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