Edward A. Freeman

“ The look-out is a wide one indeed; but it is now easier to get it from the road going back to Argentan than from the top of the hill itself. The eye ranges over a vast space chiefly to the north-west, over the great forest of Gouffers, over plains and undulating ground, a wide and striking view, but in which no remarkable object rises up to catch the eye. We look forth with the special hope of getting a distant glimpse of Falaise and its donjon. Perhaps not the donjon itself, but the high ground about it is said to be seen from the tower of Saint German at Argentan. ”

“ Sham Romanesque is grotesque everywhere, but it is more grotesque than all when we see newly-cut capitals stuck into the windows of a roofless castle, when the grey hue of age is wiped away from a building which has stood at least seven hundred years, and when the venerable fortress is made to look as spick and span as the last built range of shops at Paris. ”

“ The Avranchin formed part of the fief of the Ætheling 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. ”

“ There is an east end, such as one hardly sees on so small a scale out of Auvergne. Here is the apse, the surrounding aisle, the apses again projecting from the aisle; and the varied outline is made yet more varied by a round turret of the same date and style thrown in among the apses. The general air is early, the work plain, the masonry simple; but the clerestory windows have pointed arches. We gaze with delight on an outline more thoroughly picturesque than we have seen for a long while, and which carries back our thoughts to a land of which all the memories are pleasing. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is a town which never was a Bishop's see, but which contains four or five churches each fit to have been a cathedral. There is the stern and massive pile which owes its being to the Conqueror of England, and where a life which never knew defeat was followed by a posthumous history which is only a long series of misfortunes. There is the smaller but richer minster, part of which at least is the genuine work of the Conqueror's Queen. ”

“ A Celtic hill-fort, crowning a height rising steeply from a river-side, has grown into a Roman city, and the Roman city has remained to our own times the local capital, alike civil and ecclesiastical. It would be hardly possible to find a single town in England whose history has run the same course—a course which is by no means peculiar to Chartres and Le Mans, but which they share with many other cities in all parts of Gaul. And Le Mans especially has a local history of unusual interest, and that history is written with unusual clearness on the site and the earliest remains of the town. ”

“ And from the chapel itself and from the hill-side paths which lead up to it, we get the noblest views of the great abbey, in all the stern simplicity of its age, stretching the huge length of its nave, one of the very few, even in Normandy, which rival the effect of Winchester and Saint Albans. A single central tower, of quite sufficient height, of no elaborate decoration, crowned by no rich spire or octagon, but with a simple covering of lead, forms the thoroughly appropriate centre of the whole building. We feel that this tower is exactly what is wanted ”

“ We 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. ”

“ Just out of the road, at the base of the two hills, the eye is caught by a ruined tower on the right hand. This is what remains of the castle of Mortemer, a fragment of considerably later date than the battle. The church is modern and worthless; the few scattered houses, almost wholly of wood, which form the hamlet, present nothing remarkable. But it is in this very absence of anything remarkable that the historic interest of Mortemer consists. The Mortemer of the eleventh century was a town; the Mortemer of the nineteenth century is a very small and scattered village. ”

“ We know not who are the guilty ones. Perhaps there is some stuck-up Mayor or Prefect who would think himself a great man if he could make Le Mans as ugly and uninteresting as the dreary modern streets of Rouen or of Paris itself. It is at all events certain that M. Haussmann was not long ago seen in Le Mans, and such a presence at such a time is frightfully ominous. At any rate the facts which can be seen by the traveller's own eyes are beyond doubt. ”

“ They who have turned all the ancient monuments of France upside down have come to Falaise also. They who were revelling ten years back in the destruction of Périgueux, they who are even now fresh from effacing all traces of antiquity from the noble minster of Matilda, they who have thrust their own handiworks even into the gloomy crypt of Odo, have at last stretched forth their hands to smite the cradle of the Conqueror himself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ THE CATHEDRAL CHURCHES OF BAYEUX, COUTANCES, AND DOL 1867
One would rather like to see a map of France, or indeed of Europe, marking in different degrees of colour the abundance or scarcity of English visitors and residents. Of course the real traveller, whether he goes to study politics or history or language or architecture or anything else, is best pleased when he gets most completely out of the reach of his own countrymen. The first stage out of the beaten track of tourists is a moment of rapture. For it is the tourists who do the mischief; the residents are a comparatively harmless folk. ”

“ But when we come more thoroughly to take in the internal beauties of Coutances, we begin to feel that Bayeux, with all its superior grandeur, has found a very formidable rival. Coutances is the more harmonious whole. The choir and the nave vary considerably, and the choir must be somewhat the later of the two. But the difference is hardly of a kind to interfere much with the general effect. The general appearance of the church is thoroughly consistent throughout, and the octagon lantern, with its arcades, galleries, and pendentives, all open to the church, forms a magnificent feature. ”

“ In the second generation after the province became Normandy at all, Rouen had again become a French city. William Longsword, Rollo's son, sent his son to Bayeux to learn Danish. There the old Northern tongue, and, we fancy, the old Northern religion too, still flourished, while at Rouen nobody spoke anything but French.
A tour in Normandy has an interest of its own, but the nature of that interest is of a kind which does not make Normandy a desirable choice for a first visit to France. We will suppose that a traveller, as a traveller should, has learned the art of travel in his own land. ”

“ There are no columns, no capitals, not a moulding of any kind. Arches of two orders rise from square piers with imposts, and support an equally plain clerestory. For a clerestory there is, genuine and untouched, though so strangely hidden outside by the great sloping roof. This is all; but we ask for no more; the design, plain as it is, leaves nothing to ask for. One does not rush at a date; it may be twelfth century; it may be eleventh; but, if so, it is of the second half of the eleventh. Plain as are the imposts, they show that the work is of the confirmed Norman variety of Romanesque ”

“ 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 château in the later French sense, or perhaps only of its outhouses. The modern château 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. ”

“ In no part of Gaul, in the days at least when Le Mans and Maine stand out most prominently in general history, are the city and the district more closely connected. Maine was not, like Normandy, a large territory, inhabited to a great extent by a distinct people—a territory which, in all but name, was a kingdom rather than a duchy—a territory which, though cumbered by the relations of a nominal vassalage, fairly ranked, according to the standard of those times, among the great powers of Europe. ”

“ 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 primæval 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 ”

“ No city is more distinctly the Gaulish hill-fort which has gradually swelled into the Roman, the mediæval, and the modern city. Yet the height of Le Mans is neither so lofty nor so isolated as those of many of its fellows. It is not a detached hill at all, nor does the city stand on the highest ground in its own immediate neighbourhood; and on the eastern, the inland side, the slope of the rising ground is very gradual. Yet the site of the hill-fort which grew into the city was happily chosen. ”

“ Beyond doubt the finished historian must be a traveller: he must see with his own eyes the true look of a wide land; he must see, too, with his eyes the very spots where great events happened; he must mark the lie of a city, and take in, as far as a non-technical eye can, all that is special about a battle-field. ”

“ The central tower is indeed low and massive, but so are many others both in Normandy and England; nor would the wooden spire with which it is crowned suggest that in the inside the four plain arches of its lantern support as perfect a cupola as if we were on the other side of the Loire. But both the arches of the lantern and the barrelled vault of the choir keep the round arch. Maine was far off from the land of the Saracen, and the pointed arch would here be a sign that later forms were not far off. ”

“ Otherwise the very important phenomenon of the strong likeness between Normandy and England will not be taken in as it ought to be.
Go from France proper into Normandy and you at once feel that everything is palpably better. Men, women, horses, cows, all are on a grander and better scale. If we say that the food, too, is better, we speak it with fear and trembling, as food is, above all things, a matter of taste. ”

“ For the antiquary, nothing can be more fascinating than a Norman tour. Less curious, less instructive, because much more like English buildings, than those of Aquitaine, the architectural remains of the province8 are incomparably finer in themselves. Caen is a town well nigh without a rival. It shares with Oxford the peculiarity of having no one predominant object. At Amiens, at Peterborough—we may add at Cambridge—one single gigantic building lords it over everything. Caen and Oxford throw up a forest of towers and spires, without any one building being conspicuously predominant. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Normandy as in England, you do not see piles, like Beauvais, begun on too vast a scale for man's labour ever to finish; you do not see piles like Amiens, where all external proportion is sacrificed to grandeur of internal effect. [9] A Norman minster, like an English one, is satisfied with a comparatively moderate height, but with its three towers and full cruciform shape, it seems a perfection of outline to which no purely French building ever attains. ”

“ Now, Normandy and England, of course, have many points of difference, and doubtless a man who goes at once into Normandy from England will be mainly struck by the points of difference. But let a man go through Southern Gaul first, and visit Normandy afterwards, and he will be struck, not with the points of difference, but with the points of likeness. Buildings, men, beasts, everything will at once remind him of his own country. ”