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 Constantinus" 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";[25] because this last is at least funny, while to derive Cotentin from cote is simply stupid. But it is very like a derivation which we once saw in a Swiss geography-book, according to which the canton of Wallis or Valais was so called "parce que c'est la plus grande vallee de la Suisse." And, what is more, a Swiss man of science, eminent in many branches of knowledge, but not strong in etymology, thought it mere folly to call the derivation in question. It was no good arguing when the case was as clear as the sun at noon-day. Now, in the case of Wallis, it is certainly much easier to say what the etymology of the name is not than to say what it is; but in the case of the Cotentin 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 Bessin, the land of Bayeux, might perhaps be twisted into something funny, but the Avranchin could hardly be anything but the district of Avranches, and this one might have given the key to the others. But both Cotentin and Bessin illustrate a law of the geographical nomenclature of Gaul, by which, when a city and its district bear the same name, the name takes two slightly different forms for the city and for the district. Thus we have Bourges and Berry, Angers and Anjou, Perigueux and Perigord, Le Mans and Maine.[26] So Constantia has become Coutances; but the adjective Constantinus has become Cotentin. City and district then bear the same Imperial name as that other Constantia on the Rhine with which Coutances is doomed to get so often confounded. How often has one seen Geoffrey of Mowbray described as "Bishop of Constance." In an older writer this may be a sign that, in his day, Coutances was spoken of in England as Constance. In a modern writer this judgment of charity is hardly possible. It really seems as if some people thought that the Conqueror was accompanied to England by a Bishop of the city where John Huss was burned ages afterwards.

We have called the Cotentin a peninsula, and so it is. Sir Francis Palgrave points out, with a kind of triumph, that the two Danish peninsulas, the original Juetland 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 further to forget that the whole of that west coast is not Cotentin. Avranches has its district also, and the modern department of Manche takes in both, as the modern diocese of Coutances takes in the older dioceses of Coutances and Avranches.

Part of the Cotentin then is a true peninsula, a peninsula stretching out a long finger to the north-west in the shape of Cape La Hague; and this most characteristic part of the land has impressed a kind of peninsular character on the whole region. But we must not forget that the land of Coutances is not wholly peninsular, but also partly insular. The Norman islands, those fragments of the duchy which remained faithful to their natural Duke when the mainland passed under the yoke of Paris, are essential parts of the Constantine land, diocese and county. Modern arrangements have transferred their ecclesiastical allegiance to the church of Winchester, and their civil allegiance to the Empire of India; but historically those islands are that part of the land of Coutances which remained Norman while the rest stooped to become French.[27] The peninsula pointing northwards, with its neighbouring islands, save that the islands lie to the west and not to the east, might pass for no inapt figure of the northern land of the Dane. They formed a land which the Dane was, by a kind of congruity, called on to make his own. And his own he made it and thoroughly. Added to the Norman duchy by William Longsword before Normans had wholly passed into Frenchmen, with the good seed watered again by a new settlement straight from Denmark under Harold Blaatand, the Danish land of Coutances, like the Saxon land of Bayeux, was far slower than the lands beyond the Dive in putting on the speech and the outward garb of France. And no part of the Norman duchy sent forth more men or mightier, to put off that garb in the kindred, if conquered, island, and to come back to their natural selves in the form of Englishmen. The most Teutonic part of Normandy was the one part which had a real grievance to avenge on Englishmen; in their land, and in their land alone, had Englishmen, for a moment in the days of AEthelred, shown themselves as invaders and ravagers. But before the men of the Cotentin could show themselves as avengers at Senlac, they had first to be themselves overthrown at Val-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 subdued by the joint might of Rouen and Paris.

It is singular enough that the two most prominent names among those which connect the Bessin and the Cotentin with England should be those of their two Bishops, Geoffrey of Mowbray, for a while Earl of Northumberland, and the more famous Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent. Geoffrey would deserve a higher fame than he wins by the possession of endless manors in Domesday and by the suppression of the West-Saxon revolt at Montacute,[28] if we could believe that, according to a legend which is even now hardly exploded, the existing church of Coutances is his work. William of Durham and Roger of Salisbury would seem feeble workers in the building art beside the man who consecrated that building in the purest style of the thirteenth century in the year 1056. According to that theory, art must have been at Coutances a hundred and fifty years in advance of the rest of the world, and, after about a hundred and twenty years, the rest of the world must have begun a series of rude attempts at imitating the long-neglected model. But without attributing to the art of Coutances or the Cotentin so miraculous a development as this, the district was at all times fertile in men who could build in the styles of their several ages. A journey through the peninsula shows its scenery, so varied and in many parts so rich, adorned by a succession of great buildings worthy of the land in which they are placed. The great haven of the district is indeed more favoured by nature than by art. In the name of Cherbourg mediaeval 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 Caesaris Burgus. Yet it is far more likely that the name of Cherbourg is simply the same as our own Scarborough, and that it is so called from the rocky hills, the highest ground in the whole district, which look down on the fortified harbour, and are themselves condemned to help in its fortification. The rocks and the valley between them are worthy of some better office than to watch over an uninteresting town which has neither ancient houses to show nor yet handsome modern streets. The chief church, though not insignificant, is French and not Norman, and so teaches the wrong lesson to an Englishman who begins his 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 greater, church, the two standing side by side, and with the outline of the greater—the same triapsidal form marking both—clearly suggested by the smaller. Of the smaller, which is very small indeed, one can hardly doubt that parts at least are primitive Romanesque, as old as any one chooses. It is the fellow of the little church of Montmajeur near Arles, but far ruder. But at Querqueville the name is part of the argument; the building gives its name to the place. The first syllable of Querqueville is plainly the Teutonic kirk; and it suggests that it got the name from this church having been left standing when most of its neighbours were destroyed in the Scandinavian inroads which created Normandy. The building has gone through several changes; the upper part of its very lofty tower is clearly a late addition, but the ground-plan, and so much of the walls as show the herring-bone work, are surely remains of a building older than the settlement of Rolf.



From the rocks of the Norman Scarborough, 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 grouping with a spire of late date immediately at its side? There is much to please at Valognes; but when we remember the part which the town plays in the history of the Conqueror, that it was from hence, one of his favourite dwelling-places, that he took the headlong ride which carried him away safely from the rebellious peninsula before Val-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-Vicomte, the home of the two Neals, the centre, in the days of the second of the rebellions which caused William to ride so hard from Valognes to Rye.[29] A characteristic church or two, among them Colomby, with its long lancets, may be taken on the way; but the great object of the journey is where the little town of Saint Saviour lies on its slope, with the castle on the one hand, the abbey on the other, rising above the river at its feet. The abbey, Neal's abbey, where his monks supplanted an earlier foundation of canons, has gone through many ups and downs. Its Romanesque plan remained untouched through a great reconstruction of its upper part in the later Gothic. It fell into ruin at the Revolution, but one side of the nave and the central saddle-backed tower still stood, and now the ruin is again a perfect church, where Sisters of Mercy have replaced the monks of Saint Benedict. Here then a great part of the work of the ancient lords remains; with the castle which should be their most direct memorial the case is less clear. Besides round towers—one great one specially which some one surely must have set down as Phoenician—the great feature is the huge square tower which forms the main feature of the building, and which has thoroughly the air of a Norman keep of the eleventh or twelfth century. But when we come nearer, there is hardly a detail—round arches of course alone prove nothing—which does not suggest a later time. And the tower is attributed to Sir John Chandos, who held the castle in Edward the Third's time. Did he most ingeniously recast every detail of an elder keep, or did he choose to build exactly according to the type of an age long before his own? Anyhow, as far as general effect goes, the tower thoroughly carries us back to the days of the earlier fame of Saint Saviour. The view from its top stretches far away over the peninsula of which it was once the citadel to the backs of the hills which look down on Cherbourg and the sea, the sea which, if we believe the tale, bore the fleet of AEthelred when the elder Neal drove back English invaders 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 in some detail;[30] of the city itself we may add that none more truly bespeaks its origin as a hill-fort. The hill is of no extraordinary height; but it is thoroughly isolated, not forming part of a range like the hills of Avranches and Le Mans. And, saving the open place before the cathedral—perhaps the forum of Constantia—there is not a flat yard of ground in Coutances. The church itself is on a slope; you walk up the incline of one street and see the houses sloping down the incline of the other. In the valley on the west side of the city is a singular curiosity, several of the arches of a mediaeval aqueduct.[31] Pointed arches, and buttresses against the piers, are what we are not used to in such buildings. A road by a few small churches leads to Granville on its peninsula, with its strange church where Flamboyant and Renaissance die away into a kind of Romanesque most unlike that of Ragusa, and the Cotentin has been gone through from north to south. The modern department and the modern diocese go on further; but the "pagus Constantinus" is now done with; the land of Avranches, the march against the Breton, has a history of its own.



THE AVRANCHIN

1876

The town of Avranches is well known as one of those Continental spots on which Englishmen have settled down and formed a kind of little colony. A colony of this kind has two aspects in the eyes of the traveller who lights upon it. On the one hand, it is a nuisance to find one's self, on sitting down to a table-d'hote in a foreign town, in the middle of ordinary English chatter. Full of the particular part of the world in which he is, the traveller may hear all parts of the world discussed from some purely personal or professional aspect, without a single original observation to add anything to his stock of ideas. On the other hand, it must be allowed that the presence of an English settlement anywhere always brings with it a degree of civilisation in many points such as is not always found in towns of much greater size which our countrymen do not frequent. But to the historical traveller Avranches is almost dead. A few stones heaped together are all that remains of the cathedral, and another stone marks the sight of the north door where Henry the Second received absolution for his share in the murder of Thomas. The city which formed the halting-place of Lanfranc on his way from Pavia to Bec is now chiefly to be noticed for its splendid site, and as a convenient starting-point for other places where more has been spared. Avranches, like Coutances, is a hill-city, and, as regards actual elevation, it is even more of a hill-city than Coutances. But then the hill of Coutances is an isolated hill, while Avranches stands on the projecting bluff of a range. Seen from the sands of Saint Michael's Bay, the site proclaims itself as one which, before the fall of its chief ornament, must have been glorious beyond words. It might have been Laon, as it were, with, at favourable tides at least, the estuary washing the foot of its hill. What the view is from the height itself is implied in what has just been said. The bay, with the consecrated Mount and the smaller Tombelaine by its side, the Breton coast stretching far away, the Mount of Dol coming, perhaps within the range of sight, certainly within the range of ideas, the goodly land on either side of the city, the woods, the fields—for in the Avranchin we are still in a land of pasture and hedgerows—all tell us that it was no despicable heritage of his own to which Hugh of Avranches added his palatine earldom of Chester. And if Avranches gave a lord to one great district of England, England presently gave a lord to Avranches. The Avranchin formed part of the fief of the AEtheling Henry, the fief so often lost and won again, but where men had at least some moments of order under the stern rule of the Lion of Justice, while the rest of Normandy in the days of Robert was torn in pieces by the feuds of rival lords and countesses. But musings of this kind would be more to the point if the city itself had something more to show than a tower or two of no particular importance—if, in short, the hill of Avranches was crowned by such a diadem of spires and cupolas as the hill of Coutances. As it is, Avranches is less attractive in itself than it is as the best point for several excursions in the Avranchin land. The excursion to the famous Mount of Saint Michael and its fortified abbey need not here be dwelled on. No one can walk five minutes in the streets of Avranches without being reminded that the city is the starting-place for "le mont Saint-Michel." But no one suggests a visit to Saint James nor even to Mortain and its waterfalls. Nor should we ourselves suggest a visit to Saint James, except to those who may be satisfied with a beautiful bit of natural scenery, heightened by the thought that the spot is directly connected with the memory of William, indirectly with that of Harold.

When we write "Saint James," we are not translating.[32] The "castrum sancti Jacobi" appears as "Saint James" in Wace, and it is "Saint James" to this day alike in speech and in writing. The fact is worthy of some notice in the puzzling history of the various forms of the apostolic names Jacobus and Johannes and their diminutives. Jacques and Jack must surely be the same; how then came Jack to be the diminutive of John? Anyhow this Norman fortress bears the name of the Saint of Compostela in a form chiefly familiar in Britain and Aragon, though it is not without a cognate in the Italian Giacomo. The English forms of apostolic names are sometimes borne even now by Romance-speaking owners, as M. James Fazy and M. John Lemoinne bear witness. But here the name is far too old for any imitative process of this kind. And it is only as applied to the place itself that the form "James"[33] is used; the inn is the "Hotel Saint-Jacques," and "Saint-Jacques" is the acknowledged patron of the parish. Anyhow the effect is to give the name of the place an unexpectedly English air. Perhaps such an air is not wholly out of place in the name of a spot which was fortified against the Breton by a prince who was to become King of the English, and whose fortification led to a war in which two future and rival Kings of the English fought side by side.

For the castle of Saint James was one of the fortresses raised by William's policy to strengthen the Norman frontier against the Bret-Welsh of Gaul, just as in after days he and his Earls raised fortresses on English ground to strengthen the English frontier against the Bret-Welsh of Britain. It stands very near to the border, and we can well understand how its building might give offence to the Breton Count Conan, and so lead to the war in which William and Harold marched together across the sands which surround the consecrated Mount. In this way Saint James plays an indirect part in English history, and it plays another when it was one of the first points of his lost territory to be won back by Henry the AEtheling after his brothers had driven him out of the Mount and all else that he had.[34] But the place keeps hardly anything but its memories and the natural beauty of its site. A steep peninsular hill looks down on a narrow and wooded valley with a beck—that is the right word in the land which contains Caudebec and Bec Herlouin—running round its base. The church—a strange modern building with some ancient portions used up again—stands on the extreme point of the promontory. This seems the best point for commanding the whole valley, and we may perhaps guess that a less devout prince than William would not have scrupled to raise his donjon at least within the consecrated precinct. But he chose the southern side of the hill, the side to be sure most directly looking towards the enemy; and church and castle stood side by side on the hill without interfering with each other. But the visitor to Saint James—if Saint James should ever get any visitors—must take care not to ask for the chateau. If he does, he will be sent to the other side of the valley, to a modern house, on a lovely site certainly, and working in some portions of 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 "le fort." The open space by the church is the "place du Fort," and the inquirer will soon find that on the south the hill-side is scarped and strengthened by a wall. That is all that is left of the castle of Saint James; but it is enough to call up memories of days which, from an English as well as from a local point of view, are worth remembering.



COUTANCES AND SAINT-LO

1891

Geoffrey of Mowbray, Bishop of Coutances, appears once in Domesday as Bishop of Saint-Lo, but it must not therefore be thought that he had his bishopstool in the town so called, or that the great church of Saint-Lo was ever the spiritual head of the peninsular land of Coutances. There is indeed every opportunity for confusion on the subject. The Bishops of Coutances were lords of Saint-Lo in the present department of La Manche; but, so far as they were Bishops of Saint-Lo at all, it was of quite another Saint-Lo, namely, of a church so called in the city of Rouen. There, when the Cotentin was over-run by the still heathen Northmen, the Bishops of Coutances took refuge, carrying with them Saint-Lo himself—Sanctus Laudus, a predecessor in the bishopric—in the form of his relics. When heathen Northmen were turned into Christian Normans, the Bishops of Coutances went home again, but the title which they had picked up on their travels seems to have stuck to them. As they had to do with two things, both called Saint-Lo, as well as with their own city, the error of speech was not wonderful. But, setting aside times of havoc, when there was nothing left to be head of, Coutances always remained the formal head, ecclesiastical and civil, of the Cotentin, the "pagus Constantinus," which took its name from the city. The town of Saint-Lo has now outstripped Coutances in the matter of temporal honour as the head of the department of La Manche, though that dignity was not assigned to it without a good deal of opposition on the part of the elder seat of rule. The same series of changes gave to ecclesiastical Coutances, if not a higher dignity, at least a wider jurisdiction. When the episcopal church of Coutances, after being put to various strange uses in the revolutionary time, became once more a place of Christian worship and the head church of the diocese, that diocese was enlarged by the ecclesiastical territory of Avranches. Avranches and Lisieux have both vanished from the roll of the six suffragans of the Archbishop of Rouen, Primate of Normandy. But Avranches has suffered worse things than Lisieux. The Lexovian bishopstool has passed away; but the church that held it is still there. From Avranches the church itself has vanished. It is from its site only that we look down on the wide plain at our foot, on the Mount of the Archangel in its bay, and the rocks of Cancale beyond.[35]

There is no need to describe anew a building so well known as the cathedral church of Coutances. There is no need to argue against, there is hardly need to wonder at, the strange belief against which Gally Knight and others had to fight, that this beautiful example of the fully developed Early Gothic was really the work of that Bishop Geoffrey who blessed the Norman host on its march from Hastings to Senlac.[36] That belief was indeed a strange one. It implied that some nameless genius at Coutances had, in the middle of the eleventh century, suddenly, at a blow, invented the fully developed style of the thirteenth—that this great discovery was kept hidden at Coutances till the very end of the twelfth—that then various people in Normandy, France, England, and above all Saint Hugh of Burgundy, began to make many, and at first not very successful, attempts to imitate what the men of one spot in the 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 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 Coutances and come back to Saint-Lo, and then walk along the banks of the Vire if we wish to take in the fact, that even the spires of Saint-Lo, much less the church as a whole, have no claim to belong to the same class of buildings as Coutances. In neither case is the church built, as that of Avranches must have been, like Durham, on the brow of the hill. There is a considerable space, at Saint-Lo a busy market, between the west front and the steep. From any point in this space the effect of the west front of Saint-Lo is striking beyond its actual size. The towers are of different dates, and do not altogether match, which has the effect of thrusting the central door rather out of its place. But the front is a grand one all the same. One must go down below, and see from how many points the towers, and even the spires, are lost among the houses, before we find out how comparatively small they are. And in the body of the church we see a marked example of an opportunity thrown away. That the church is much smaller than that of Coutances is a fact of less importance than it would be in England. A characteristic of French architecture is the constant reproduction of the designs of great churches on a much smaller scale. This is a thing which we know nothing of in England, where the parish church and the minster are buildings of two different types, each of which may be equally good in its own way. The church of Saint Peter at Coutances, much smaller than that of Saint-Lo, will illustrate this position. And there are plenty of instances, from graceful miniatures like Norrey and Les Petits Andelys up to churches of considerable size. But at Saint-Lo, whatever little outline the church has apart from its spires it gets from a series of gables along the aisles, something like those of Saint Giles at Oxford. Inside we have a not very successful hallenkirche, three bodies without a clerestory, Bristol-fashion. Much of the work is good enough of its kind, and the late stained glass is worth studying; but, as soon as we leave the west front behind there is a strange lack of design in the whole building, inside and out.

But Notre-Dame is not the only church at Saint-Lo. Both De Caumont and Gally Knight have a good deal to tell us about the church of Saint Cross, which it seems that some antiquaries had carried back to the days of Charles the Great. Distinguendum est. To carry back a piece of Romanesque of any date to a date too early, but still within Romanesque times, is a mistake of quite another kind from attributing finished work of the thirteenth century to Geoffrey of Mowbray in the eleventh. Gally Knight himself erred more slightly in the same way. He knew very well that the work at Saint Cross could not be of the eighth century; but he took it for the eleventh instead of the twelfth. No one can blame him for that at the time when he wrote. But both Gally Knight and De Caumont saw some things at Saint Cross which are not to be seen now, and some things are to be seen now which they did not see. They saw a twelfth-century church which had gone through some changes and additions, and they also saw some considerable monastic buildings, of part of which, a vault with what seems to be a rather classical column, De Caumont gives a drawing. Here it is, if anywhere, that one would look for the earlier date of Romanesque. But all outside the church itself has perished. The church itself has, since De Caumont's visit, been greatly enlarged in imitation of the twelfth-century work, and the twelfth-century work itself has been frightfully scraped and scored after the manner of restoration. Still several bays of arcade and triforium are left in such a state that we can see the original design of round arches with Norman mouldings on piers with shafts with foliated caps. The church, before it was pulled about, must have been a fine one, but assuredly of the twelfth century and not of any earlier time.

One bit of detail which Gally Knight saw may still be seen untouched. "The west entrance," he says, "is barbarously adorned with a grotesque group, in high relief, which represents the Subjugation of the Evil Spirit." The power subjugated takes the shape of a creature, said to be a toad, with his head downwards. The work of subjugation is done by two men below pulling at his head with ropes.

Though Romanesque is the thing which one wishes most to see, yet a church in such a case as Saint Cross at Saint-Lo teaches one less than the smaller churches at Coutances. Both of these, Saint Peter and Saint Nicolas, aim at reproducing on a smaller scale the most distinctive feature of the episcopal church. This is the grand central octagon, with its quasi-domical treatment inside. But in both of the smaller churches it is coupled with a single western tower. This arrangement of a central and western tower is rare in England, because in most of the cases where it once existed one or other of the towers has fallen down. In France it is somewhat more usual, and in Auvergne it is the rule. Here at Saint Peter's a vast deal of effective and stately outline is crowded into a wonderfully small space on the ground. The two towers, tall and massive, rise with a strangely small allowance of nave between them. Begun in the latest Gothic, carried out in early Renaissance, their outline is rich but fantastic, and in many points of general view the three towers of the cathedral do not despise the two of Saint Peter's as fellows in a most effective piece of grouping. The internal effect, which the height might have made very striking, is not equal to the external outline. The discontinuous impost, the ugliest invention of French Flamboyant, may perhaps be endured in some subordinate place; it is intolerable in the main piers of a church. The treatment of the central tower within is very curious; the lantern of the cathedral is here translated into an Italianising style. In short we have here, as we have seen in many places, specially at Troyes,[37] as we shall see again in a most marked form at Argentan, that curious process of transition from mediaeval to Renaissance detail which in England we are familiar with in houses, but which in France is to be largely studied in churches also. At Saint Nicolas, though the building is later in date and less striking in design, such work as keeps any style at all is better. Its nave is free from discontinuous imposts.

Lastly, at Coutances the mediaeval aqueduct, a little way out of the town, must not be forgotten. There are not many such anywhere, save one or two in Sicily. It is a pity that of late years the ivy has been allowed to grow over the arches to that degree that a new-comer would hardly know whether they were round or pointed.



HAUTEVILLE-LA-GUICHARD

1891

The experienced antiquarian traveller is perfectly familiar with the doctrine that in many cases it is more satisfactory to find a mere site than to find anything on the site. Suppose one is castle-stalking in Maine, suppose one is looking for 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, one of the most memorable sites, in its own way of being memorable, to be found in all Western Normandy. We say in its own way of being memorable, because, even if we found ditch and mound and tower all as they should be, their claim to historic reverence would not be that they themselves were the witnesses of any specially memorable acts. Its sound has gone forth into all lands; but it is in lands far away from the site that we seek that the deeds were wrought which made the name of the site famous. We are at Coutances; we seek for Hauteville. The Hauteville that we seek is not that which seems to occur most naturally to the mind of Coutances. It is not Hauteville-sur-mer; it is the namesake that bears the speaking surname of Hauteville-la-Guichard. We seek, in short, for the home of Tancred and his sons. Their statues are now again set up in their niches on the north side of the church of Coutances. But the artist has surely given William of the Iron Arm far too mild a look. It is true that he and all the rest are tricked out as shepherds of the people, in royal, or at least ducal, apparel. It may be then that even he of the Iron Arm, when thus attired, ought not to look as one fancies he must have looked when he sailed into the haven of Syracuse as the brother-in-arms of George Maniakes and Harold Hardrada.

As an episode in the history of the world, one is tempted to think that the fellowship of three such warriors as those, each representing the tongue, the speech, and the mode of warfare of his own folk, is the most striking scene in the whole story of the house of Hauteville. But it is naturally the brother whose deeds have had more abiding results who has made the deepest impression on the minds of men, and who has stamped his surname on the place of his birth. One might almost have been better pleased if Hauteville were known as the Hauteville of Tancred himself rather than by the name of any of his sons. But, if it was to bear the name of one of his sons, one cannot wonder at the son who was chosen. Hauteville is Hauteville-la-Guichard, the Hauteville of Robert the Wiscard, him whom Palermo knows in one character and Rome in another. A good deal of local history lies hid in these surnames of places. The place took the name of its lord to distinguish it from other places of the same name. But we cannot always say why it took the name of this or that particular lord, that is, in effect, why it took its name in this or that particular generation. Old Roger of Beaumont, who stayed to look after Normandy and its duchess while Duke William went to seek a crown in England, is so distinctly Roger of Beaumont that it seems only fair that his Beaumont should be known back again as the Beaumont of Roger.[38] His sons are of Meulan, of Leicester, of Warwick, rather than of Beaumont. Beaumont-le-Roger is felt at once to be the becoming name of his home. Nearer to Hauteville, Saint-Jean, between Avranches and Granville, cradle of all who have written themselves de sancto Iohanne, is Saint-Jean-le-Thomas, after Thomas, its lord in the days of Henry the First. His name is written in Orderic, but he is hardly so famous even as the name-father of Beaumont, much less as the name-father of Hauteville. One needs to know the exact state of things at Saint-Jean in the days of Thomas, before one can tell why the place took his name as its surname rather than the name of any other lord before or after. But mark that it was the Christian name only that Saint-Jean could take; it could not, like La Lande-Patry and Longueville-Giffart, take the surname of the house which was called after itself. But if Hauteville had to take the name of a Tancreding, Robert was the obvious one to choose, and his surname of the Wiscard was the most distinctive name that the family could show. The fame of Robert, the actual founder of the Apulian duchy and indirectly of the Sicilian kingdom, the ally of Gregory the Seventh, the deliverer or the destroyer of Rome, the invader of Eastern Europe, must have quite overshadowed the fame of his elder brothers. And, while he lived, it must have overshadowed the fame of Roger of Sicily also.[39] The Great Count was the younger brother and the liegeman of the Duke. It was later events which caused the youngest branch of the house of Hauteville to outstrip all that had gone before it, to rise in the next generation to the royal crown of Sicily, and in the female line to the crown of Jerusalem and the crown of Rome.

It is then the Hauteville of Robert Wiscard, Hauteville-la-Guichard, that we seek for. As far as the map goes, as far as the road goes, there is no difficulty. But it is a strange thing that in such books as we are able to carry with us we can find no account of Hauteville whatever. Joanne does not mention it; Murray does not mention it; it does not come within the range of De Caumont's Statistique Routiere de la Basse Normandie. A little local book on Coutances and its neighbourhood looks upon Hauteville either as too far off or unworthy of notice. Yet the distance at least, as the map witnesses, is not frightful, and one would have thought that the mere fact of the setting up of the new statues would have awakened the writer of the Coutances guidebook to the fact that such a spot was not far off. Anyhow, if all refuse to describe, the place seems to describe itself. Hauteville, Alta Villa, must surely be what its name implies. We may have unluckily forgotten the warning of Geoffrey Malaterra that Hauteville was not so much called from the height of any hill ("non quidem tantum pro excellentia alicuius montis in quo sita sit"), but rather prophetically, from the height of power and glory to which men who went from it should climb ("sed quoniam, ut credimus, aliquo auspicio ad considerationem praenotantis eventum et prosperos successus eiusdem villae futurorum haeredum, Dei adiutorio et sua presenuitate gradatim altioris honoris culmen scandentium"). We look then for a high place. It might be bold to expect to see the high place crowned by any actual building of the days of Tancred; but it seems only reasonable to argue that Hauteville must be Hauteville, that it must stand high. We feel sure of finding, perhaps, if our hopes are very daring, the eagle's nest on the top of the rock, or perhaps, what in Norman scenery is far more likely, the mound, natural or artificial, with its ditches, rivals, it may be, of Arques. And, where there is so little chance of finding any building of Tancred's own day, we cherish the hope that the site of his dwelling may stand wholly void, and may not have been turned to support any other building of later times.

In this fairly hopeful frame of mind, we set forth from Coutances to the north-east. The path at least is easy enough. After some miles of route nationale, with a fine view of the towers of Coutances for those who look backwards, we turn off into a route departementale. And all who are used to French roads know well that a route nationale is always excellent, and that a route departementale is always endurable and something more. We have one or two gentle ups and downs; but we neither see nor feel anything to suggest the presence or the neighbourhood of an alta villa. Presently a gentle down rather than a gentle up brings us to a small village, a church with a good example of the usual saddle-back tower, and with a few houses around it. We are told, and the ordnance map confirms the statement, that this is Hauteville, Hauteville-la-Guichard. Here then is the home of the Norman gentleman of the twelfth century, whose sons grew into counts and dukes in the southern lands, and whose remoter descendants wore the crowns of kingship and of Empire. With this knowledge, we are staggered to find ourselves, if not actually in a hole, yet in something much nearer to a hole than to a height, in a spot which, of the two, would seem to be more fittingly called Basseville than Haute. A slightly rising ground to the east of the church kindles again some faint hopes, the more so when the bystanders, again confirmed by the map, point out this direction as the way to the chateau. But chateau, in modern French use, is a dangerous word, and even the higher ground did not at all answer our preconceived notion of Hauteville. Still, not to throw away the faintest chance, we go on in the direction pointed out, trusting to our natural wits, for we had nothing else to guide us. Our books had failed us; nor did we, as sometimes happens, light on some intelligent priest or other person more likely to help us than the ordinary villager. A short further drive through two or three narrower roads and their turnings brings us to a spot beyond which there is clearly nothing "carossable" or even "jackassable." We come to two ranges of buildings standing among fields, buildings which have greatly gone down in the world, but which proclaim themselves as the remains of a chateau in the later French sense, or perhaps only of its outhouses. The modern chateau does indeed often enough stand on the site of the ancient castle; but here were no signs whatever of mound or ditch, though we ran into several fields to look for them. And, though we were certainly on higher ground than the church and village, there was nothing at all to suggest why the name of the place should have been called Hauteville.

The only hope now is to go back to the village, on the chance either of finding out something more by the light of nature or of lighting on some one who can tell us something. To the south of the church, as to the east, there is some ground rather higher than the village itself; but we see nothing of a mound, nothing to suggest an alta villa. But some farm-buildings to the west of the church attract the eye; they are not of yesterday; a round tower, seemingly belonging to a gateway, suggests a chateau which has taken the place of a chateau-fort. And, hard by, some of our company are led, perhaps by their noses, to an undoubted ditch, though not exactly a fellow of Arques, Marsala, or Old Sarum. And it is more than a common ditch; it is deep; it is four-sided, and it fences in a distinct plot of ground. Our thoughts have come down so low from the lofty donjon with the vision of which we set out that we begin to think of the smaller kind of moated houses in our own land. The rectory at Slymbridge in Gloucestershire had, some years back at least, a moat round it. Some traces of a moat were not long ago still to be seen at the Bishop's court-house at Wookey in Somerset. Is it possible that this unsavoury ditch really marks out the home precinct of the father of kings? Can it be that Tancred lived within it, perhaps in a wooden house, defended by a palisade and by such a ditch? We do not like the guess, but we have no better, and it really is not so absurd as it sounds. We must remember that, in Tancred's day, at least in Tancred's youth, the existence of stone castles is a little problematical. It is certain that there are few or none left of so early a date; but Normandy has seen so many seasons of the destruction of castles that it is rash to say positively that there never were any. In Tancred's day and later we often hear of the "domus defensabilis," as distinguished from the castle. And, as the famous one at Brionne, which so long defied the arms of Duke William, is defined as "aula lapidea,"[40] it seems implied that a "domus defensabilis" might be only "lignea." To be sure the stone house at Brionne had in the river Rille a ready-made moat in every way better than the ditch that we have stumbled on at Hauteville. In England, at the same time, we should have been perfectly satisfied with a wooden "aula" as the dwelling place of a powerful thegn, but then we should have looked for it on something of a mound, like the home of Wiggod at Wallingford. Certainly, a frightfully stinking ditch of no great width, compassing a square field, is a poor find after the hopes with which we set out. But, in the absence of all help from books or men, it is all that we have to offer. We should be glad if anybody would tell us of something better; but this is all we could make out for ourselves. The name is hardly a greater difficulty on this lower site than on the higher ground of the chateau. It may be then—we hope it is not so, but it may be—that it was within this ditch that Humphrey and Drogo and William of the Iron Arm were so carefully brought up by their good stepmother, that it was here that the Wiscard played his first childish tricks, with the yet smaller Roger as a willing younger brother. Tancred's estate, we are told, was not large enough to feed his two batches of children; that was the reason why they went to seek their fortunes so far off. If they had stayed at home, the estate might possibly have grown; for we are told by their own biographer that it was the nature of the sons of Tancred, when they saw that anybody else had anything, to take it to themselves. Perhaps this dangerous tendency extended only to misbelievers, schismatics, or at least men of other tongues. Otherwise such vigorous annexers of other men's lands might have found more than one chance at home, in days of confusion, of enlarging the estate of Hauteville. In short we may speculate on many matters; we can only say what we have seen and what we have not. And at the last moment a frightful thought comes upon us. We have with us one book of Gally Knight's, but it is only the Norman book. But he wrote another book, in which the house of Hauteville plays a great part. What if he went to Hauteville and found out all about it and put it all in print, only not in his Norman, but in his Sicilian book.



MORTAIN AND ITS SURROUNDINGS

1892

In the course either of a Norman journey or of any study of Norman matters, the thought is constantly suggesting itself that there is an important class of people who are always using the names of the places through which we go, but who seem to attach no meaning to them. The whole tribe of genealogists, local antiquaries, and the like, are, in the nature of things, constantly speaking of Norman places, or at least of the families which take their names from them. But it never seems to come into their heads that these places are real places still in being on the face of the earth. What was the state of mind of the endless people who have spoken of both King Stephen and King John in earlier stages of being by the strange title of "Earl of Moreton"? Do they think they took their title from Moreton-in-the-Marsh, or do they mix those kings up with the Earl of Moreton in Scotland, who died by the maiden a good while later? And, if they try to improve their spelling, and to give it more of a continental look, perhaps he comes out in some such shape as "Count of Mortaigne." That is to say, no distinction is made between Mortain, Moretolium or Moretonium, in the Avranchin, and Mortagne, Mauritania, in Perche. Yet the two towns are both there, each in its old place, though in official speech we have no longer to speak of the Avranchin, but of the department of La Manche, no longer of Perche, but of the department of Orne. There are railways, branch railways certainly, which lead to both; there is no difficulty in getting to either, and Mortain at least, the one most closely connected with our own history, is very well worth going to indeed.

The position of Mortain, to say nothing else, is certainly one of the most beautiful to be found in any region which does not aspire to the sublimity of mountain scenery. The waterfalls have been famous ever since Sir Francis Palgrave connected them with the story of the place and its counts. But the whole position of town, castle, everything about Mortain, is lovely. The town itself in a strange way suggests Taormina. It stands in somewhat the same sort on a kind of ledge on a hill-side, with higher hills rising behind it. But while Taormina looks straight down on the Ionian Sea, Mortain looks down only on the narrow dale of the little river Cance, with its steep banks rising on the other side. Yet there are spots among the limestone rocks which rise about and above Mortain which call up other Sicilian memories. If the traveller intrusts himself to the care of a local guide he will certainly be carried to the little chapel of Saint Michael overhanging the town. From that height he will be rewarded by a wide view, the most part of which, over the rich Norman plain, is as unlike Sicily as may be. But, on another side, the greater Mount of the Archangel may be seen far away floating on its bay, and the position of the chapel itself—old, but modernised and no great work of art—called up for a moment that chapel of Saint Blaise on the Akragantine rocks, which once was the temple of 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 Gregory 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 projection of a bold peninsular rock, joined by a kind of isthmus to the main hill on which the town stands. Here stood the castle; town and church rise above it, and higher hills rise above town and church. But no higher point was so well suited for the purposes of a great and strong fortress. On that spot therefore the castle of Mortain arose; the town, the church, the suburb on the opposite height with its smaller church, the house of nuns above the waterfalls, the Archangel's chapel on the highest point of all, were alike satellites of the castle. They came into being, because the castle had come into being. Count Robert, the brother of the Conqueror, founded the great church of Mortain; but he founded it only because some one before him had founded the castle.

The castle is gone; a few pieces of wall on the rock are all that remains. Mortain is now ruled, not by a count, but by a sub-prefect, and the sub-prefect has made his home on the site of the home of the count. The sub-prefect of Mortain is therefore in one sort to be envied above all sub-prefects, and even prefects too. Such functionaries are commonly quartered in some dull spot in the middle of a town. The sub-prefect of Mortain dwells, and doubtless goes through the duties of his sub-prefecture, in a fair house in a fair garden. That house is the chateau that is, on the site of the chateau-fort that was, looking down on the valley, looking up at the hills, looking across at the church which marks the hermitage of the Blessed Vital. Whether from any point he can actually look over on the lesser waterfall, one must be the sub-prefect or his guest to know. Such is the change, and perhaps one should not regret it; a sub-prefect is certainly a more peaceful representative of authority than a 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.[41] Such seems to be the obvious English shape of Warlencus; but we have a natural curiosity to know what a Warling is, and why William was so called. The name has an attractive sound, and some have seen in it that same approach to a warlock which Gibbon saw to a wiseacre in the surname of Robert Wiscard. We have also a natural curiosity to know whether Duke William really had any good reason for banishing him, and thereby giving the Wiscard another comrade in the Apulian wars. We care more for the reputation of William the Great than for that of William the Warling: the accuser of the Warling too was the first recorded Bigod.[42] That is, he was the first who bore that name as a surname; for Normans in general were scoffed at by Frenchmen as bigods, bigots,—never mind the spelling or the meaning—and also as drinkers of beer. We have that reverence for a much later Bigod that we had rather not think that any Bigod told lies; but there is an awkward oath which an intermediate Bigod took at the time of the election of Stephen. So we will not venture to go beyond the fact that Duke William gave the lands of the Warling to his half-brother Robert. We know him on Senlac; we know him in Cornwall; we know him through all the western lands; we know him most of all on that Montacute of his founding which once was Leodgaresburh, scene of the Invention of the Holy Cross of Waltham.[43]

The West-Saxon knew Count Robert only as a spoiler, the Norman of Mortain knew him as a great ecclesiastical founder. In 1082 he founded the collegiate church of Saint Evroul "in castro Moretonii" for a Dean and eight Canons, to whom seven more were added by other benefactors. He also built or rebuilt the church, and, just as in the case of Harold at Waltham, the language of the charter seems to imply that he built the church first and then founded the canons to serve in it. There was a time—it seems not so very long ago—when Gally Knight had to fight against people who believed that the present church was of Count Robert's own building. So to believe was indeed one degree less grotesque than to believe that the far more advanced church of Coutances was earlier still. Gally Knight easily saw that there was nothing in the church which could be of Count Robert's time except the fine Romanesque doorway on the south side. And even that we should now call too advanced for Count Robert's own work; we should set it down for the last finish of a building which doubtless took some time to make complete in all its parts.

It is common enough in England to find a grand doorway of the twelfth century left in a church where everything else has been rebuilt. Later builders clearly admired them and spared them. Much more would this be the case at Mortain, where the building of the new church must have begun no very long time after the adding of this last finish to the old. The style of the building is Transition, and advanced Transition; it is all but early Gothic. The pointed arch alone is used; the only trace of Romanesque feeling is to be seen in the short columns of the arcade, and in the extreme simplicity of the triforium and clerestory, a single unadorned lancet in each. The vaulting is naturally a little later; that at least, with the English-looking shafts from which it springs, is in the fully developed Pointed style.

The plan of the church of Saint Evroul, Mortain, is as simple as a church that has aisles can be. We were going to say that it is a perfect basilica; but no; the basilica commonly has the transepts and the arch of triumph. At Mortain the same simple arcade runs round nave, choir, and apse without break of any kind. Within the building the effect of this austere and untouched simplicity—no one at Mortain has altered a window or added a chapel—is perfectly satisfactory. Many buildings are larger and more enriched; not many can be said to be more perfect wholes. Save in the matter of multiplied aisles within and flying buttresses without, Mortain may pass for Bourges in small. And, just as at Bourges, the external outline is less satisfactory than the internal effect. A single body of this kind has in itself no outline at all; it depends on its tower or towers. At Mortain the usual central tower of a great Norman church could not be; but neither has Saint Evroul the two Western towers of Saint-Lo and Seez; the arrangement designed was rather a development of the side towers common in the smaller churches of the district. A tower on each side was designed and begun. They stand near the east end; but they are not eastern towers like those of Geneva and many German churches. They stand outside the aisles, so as not to interrupt the continuous design within. They therefore do not really group with the apse; they are detached towers whose lowest stage just touches that of the church. But we are speaking as if both towers were there. In truth only the southern one was carried up, and that only to a height very little above the ridge of the roof, and there furnished with a saddle-back. Such a tower lends the building hardly any increase of outline in the distance, and in a near view it is chiefly remarkable for the oddness of the wonderfully long coupled windows on the west side, which are not continued all round. Save only the simple and graceful west front and the general goodness of the design and execution, the beauties of the church of Mortain are certainly to be sought within.

The castle looks up at the church, which stands on the rather steep slope of the hill, the effect of which is that the east end can hardly be seen, except from a considerable distance. Above it is the hospice, with the fragment of a church with a saddle-back to its central tower. Above again is the chapel of Saint Michael. Of quite another value from Saint Michael is a church a little way out of Mortain, in the near neighbourhood of the waterfalls, with rocks above it and rocks below. This is the church of nuns known as l'Abbaye Blanche, a foundation of Count William of Mortain in 1105. As the next year he was taken at Tinchebray and kept in prison for the rest of his days, he was not likely to do much in the way of building. The church described long ago by Gally Knight and De Caumont is palpably later than his day. It is of the Transition, and it is a much less advanced example of the Transition than the church of Mortain. Whatever Count William meant to found, the actual house was Cistercian, and the church carries Cistercian severity to its extremest point. One thinks of Kirkstall; but Kirkstall, plain as it is, drew majesty from its grand and simple outline; the White Abbey is small; it has, through the lack of a central tower, no outline without, and its small scale hinders the effect of Kirkstall.[44] One might even say that, in buildings of this class—not in those of more elaborate design—something is gained, as with the monuments of Rome, by being somewhat out of repair. Anyhow, in connexion with Mortain, the White Abbey does not lack architectural importance. It is very odd if anybody took the collegiate church to be the older. The White Abbey is a truly Cistercian building, a simple cross with a flat east end, no aisles to the nave, but chapels east of the transepts. It follows the usual law of Transitional buildings. The main constructive arches are pointed; the windows are round-headed in the eastern part, pointed in the western. The cloister and chapter-house have round arches; the remains of the cloister have small single shafts, not the Saracenic coupling to which we have got used in Italy, Sicily, and Southern Gaul. In an odd position to the west of the church, forbidding any west front, is an undercroft with columns with good, but not very rich, twelfth-century capitals, clearly of a piece with the cloister.

Lastly, on the opposite side of the valley, forming a picturesque object on the road from Mortain to the White Abbey, is the small plain church of Neufbourg. The spot marks the solitary dwelling of the Blessed Vital, him who strove to make peace between the contending brothers at Tinchebray, and who gave up his prebend at Mortain and all that he had, to dwell as a hermit amid the woods and rocks.[45] The church, bating a few later insertions, is a perfect Transitional cross church, with a flat east end and no aisles. In this part of Normandy the small churches that one lights on in the villages, though commonly of pleasing outline, have seldom any remarkable work. In this they are distinguished in a marked way from the wonderful series of parish churches round Caen and Bayeux. Those we are tempted to compare with the churches of our own Holland, Marshland, and Northern Northamptonshire. But the comparison does not strictly apply. In each case there is a series of notable churches which never were collegiate or monastic. But in the English district the churches are, as parish churches, of considerable size, sometimes indeed very large, though never affecting the character of a minster. The churches in the Bessin are mainly small, but of singular excellence of work, largely Romanesque of the twelfth century. We may come to some of them before we have done.



MORTAIN TO ARGENTAN

1892

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

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

But Tinchebray is much more than La Lande-Patry, and the site is much more certain. There it was, as Englishmen at the time deemed, that the assize of God's judgment on Senlac was reversed after forty years.[48] England had been won by the Duke of the Normans; Normandy was now to be won by a King of the English. To be sure the English King was the son of the Norman Duke; but he was born in England; he spoke the English tongue; Englishmen had chosen him to be their king rather than his purely Norman brother. King Henry's host was most likely far more largely Norman—specially West-Norman—than English; the chief men above all were Norman; still there were Englishmen in it, and those Englishmen looked on the fight as a national struggle and on the result as a national victory. William of Malmesbury witnesses to the feeling; it is odd that there is not a word of it in "Ordericus Angligena," writing at Saint-Evroul. We read our Orderic; we read the little that there is in Wace; we read the contemporary account in a letter by a Norman partisan of Henry. We then go forth to make out what we can of the site, knowing perfectly well that we shall not find a castle standing up as at Falaise.

The railway takes us from Flers to Montsecret junction, and from Montsecret junction to Tinchebray station. We are looking out for a possible site for the battle, and we soon rule that the ground where the station itself stands, the flat ground to the north of the town, will do perfectly well for the purpose; but we do not as yet know whether there may not be some other site which may do equally well. We walk up from the station, and we find Tinchebray itself a somewhat larger town than we had looked for, though still but small. It strikes us almost at once that it is a town of the same class as Carlisle, Stirling, and Edinburgh, where a single long street, with more or less of slope, leads up to a castle at one end. Here at Tinchebray it is the east end, where the castle hill rises boldly enough over the little stream of the Noireau, the Norman Blackwater, which gives a surname to that 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 withdrawn to a greater distance; the castle hill rises above a meadow which in times past seems to have been a marsh. On the northern side, the hill slopes away more gradually to the plain. Here the castle must have trusted wholly to its own defences. It is on this north side only, where the railway runs, that the battle could have been fought. For the fight of Tinchebray really was a battle, one of the very few pitched battles of the age. The campaign indeed began in an attack on the fortress; but it grew into something more on both sides. And it is only to the north that there was room for the operations of two armies of any size; the earlier besieging could take place from all points, but specially, one would think, from the east and north. But we have to make out these things as well as we can from the look of the ground. The contemporary accounts give us the facts; but they give them without local colouring.

Of the buildings of the castle fairly full accounts have been preserved, which may be studied in a History of Tinchebray in three volumes by the Abbe L.V. Dumaine (Paris: 1883). It is a book most praiseworthy for bringing together all manner of local facts of all manner of dates. And it is full of plans and plates to illustrate particular subjects. For historical criticism we do not look; but we should have liked a clear plan of the castle and town, and, if possible, the reproduction of some old drawing of the castle, such as one often finds. As things are, we have to put up with M. Dumaine's description. Towards the river and the marsh the castle trusted mainly to its natural defences; but at least on the side towards the town it had a ditch which has now vanished. The gates are gone, but the likeness survives of a building near the eastern gate with two pointed arches rising from a pillar, known as Les Porches. Here was the Champ Belle-Noe, and on the hill on the opposite site of the valley was Beaulieu. The names were not ill deserved; the stream and its accompaniments make a pleasant look-out. But of the buildings of the castle nothing now is left; the utmost that we can do is to make out, not the eastern gate itself, but its site. No walls and bulwarks stand up; we must be content with calling up an imagination what there once was. But that is enough; the castle of Henry's day standing up would be best of all; a simple empty space would be next best; but the scattered buildings of the little suburb which occupies the castle site do not seriously hinder us from understanding what we want to understand. In other lines all that Tinchebray has to show is a desecrated fragment of the church of Saint Remigius just outside the castle. Here is a central tower with a very short eastern limb. On the eastern face of the tower is a Romanesque arcade, so very simple and even rude that one is inclined to assign it to a time a good bit earlier than the day of Tinchebray. But there is no such arcade on the other sides, and the western arch of the tower is pointed. What are we to infer when the place is locked and it is hopeless trying to get the key? We do at least remember that the four lantern-arches at Saint David's are not all of the same date; and we hope that, whenever the pointed arch was made, the plain arcade was there on the 28th day of September, 1106, just forty years after the father of the contending princes had landed at Pevensey.

Our accounts are not very clear in their topography, and they do not distinctly point out the site of the battle. The relieving force under Duke Robert and Count William came from Mortain—that is, from the south-west. A striking tale is told of their march. In crossing the forest of Lande-Pourrie to the south of Tinchebray the army heard mass under a tree from the mouth of Vital, the holy solitary of Neufbourg. Count William was his lord, if one who had renounced the world could be said to have an earthly lord, and he was only in his allegiance if he accompanied the forces of Mortain. The object of the holy man was to reconcile the brothers, and he made an attempt on the mind of Henry also. But, according to Orderic, the King of the English was able to show that the fault rested wholly with Robert, and that he himself had entered Normandy only from the purest motives. Anyhow arms were to decide. Only on what spot? The south side of the castle, the natural approach from Mortain, gave no opportunities for fighting an open battle, hardly even for an assault on the castle. The ducal army, with William of Mortain and the terrible Robert of Belleme, must have gone round to some other point. The name of Champ Henriet, borne by a site to the west of the town, therefore away from the castle, does not seem to prove much. The north side seems to furnish the best fighting-ground, and it is the weakest side of the castle. The King's forces would most likely be on that side, and the Duke would come round to attack them. But one cannot pretend to certainty.

The combatants, some of them, awaken a more lively interest than the immediate scene of their exploits. It is hard to throw ourselves into the feeling of those men of the time who saw in the fight of Tinchebray a national victory of Englishmen over Normans. In some sort it was so; from that day no once could say that a Duke of the Normans held England; it was the King of the English who held Normandy. And the invasion of Normandy by Englishmen and their King, and the fighting of the victorious battle on the forty years' anniversary of the Conqueror's landing, could not have failed to strike men's minds. One strange turning-about of things indeed there was. The man whom Englishmen had once chosen as their King, the heir of Alfred, Cerdic, and Woden, fought at Tinchebray in the following of Duke Robert. Eadgar and Robert had been comrades in the Crusade, and the two men were not unlike in character. Neither could ever act for himself; both could sometimes act for others. And if Eadgar thought at all, he may have seen a rival in Henry, while he assuredly could not have seen one in Robert. Anyhow the AEtheling who had marched on York with Waltheof and Maerleswegen 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 grandson of AEthelred, born in Hungary, and fighting alongside of the foreign oppressors whom England and her King had cast out. And the best and the worst of the warrior princes and nobles of the time were there on opposite sides. With Duke Robert came Robert of Belleme, no longer of Shrewsbury or Arundel. With King Henry came the Count of Maine, Helias of La Fleche.

Orderic witnesses to the presence of Englishmen in the battle. The contemporary letter-writer only implies it by mentioning others, of whom he speaks a little scornfully, as well as the men of Bayeux, Avranches, and Coutances, and the Breton and Mansel allies. When Robert of Torigny speaks of the "acies Anglorum," he doubtless simply means, according to a very common form of speech, the force of the King of the English, whatever they might be, either "genere" or "natione." But all who were under the King's immediate command had in some sort to become Englishmen in the hour of battle. Like Brihtnoth and Harold, King Henry stood and waited for the enemy on foot. So did Randolf of Bayeux and the younger William of Warren; so did the wary counsellor who had little love for Englishmen, Robert of Beaumont, Count of Meulan, and presently to be Earl of Leicester, forefather in the female line of another Earl who loved them well. Seven hundred horsemen only kept the two flanks of the infantry. The main body of the horse, Breton and Mansel, stood apart. King Henry's footmen, perhaps with some little advantage of the ground, stood as firm in their ranks as the fathers of some of them had stood forty years before when the lord of Meulan was foremost in the charge against them. They bore up against every charge of the ducal force till Count Helias, with his reserve, chose a happy moment and broke in on their assailants with his horsemen. The lord of Belleme fled for his life; the Duke of the Normans and the Count of Mortain became the prisoners of their conqueror and near kinsman.

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

We go back from Tinchebray to Flers. Next day the main line takes us to Argentan. The name of Tenarcebrai is written in our own Chronicles; so is that of Argentses; only is that really Argentan or only Argences?



ARGENTAN

1892

A good many of the places which we go through on such a journey as we are now taking in Western Normandy, full as they are of historic and local interest on particular grounds, might easily fail to attract, not only the ordinary tourist, but even the general antiquarian traveller. No one, for instance, need go to La Lande-Patry, unless he is anxious to get a better understanding of a single sentence of the Roman de Rou. Even at Tinchebray the strictly historic interest is all. Unless we except that single arcade on the tower of St. Remigius, there is really nothing memorable to show in the shape of either church or castle. With Argentan the case is different. Any one who has a turn for 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 town itself is remarkable, and its existing monuments are of various kinds and instructive in several ways. And the means of getting there are as simple as any means well can be; for Argentan is a principal station on the line from Paris to Granville. It is also a station on the great cross line from Caen to Le Mans. This position makes it a good centre for seeing several places in various directions, to say nothing of others for which none of the many railways of Normandy has as yet done anything. In the journey now recorded it served as a centre for Falaise and Seez, and for what will to most people be the less familiar names of Exmes 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 ecclesiastical foundation; such importance as it has in history seems to have come from the presence of a castle which not uncommonly received princely sojourners. Yet it is plainly something more than one of those towns which have simply sprung up at the gate of a castle. It has one main characteristic of a class of towns much greater than its own: the fortress and the great church stand side by side in its most prominent quarter. That in the general view the church is far more conspicuous than the fortress is the result of later havoc; but we are surprised to find that a church of such dignity in itself and placed in such a position as the chief church of Argentan was never the seat of abbot or dean. Falaise is now a larger town than Argentan; but we feel that at Falaise the town has simply grown up at the foot of the castle hill. Saint Gervase at Falaise is no fellow to the mighty fortress on the felsen, as Saint German of Argentan must have been to the donjon of Argentan, even when that donjon was better seen than it is now. The name of Argentan does not at once lead us to some Gaulish tribe or to some Roman prince; but it does not, like that of Falaise, at once carry its own meaning with it in the speech of some or other of the Teutonic conquerors of Gaul. We feel that Falaise, looking up to the great keep and to the tower of Talbot, is merely a magnificent Dunster or Richmond—we cannot say Windsor; for the sainte chapelle of Saint George has no fellow there. But Argentan is a miniature, a very small miniature certainly, but still a miniature, of Durham and Lincoln and Angers. That is, church and fortress stand together on the highest point in the town.

Is Argentan therefore to be set down among the hill-towns? Falaise, of all places in the world, assuredly is not; the castle is set on a hill, but not the town. But can we give the name to Argentan? Some scruple may be felt by one who has come from Saint-Lo, from Coutances, or from Avranches. Yet the ascent from the Orne to the upper part of the town is very marked, and as the chief buildings, ecclesiastical and military, are gathered together on the higher ground, there is a true akropolis. And there is no doubt that this akropolis had its own circuit of wall, distinct from that of the lower town. This last took in a large space, and was of a strangely complicated shape, running out hither and thither in various directions. According to all our experience of other places, we would take for granted that the inner circuit was the older. Here, we should say, was the original settlement; the town, after the usual manner of towns, outstripped its boundaries; it spread itself in whatever directions suited its inhabitants; lastly, the suburbs which thus grew up were taken into the town, and were fenced in by a second wall. This, one need hardly say, is a thing which has happened over and over again, in this place and that, till we take it for granted as the explanation of such a state of things as we see at Argentan. But in a local book, in which a great deal of information about Argentan is brought together, Le Vieil Argentan, by M. Eugene Vimont, it is distinctly asserted that the case is the other way. The wider circuit, he tells us, is the older. In the wars of the early days of William, King Henry of France burned Argentan. The burning is undoubted; it is recorded by William of Jumieges. But M. Vimont's inference seems strange—namely, that after this destruction the town was rebuilt, but on a smaller scale. The case would be something like one stage in the history of 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.[49] But an ordinary burning of a town in warfare like that which went on between France and Normandy did not commonly lead to such great changes as this, and it is very hard to believe that the town of Argentan can, in the first half of the eleventh century, have reached this great extent and this irregular shape. We are bound to suppose that a local writer who shows much local knowledge has some reason for what he says. But for a thing so hard to believe some direct authority should be quoted, and M. Vimont quotes none. Till some other convincing authority is produced, we shall believe that the growth of Argentan followed the same law as that of other towns.

It is only in a few small pieces here and there that either the wider or the narrower circuit of wall has left any sign of itself. But we can believe both on M. Vimont's witness, and indeed they hardly need any witness. Each circuit has left its stamp behind it in the way that town walls do leave it, even when, as walls, they have altogether vanished. We hold, then, that the narrower circuit, taking in only the higher ground with the church of Saint German, and the two castles, is the oldest. The church and the donjon doubtless had predecessors before King Henry came against Argentan. His burning need not have wrought any more of lasting destruction than a hundred other such burnings. The town sprang up again; in course of time, when Argentan flourished under princely favour, it grew beyond its old bounds. The growth of the inhabited town called for a wider circuit of walls. The new suburbs, with the church of Saint Martin, were taken within the fortified area. Argentan no longer merely looked down on the Orne, but was washed by it.

The upper town, then, besides the church of Saint German, contains not only one, but two castles. On the highest ground of all, in the north-west corner of the enclosure, are the remains of a large polygonal keep, which keeps its name of the donjon. It makes very little show, being sadly crowded in by houses. Somewhat lower down is the chateau, a graceful building of the late French Gothic, now used as the Palace of Justice. The building itself has hardly any defensive character about it, but it stands as part of the general line of defence, and it was also connected with the donjon by an inner wall, parting the two castles from the town. Some parts of the wall in this neighbourhood, both inner and outer, are still standing; and near the chateau 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 central and western towers, though the central tower of Saint German's is not octagonal, but square. But the western tower at Argentan is not western in the same sense as the western tower at Coutances. That is, it does not stand in the same line with the central tower. It is not a western, but a north-western tower. This allows a greater variety of outline than can be had at Saint Peter's. But the general effect of the towers, all of which evidently received their last finish after the days of pure Gothic had passed away, is essentially the same in the two cases. In the central tower of Saint German this finish is nothing more than a cupola of wood and lead on a handsome but not lofty lantern of late Gothic, wonderfully good, outside at least, for the date of 1555. But the general effect is not bad. The north-western tower, known as la grosse tour, has a more curious history. The lowest stage is good and rich Flamboyant, with a highly adorned porch. On this is a much plainer stage, from which the Gothic feeling has passed, but which has no distinctly Renaissance detail. It has long narrow windows with flat-arched heads. This must have been building in 1617, when the governor of the town forbade the tower to be carried higher, lest it should overlook the donjon. We think of William Rufus bidding Hildebert of Le Mans to pull down his pair of newly built towers.[50] The hindrance was afterwards withdrawn, and in 1638 the tower was finished with its fantastic, but certainly taking, cupola. The nave was begun in 1421, when Normandy was ruled for a season by the descendants of its ancient dukes. It was carried on gradually for 220 years, and was finished in 1641. The changes in style during this time are easily traced. The nave is late but pure Gothic, a really fine design, though a good deal spoiled by the loss of tracery in so many of the windows both in aisles and clerestory. In a large panelled triforium a very keen eye may possibly detect in the lowest range of ornament a tendency—it is nothing more—to Renaissance ideas. Or it may only be fancy suggested by the stages further east. Certainly the nave, if not quite of first-rate merit, has a really striking effect, and is far better than most panel work of the time. The transepts are of the same style. They are finished north and south with apses, which are really graceful, though we miss the rose-windows which we should otherwise have looked for in a French church on such a scale as this. The choir too, as seen out of the nave, is well-proportioned and effective, though we see that the windows in the apse have flat arches and no tracery. The apse, if we can call it so, has the strange singularity of ending in a point, and some odd details have crept into the bosses of the vault. But, in the general view from the nave, the only thing that mars the general harmony and good effect is the treatment of the lantern. The four lantern arches have the flattened shape of the latest Gothic; but, oddly enough, the variety here chosen is the English four-centred arch, not the usual French shape, three-centred, elliptic, or actually flat-headed. But both the English and the French form are quite unsuited for pier-arches, and for lantern arches yet more. And, though the work of the lantern is quite good outside, yet within we see that the enemy has begun to take possession. There is perhaps no actual un-Gothic detail, but the feeling of the arcade of flat-headed arches which forms the gallery shows the way in which things are tending.

We go into the choir. There, setting aside the apse windows, the arcade, triforium, clerestory, are still pure, if very late Gothic; the new fashion comes in one detail only; the vaulting shafts have an odd kind of Ionic capital. It is in the latest part of all, the chapels round the choir, that the new taste comes in most strongly, and even there it is not altogether dominant. It is very strange outside, where heavy flying-buttresses are tricked out with little columns. Within, pairs of such little columns are the chief ornament. But they support no arches, only scraps of entablature. The arches of the roof, the windows, and everything else, are still of the elliptic shape, and they still keep the late Gothic mouldings. No building better shows what a long fight was waged between the two styles. Saint German at Argentan is not like Saint Eustace, where we see a grand Gothic conception carried out without a single correct Gothic detail. Here not only the conception, but the great mass of the internal detail, is purely Gothic; the new fashion thrusts itself in only in particular parts.

This last remark is specially true of the smaller church of Argentan, that of Saint Martin. Here we have not the full cruciform shape. There is no central tower or lantern, but only lower transepts projecting from a continuous nave and choir, whose roof-line, within and without, runs uninterruptedly from east to west. The only tower is a small octagonal one with a spire at the north-west corner. The peculiarity within is that, while the arcade and clerestory are still late Gothic, the triforium between them has run off into Renaissance. The reason seems clear. The new fashion affected details long before it touched the great lines of the building. The triforium at this date is, as at Saint German, simply a matter of detail, an arrangement of panelling and the like. That stage, therefore, was naturally touched by the intruding foes, while the main features, like the pillars and pier-arches, are as yet not all affected. At Saint Martin the windows are some of them good Flamboyant, while some are a kind of very bad Perpendicular. From others, as at Saint German, the tracery has been cut away altogether. This church, smaller than Saint German, of a less effective outline, and standing in the lower part of the town, has nothing like the same grand effect as the two towers of Saint German on the hill. But it has, with its tall clerestory, a stately look from some approaches, and it has its lesson to tell in the history of art.

One is surprised to hear that in the old days Argentan had but a single cure, whose sphere of usefulness took in both Saint German and Saint Martin. One fully expects to find that such a church as Saint German was collegiate. But this is one of the characteristic features of French architecture. We are used in England to great town churches, which never were more than parish churches, covering a good deal more ground than Saint German's. But we are not used, save at Shoreham and Bristol, to see them built, like Saint German, so thoroughly on the type of churches of higher rank. Boston, Newark, Saint Michael's at Coventry, Trinity Church at Hull, are as grand in their way as Saint German at Argentan, only it is in quite another way.

There are a few other things to see at Argentan. On the slope of the hill is a good late Gothic house, with two arches of street arcade in front. Add a little more, and we should have the arcade of Carentan; add a great deal more, and we should have the arcades of Bern. Those who seek for it will also find a 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 Notre-Dame de la Place. We relieve ourselves by finding fault with M. Vimont, who certainly does not always put things in those parts of his book where we should most naturally look for them.