Some way to the north-east, 
 at a greater distance from the river, rose the fortress of 
 Mons Barhatus or Hunt Barhd, 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 
 ' Sco Nofinau Cviupied, iii. p. 192. 
 
220 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 escaped the politic destruction of the days of Richelieu. 
 Of Mont Barbet nothing is left but the mottc 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 
 jjleased 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 Pre, on the other side of the river, still 
 remain ; and we have spoken of their architectural 
 character in past years.'- There were also the Abbeys 
 of Beaulieu, beyond the river, and of St. Vincent 
 opposite to it be3'ond Mont Barbet, of which the latter 
 survives in the shape of a Bcnaissance 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 
 ' Sec aljovo, J). 200, 
 
LE MANS 221 
 
 stock of the old Coimts and of the Norman conquerors, 
 the blood of Helias and of his Angevin representatives, 
 all flowed together in the veins of tlie 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. 
 
 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 lias 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 \\Tought by the 
 last conquerors is being speedily made good on another 
 site. It is the damage which is doing to the citj' by 
 the merciless hands of its own people that never can be 
 made good. One would have thought that the Ceno- 
 mannian 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 
 
222 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 Roinan 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 drearj' 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 fects which can be seen by the 
 traveller's own eyes are beyond doubt. The later walls 
 close by the ri\er 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. Hy an amount of labour which reminds one 
 of Trajan cutting through the Quirinal, la GiU has been 
 cut into two hah'es with a ya^vning gulf between them ; 
 the Roman wall is broken through, and the very best 
 of the twelfth-century houses has been ruthlessly swept 
 awa}'. 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 
 
LE MANS 223 
 
 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 j'ears 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 fixst 
 as may be, and see all that they can while anything 
 is left. 
 
MAINE 
 
 1876 
 
 We have already spoken of the cajDital of the Ceno- 
 manni, 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 histor}', 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, faii'ly 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 
 
MAINE 225 
 
 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 
 toAvn 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 chcf-licib 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 arrange- 
 ments of France, two of the Norman dioceses have been 
 united with others, the one Cenomannian diocese has 
 been divided into two. 
 
 Q 
 
226 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 In another point also Maine shows itself very dis- 
 tinctly 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 pos- 
 sessing 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 clerestor)? 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 Pre, 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 
 invadcirs. 
 
 Maine is, in one point, one of the parts of France 
 
MAINE 227 
 
 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, with- 
 out 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 fi'om 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 sjoring 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 wp as a rival to the 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 
 ^vTested 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 to\\Ti 
 alike equally look out in the direction of danger ; from 
 either height it needs no strong effort of imagination 
 
MAINE 229 
 
 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 Avi-anches finds himself 
 in one important i^oint brought back to the modern 
 world. After going for many days by such con- 
 veyances 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 Ambrieres, 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 jiiece 
 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 to\vns 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 Romanesq\ie, it is thoroughly 
 
230 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 in harmony with the memories of the place. But the 
 church of Ambrieres is more than this. It tells us m 
 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 Ambrieres had got on 
 almo.st too fast in theii" tendencies towards a southern 
 t3'pe 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 Ambrieres either the railway or, if the' 
 traveller likes it better, a road leading up and do^Mi 
 over a series of low hills, will take him to another 
 .scene of William's \'ictories at Mayenne. Here the 
 t(3'\vii slopes d(jwn to the river of its o^vn name on 
 both sides, and the castle, instead of crowning either 
 height, rises immediately above the stream. Eight 
 3'ears does much in the way of building up as well 
 as of pulling down; and we maj' note that since 
 we made an almost casual reference to Mayenne in 
 
BIAINE 231 
 
 1868,1 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 gi-eat 
 minster. No place after the capital has a greater 
 share in the history of the county.^ It was the lord- 
 ship of that Geoffrey of Mayenne who played so 
 jjrominent 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 nobl-e. 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 commtmc. To the student of the twelfth century 
 Mayenne is full of memoi-ies ; to the student of earlier 
 times its chief attraction will be that it is the most 
 natural point of the journey to Jublains. 
 
 Further do\vn the stream wliich gi\-es 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 modein 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 
 
 ' See above, p. 57. 
 
 ^ See Norman Conqiiest, vol. ii. p. 209, et seq. 
 
232 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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,^ 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 GhxmcU Bue 
 of Le Mans runs along the ridge, the Grande Pms 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, Ave still find the choir, transepts, and lantern 
 of a comparatively small Romanesque church, perhaps 
 hardly on a level with Ambrieres, but its nave has 
 given way to a vast Angevin nave as wide as the 
 transepts of the original building, and itself furnished 
 
 ^ 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. 
 
MAINE 233 
 
 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 Avesnieres, not improved certainly by its 
 modern spire, but keeping a most stately Romanesque 
 apse with surrounding chajoels. 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 
 
234 TRAVELS IN NORMANDY AND MAINE 
 
 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 gi-owth 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. Susanna, 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, Sille-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 wliich can belong to the da}'s when Sille was 
 besieged by the armed citizens of the Cenomannian 
 commonwealth. North of Le Mans, on the vipper 
 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 
 
MAINE 236 
 
 Beaumont, too, has seen warfare in later days, and he who 
 looks down from the castle which withstood the Con- 
 queror may hear the talc 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 Eenaissancc 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 ahva3's 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 destinies both of England and of 
 France. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abbaye Blanche, near Mortain, 
 109, 110 
 
 Almeneches, 139 et seq. ; its church, 
 150, 151 ; site of the castle, 152 
 
 Ambrieres, fortress of, 57, 229 ; 
 architectural signiiicance of its 
 church, 230 
 
 Amiens, 8, 9, 23, 24, 47 
 
 Architecture in Normandy, its 
 points of likeness with tliat of 
 England, 23, 27, 28, 31, 46; 
 Romanesque, at Bayeux, 28, 29 ; 
 at Exraes, 147 ; at Le Mans, 
 206, 207, 209 ; transitional 
 period well marked in Fecamp 
 Abbey, 48 
 
 Argentan, 125—138 
 
 Arietta [Herleva], mother of Wil- 
 liam the Conqueror, 10 
 
 Arnulf of IVIontgomery, 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 Cou- 
 tances, 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 Englisli 
 character, 30 
 
 Beaumont-le-Roger, 179 et seq. 
 
 Beaumont-le-Vicomte, castle and 
 church, 234, 235 
 
 Beauvais, 9, 23, 24 
 
 Bernay, Juditli's Abbey at, 8, 
 182, 188 
 
 Bigod, use of tlie name, 105 
 
 Brionne, character of the building, 
 97, 98 
 
 C 
 
 Caen, 2 ; its ecclesiastical build- 
 ings, 8 ; destruction of churches 
 at, 19 ; burial-place of William 
 the Conqueror, 51 
 
 Ciesaris Burgus, 67. See Cherbourg 
 
 Calleva, its fall, 199. See Silchester 
 
 Carentari, 72 
 
 Castles, beginning of in England, 
 14 ; in Normandy, earlier and 
 later sites of, 58 ; question as to 
 
238 
 
 INDEX 
 
 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 
 
 Cliannel Islands, their relation to 
 England, 65 
 
 Chartres, contrasted with Le 
 Mans, 200 et scq. ; its historical 
 associations, '-02, 203 ; archi- 
 tectural features of its cathedral 
 church, 203, 204 ; why it differs 
 from Le Mans, 204 ; its height, 
 207, its secondary churches, 209 
 
 Cherbourg, name probably cog- 
 nate with Scarborough, 68 
 
 Churches, Norman, French and 
 English, compared, 9, 23, 24, 
 46, ill 
 
 Cintheaux, 53, 54 
 
 Colomljj', 70 
 
 Cotentin, derivation of the name, 
 62 ; its peninsular character, 
 64, 65 ; acquired by William 
 Longsword, 66 
 
 Coutances, catliedral church of, 
 22 et seq. , 82 ; its sham west 
 front compared \\ith that of 
 Wells, 25 ; its internal archi- 
 tecture 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, 100 
 Dieppe, meaning of the name, 6 
 Dinan, 22, 54, 55 
 Dive, river, battle by, 60 
 Dol, church of, 22, et seq. ; com- 
 
 pared with S. Canice at Kil- 
 kenny, 25, 30 ; its position sug- 
 gests St. David's, 30 ; east end 
 compared with Wells, 31 
 
 Domfront, fortress of, won by 
 William, 56, 228 ; compared 
 with Falaise, ih. 
 
 Dumaino, I'Abbe L. V. , his history 
 of Tinchebray, 117, 118 
 
 Edgar the ^Etheling, at Tinche- 
 bray, 121 ; taken prisoner and 
 released, 123 
 
 Ecclesiastical foundations, choice 
 of sites for, 42, 43 
 
 Emma, Abbess of Almenfeches, 
 sister of Robert of Belleme, 
 140—143 
 
 England, likeness of Normandy 
 to, how accounted for, 5 — 7 
 
 Eu, its historical associations,58,59 
 
 Evreux, 4, 8, 24 
 
 E\Ton, abbey at, 234 
 
 Exeter, commonwealth of, com- 
 pared with Le Mans, 212, 213 
 
 Exmes, 139 et seq. ; site of the 
 castle, 144, 145 ; its church, 
 146—149 
 
 F 
 
 Falaise, birth-place of William the 
 Conqueror, 10, 12; its historical 
 associations, 11, 12; probable 
 date of the castle, 15 ; its posi- 
 tion, 16, 17 ; origin of the name, 
 16 ; spoiled by so-called restor- 
 ation, 18 — 20, 53 ; compared 
 with Domfront, 56 
 
 Fecamp, abbey of, 43 et seq. ; 
 transitional period well marked 
 at, 47, 48 ; its fourteenth cen- 
 tury alteration compared with 
 Waltham, 49, 50 
 
 Flers, 113 
 
INDEX 
 
 239 
 
 G 
 
 Gaily Knight, Mr. quoted, 82, 86, 
 
 106 
 Geoffrey of Mowbray, Bishop of 
 
 Coutances, 67, 80 
 Geoflfrey, Count of Maj-enne, his 
 
 betrayal of the Commune of Le 
 
 Mans, 214, 231 
 Geoffrey Malaterra, quoted, 93, 94 
 Granville, 73 
 
 H 
 
 Harold, son of Godwins, received 
 by William at Eu, 58 ; the 
 guest of William Patey, 114, 
 115 
 
 Harold Blaatand, his settlement 
 in the Cotentin, 5, 66 ; delivers 
 the Norman Duchj', 60 
 
 Hauteville-la-Guichard, 90 e,t. seq. 
 
 Hellas of La Fleche, Count of 
 Maine, at Tinchebray, 121, 122 
 
 Henry I. of England, 54 ; 
 Avranchin held by, 76 ; wins 
 back Saint James, 78 ; vic- 
 torious at Tinchebray, 115, 120 
 123 ; his treatment of Robert, 
 123 ; at Saint-EAi-oul, 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-4s-dunes, ib. ; sees the 
 slaughter at Varaville, 61 ; 
 burns Argentan, 128, 130, 171 ; 
 fortress of Tillieres burned 'by, 
 171 ; re-fortifies Tillieres, ih. 
 
 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- 
 
 Eyroul, 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 Veluli-<, father of 
 
 Roger of Beaumont, 180 
 Hundred Years' War, personal 
 
 nomenclature in Normandy, 
 
 affected by, 5 
 
 Jublains and Silchester compared, 
 189-191 ; origin of the name, 
 190; its position, 191, 192: its 
 Roman remains, 192, et seq ; 
 numismatic e\adence for date 
 of fortress, 196—199 
 
 La Lande-Patry, 114, 115 
 
 Laigle, surname misunderstood, 
 15-1—156 
 
 Langlois, significance of the 
 name, 5 
 
 Laval, 231, 232 
 
 Le Mans, contrasted with Char- 
 tres, 200, et seq. ; Saint Julian's 
 keeps its ancient nave, 205 — 
 207 ; its thirteenth century 
 choir, 207, 208 ; destruction of 
 its towers ordered bj' 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 C'oinimme, 215 ; 
 
240 
 
 INDEX 
 
 its position, ih. ; Roman and 
 mediiBval walls, 216, 217, 218 ; 
 position of Saint Julian's, 217, 
 218 ; early greatness of its ec- 
 clesiastical and civil rulers, 217 ; 
 . its buildings, 218, 219 ; Wil- 
 liam's fortresses at, 219, 220; 
 birth - place of Henry the 
 Second, 220 ; German occupa- 
 tion of, 221 ; ruthless destruc- 
 tion 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 Almenii- 
 ches, 150 
 
 M 
 
 Maine, its history, 224 et seq. ; its 
 modern division, 225 ; architec- 
 tural borderland between Nor- 
 mandy 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 Char- 
 tres, 170; dispute about her 
 dowr}', ih. 
 
 INIatilda, Abbess of Almin^ches, 
 143 
 
 Mayenne, 57, 58, 225, 230, 231 
 
 Montacute, siege of, raised by 
 Geoffrey of Mowbraj', 67 ; Nor- 
 man name of Leodgarcsburh 
 (Lutgaresburg), 105 
 
 Mortagne, 101 
 
 Mortain, its position, 101, 102 ; 
 site of the castle, 103 ; its his- 
 tory, 104 ; foundation of Saint- 
 Evroul at, 105 
 
 Mortemer, battle of, 35 ; its posi- 
 tion, 38, 39 ; reason for its his- 
 toric interest, ih. ; surprise of 
 the French at, 40 
 
 N 
 
 Najodunum, 190, 198. See Ju- 
 
 blains 
 Nenfbourg, 110 
 Neufchatel-en-Braj', its hills and 
 
 cheeses, 39 
 Names, confusion of, 100, 101, 154, 
 
 155 
 Nomenclature, personal, in Nor- 
 mandy, 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 ; com- 
 pared 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 ; res- 
 toration 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 Nor- 
 mandy, French fusion of, ib. 
 Notre-Dame, Avesnicires, 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 
 
INDEX 
 
 241 
 
 Notre-Dame de la Place, Argen- 
 
 taii, 136 
 Notve-Dame-du-Pru, Lc Mans, 209, 
 
 220, 226 
 
 
 
 Odelerius, sends his son Orderic 
 to Saint-Evi-oul, 162 
 
 Odo, Bishop of Eaj'eux, his woik 
 at Bayeux, 26, 2y 
 
 Odo II., Count of Chai'tres, re- 
 fuses 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 
 
 Palgrave, Sir Francis, quoted, 39, 
 
 64, 101, 226 
 Periers, 72 
 Petit, Mr., quoted, 1 
 Puiseux, M."L., quoted, 33 
 
 Querqueville, church of, 68, 69 ; 
 
 origin of the name, 69 
 Quilly, 53, 54 
 
 R 
 
 Richer of Laigle, his character 
 
 and death, 156 
 Robert the Magnificent (the 
 "Devil"), Duke of the Nor- 
 mans, castleof 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 Belleme, 143 
 
 Robert, Count of Meulan, son of 
 Roger of Beaumont, 91, 179, ISl, 
 184 ; at Tinchebray, 122 
 
 Robert, Count of Mortain, 103, 
 105, 106 
 
 Robert of Belleme, at Tinchebray, 
 120, 121 ; banished by Henry, 
 141 ; liis treatment of Al- 
 meneches, 142 ; defeats Robert, 
 143 ; his niiprisonment, ih. 
 
 Robert of Grantmesnil, Abbot of 
 Saint-Evroul, 162 
 
 Roljert of Torigny, quoted, 122, 
 137 
 
 Robert the Bigod, accuses William 
 of ilortain 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 
 
 Rermes, 55 
 
 Richard the Fearless, Duke of the 
 
 Normans, educated at Bayeux, 2 
 Richard the Good, Duke of the 
 
 Normans, fortifies Tillieres, 170 ; 
 
 his dispute with Odo of Char- 
 
 tres, ih. 
 
 Saint Andrew, Chartres, 209 
 Saint Canice, Kilkenny, central 
 
 tower of, compared with that of 
 
 Dol, 25 
 Saint Cross, Saint-Lo, 85 — S7 
 K 
 
242 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Saint-Evroul, 143 ; his story, 162; 
 his name, 163; mciuoiials and 
 relics of, 167 
 
 Saint Evroul Aljbej', home of 
 Orderic, U3, 160, cl seq. ; re- 
 stored by families of Geroy and 
 Grantmesnil, 162 ; pillaged hy 
 order of Hugh tlie Great, 164 ; 
 its architectural remains, 165 — 
 167 
 
 Saint-Evroul, Mortain, its found- 
 ation, 106 ; its architectural 
 features, 106—108 
 
 Saint German, Argentan, 127, 
 131—136 
 
 Saint Gervase, Falaise, 16, l73 
 
 Saint James, topographical use of 
 the name, 77 ; fortified by Wil- 
 liam the Conqueror, ib. , 78 ; 
 TV'on back by Henry the ^thel- 
 ing, ih. ; its position, ib. ; site 
 of William's castle, 79 
 
 Saint John, Ycrneuil, its tower, 
 176, 177 
 
 Saint Julian's, Le Mans, contrasted 
 with cathedral church of 
 Chartres, 200 et seq. ; Roman- 
 esque work at, 206, 207 ; An- 
 gevin 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, 1-57, 158 
 
 SaintMartin-in-the-Vale,Chartres, 
 209 
 
 Saint Mary Magdalen, ^'erneuil, 
 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, C'liartres, 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 
 
 Sille-le-Guillaume, 234 
 
 Surnames of places, 91, 92 ; mis- 
 understood, 100, 101, 154—1.56 
 
 Talbot, John, Earl of Shrewslnuy, 
 
 his tower at Falaise, 11, 15, 16 
 Tanored of Hauteville, his home, 
 
 90, 95, 97, 98 
 Tillieres, 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-fes-dunes, battle of, a victory 
 of the Roman over the Teuton, 
 35 ; site of the battlefield, 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. Eugi^-ne, his book on 
 Argentan, 128, 136 
 
 Vire, 112 
 
INDEX 
 
 243 
 
 W 
 
 Wace, value of his description of 
 the battle of Val-fes-cUmes, 37, 
 38; quoted, 114, 169 
 
 Wells, west front of cathedral 
 church compared with that of 
 Coutances, 25 ; east end com- 
 pared with Dol, 31 
 
 William Longsword, Duke of the 
 Normans, Danish education of 
 his son, 2 ; wins the Cdtentin, 
 66 
 
 William the Conqueror, his church 
 of S. Stephen at Caen, 8 ; his 
 birth-place, 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 
 Eh, 58 ; Domfront submits to, 
 56 ; fortifies Ambri^res, 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 Hilde- 
 bert 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 I'Abbaye Blanche, 109 ; 
 with Duke Robert at Tinche- 
 bray, 119, 120, 121 ; taken 
 prisoner, 123 ; his alleged blind- 
 ing, 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 
 
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