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.
[Illustration: St. Nicolas, Coutances, Interior]
HAUTEVILLE-LA-GUICHARD
1891
The experienced antiquarian traveller is perfectly familiar with the
doctrine that in many cases it is more satisfactory to find a mere site
than to find anything on the site. Suppose one is castle-stalking in
Maine, suppose one is looking for 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.