Sketches of Travel in Normandy and Maine Part 3

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 fellows.h.i.+p 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 Ba.s.se 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 kings.h.i.+p 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 _Ba.s.seville_ 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 "jacka.s.sable." 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 Gloucesters.h.i.+re 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 WigG.o.d at Wallingford. Certainly, a frightfully stinking ditch of no great width, compa.s.sing 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 cla.s.s 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 t.i.tle of "Earl of Moreton"? Do they think they took their t.i.tle 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, pa.s.sed 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 banis.h.i.+ng 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 BiG.o.d.[42] That is, he was the first who bore that name as a surname; for Normans in general were scoffed at by Frenchmen as _biG.o.ds_, _bigots_,--never mind the spelling or the meaning--and also as drinkers of beer. We have that reverence for a much later BiG.o.d that we had rather not think that any BiG.o.d told lies; but there is an awkward oath which an intermediate BiG.o.d 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 b.u.t.tresses without, Mortain may pa.s.s 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 cla.s.s--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 Northamptons.h.i.+re. 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 a.s.sumption; the great church is crowded with wors.h.i.+ppers. 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 a.s.size of G.o.d'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 cla.s.s 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 gra.s.sy 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 s.p.a.ce 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 a.s.sign 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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.sault 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 a.s.suredly 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 n.o.bles 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 hors.e.m.e.n 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 a.s.sailants with his hors.e.m.e.n. 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 t.i.tle 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 a.s.suredly 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.