There is no understanding a country unless one gets to know the nature
of its sub-units. In some way not easy to comprehend, impossible to
define, and yet very manifest, each of the great national organisms of
which Christendom is built up is itself a body of many regions whose
differences and interaction endow it with a corporate life. No one
could understand the past of England who did not grasp the local genius
of the counties—Lancashire, cut off eastward by the Pennines, southward
by the belt of marsh, with no natural entry save by the gate of
Stockport; Sussex, which was and is a bishopric and a kingdom; Kent,
Devon, the East Anglian meres. No one could (or does) understand modern
England who does not see its sub-units to have become by now the great
industrial towns, or who fails to seize the spirit of each group of
such towns—with London lying isolated in the south, a negative to the
rest.
France is built of such sub-units: it is the peculiarity of French
development that these are not small territories mainly of an average
extent with government answerable in a long day’s ride to one centre,
such as most English counties are; nor city States such as form the
piles upon which the structure of Italy has been raised; nor kingdoms
such as coalesced to reform the Spanish people; but _provinces_,
differing greatly in area, from little plains enclosed, like the
Rousillon, to great stretches of landscape succeeding landscape like
the Bourbonnais or the Périgord.
The real continuity with an immemorial past which inspires all Gallic
things is discoverable in this arrangement of Gaul. At the first glance
one might imagine a French province to be a chance growth of the feudal
ties and of the Middle Ages. A further effort of scholarship will prove
it essentially Roman. An intimate acquaintance with its customs and
with the site of its strongholds, coupled with a comparison of the most
recent and most fruitful hypotheses of historians, will convince you
that it is earlier than the Roman conquest; it is tribal, or the home
of a group of cognate tribes, and its roots are lost in prehistory. So
it is with Normandy.
This vast territory—larger (I think) than all North England from the
Humber to Cheviot and from Chester to the Solway—has never formed a
nation. It is typical of the national idea in France that Normandy
should have “held” of the political centre of the country, probably
since the first Gallic confederations were formed, certainly since the
organization of the Empire. It is equally typical of the local life of
a French province that, thus dependent, Normandy should have strictly
preserved its manner and its spirit, and should have readily made war
upon the Crown and resisted, as it still resists and will perhaps for
ever, the centralizing forces of the national temper.
If you will travel day after day, and afoot, westward across the length
of Normandy, you will have, if you are a good walker, a fortnight’s
task ahead of you; even if you are walking for a wager, a week’s. It is
the best way in which to possess a knowledge of that great land, and my
advice would be to come in from the Picards over the bridge of Aumale
across the little River Bresle (which is the boundary of Normandy to
the east), and to go out by way of Pontorson, there crossing into
Brittany over the little River Couesnon, which is the boundary of
Normandy upon the west and beyond which lie the Bretons. In this way
will you be best acquainted with the sharp differentiation of the
French provinces passing into Normandy from Picardy, brick-built,
horse-breeding, and slow, passing out of Normandy into the desolation
and dreams of Brittany, and having known between the one and the other
the chalk streams, the day-long beechen forests, the valley pastures,
and the flamboyant churches of the Normans. You will do well to go by
Neufchâtel, where the cheese is made, and by Rouen, then by Lisieux to
Falaise, where the Conqueror was born, and thence by Vive to Avranches
and so to the Breton border, taking care to choose the forests between
one town and another for your road, since these many and deep
woods—much wider than any we know in England—are in great part the soul
of the country.
By this itinerary you will not have taken all you should into view; you
will not have touched the coast nor seen how Normandy is based upon the
sea, and you will not have known the Cotentin, which is a little State
of its own and is the quadrilateral which Normandy thrusts forth into
the Channel. If you have the leisure, therefore, return by the north.
Pass through Coutances and Valognes to Cherbourg, thence through Caen
and Bayeux to the crossing of Seine at Honfleur, and then on by the
chalk uplands and edges of the cliffs till you reach Eu upon the Bresle
again. In such a double journey the character of the whole will be
revealed, and if you have studied the past of the place before starting
you will find your journey full. Avranches, Coutances, Lisieux, Bayeux,
Rouen are not chance sites. Their great churches mark the bishoprics;
the bishoprics in turn were the administrative centres of Rome, and
Rome chose them because they were the strongholds or the sacred cities
each of a Gallic tribe. The wealth of the valleys permitted everywhere
that astonishing richness of detail which marks the stonework in
village after village; the connexion with England, especially the last
connexion under Henry V, explains the innumerable churches, splendid
even in hamlets as are our own. The Bresle and the Couesnon, those
little streams, are boundaries not of these last few centuries, but of
a time beyond view; the Romans found them so. Diocletian made them the
limits of the “Second Lyonesse,” “Lugdunensis Secunda,” which was the
last Roman name of the province.
Here and there, near the west especially, you will discover names which
recall the chief adventure of Normandy, the accident which baptized it
with its Christian name, the landing of the Scandinavian pirates, the
thousandth anniversary of which is now being celebrated. They came—we
cannot tell in what numbers, some thousands—and harried the land. The
old policy of the Empire, the policy already seven hundred years old,
was had recourse to; the barbarians were granted settlement,
inheritance, marriage, and partnership with the Lords of the Villae;
their chief was permitted to hold local government, to tax and to levy
men as the administrator of the whole province; but there followed
something which wherever else the experiment had been tried had not
followed: something of a new race arose. In Burgundy, in the northeast,
in Visigothic Aquitaine the slight admixture of foreign blood had not
changed the people, it was absorbed; the slight admixture of
Scandinavian blood, coming so much later, in a time so degraded in
government and therefore so open to natural influence, did change the
Gallo-Romans of the Second Lyonesse. Few as the newcomers may have been
in number, the new element transformed the mass, and when a century had
permitted the union to work and settle, the great soldiers who founded
us appeared. The Norman lords ordered, surveyed, codified, and ruled.
They let Europe into England, they organized Sicily, they confirmed the
New Papacy, they were the framework of the Crusades.
The phenomenon was brief. It lasted little more than a hundred years,
but it transformed Europe and launched the Middle Ages. When it had
passed, Normandy stood confirmed for centuries (and is still confirmed)
in a character of its own. No longer adventurous but mercantile, apt,
of a resisting courage, sober in thought, leaning upon tradition, not
imperially but domestically strong: the country of Corneille and of
Malesherbes, a reflection of that spirit in letters; the conservative
body of to-day—for in our generation that is the mark of Normandy—and,
in arms, the recruitment to which Napoleon addressed his short and
famous order that “the Normans that day should do their duty.”