Chapter V: Preface (5)

Our present business is to see the sites of all these events. We hardly dared to hope that we may see any ecclesiastical work of Abbess Emma or Abbess Matilda. Still less do we hope to see the castles which Arnulf and Robert of Belleme seized on standing up as they were in their day. Both Exmes and Almeneches, in the present state of their military works, are among the places which most fully bear out the doctrine with which we started in speaking of Hauteville, that a site is often better when there is nothing on it. The site of the castle of Exmes is not exactly in an ideal state. The best case of all would be if it still bore a castle of the right date; the second best would be if there were only a green hill and its ditch, with full power of walking freely over them as one thought good. The castle-hill of Exmes is not in so happy a case as either of these; but it is much better off than if it were surmounted by a barrack or a prison. The hill is there; the ditch, as we suppose we must call it, is there; there is no building on the hill save a small modern chapel; the only bad thing about it is that the top of the hill is cut up into small fields with high hedges, and that the ditch is cut up into gardens. There is therefore no means either of going freely about, or of taking any connected view of the top of the hill. Still, the general line of the place can be easily made out, and we soon see that a site well suited for its purpose has been made the most of. The actual hill of the castle makes no special show in the distance. No longer marked by the castle itself, it seems simply part of the general mass of high ground on which both town and castle stand, and from which the castle-hill itself stands forward in a peninsular fashion towards the north. The hill is round, or nearly so; and no small measure of human skill has been employed in adapting it to purposes of defence. We spoke of a ditch; but a ditch is hardly the right word. At a good height above the actual bottom, as one feels very strongly in going up the road from Argentan, the castle-hill strictly so called is surrounded by the artificial work which, for want of a better name, we have called a ditch. But it is safer to say that the hill-side has been cut, leaving the upper part of the hill with scarped sides rising above a flat piece of ground all round, which puts on the character of a ditch or not according as the hill-side at different points supplies a bank on the other side. It is on the side towards the town that it is most truly a ditch. The general effect is something like the clerestory of a round church, the Temple Church or any other, rising above a flat-roofed surrounding aisle. The ditch is wide, and doubtless has been deeper--that is, more of a ditch--than it is now; that is, its use for gardens must have raised its general level. One's thoughts somehow rather go away to Marsala than to Arques or Old Sarum--perhaps because in those last we can freely go about, while gardens, houses, what not, come in the way both at Marsala and at Exmes. If they were away, the whole thing would be more like some of the ditches on the Malvern hills than anything else.

Such is all that is to be seen of the castle of Exmes; but, in the absence of an actual donjon that can have seen the wars of the Conqueror and his sons, it is quite enough. 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. But we at least could not see it from Exmes.

The other object in the little town of Exmes, now hardly more than a village, is the church. This stands on the general mass of high ground from which the castle hill juts out. It is a building of no small interest, both from what it has to show and from what it has not. At first sight it seems utterly shapeless. What first catches the eye is a very pretty apse of good Flamboyant work, with windows in two ranges, of which all in the upper and some in the lower are blocked. We see also at the same glance that something just to the west of the apse has been destroyed or left unfinished. Beyond this again is a much lower western body, a nave with its aisles thrown under one roof. This last is not attractive from without, but when we go in, we find that it is the jewel of Exmes. There is a nave of five bays, perhaps once of six, of the very simplest and purest Romanesque, one of the examples which show how that style, better than any other style, can altogether dispense with ornament. 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; there are no Primitive traces hanging about it, such as we see at Jumieges.

The perfection of the Norman nave seems to have been tampered with in later days by cutting through a low transepted chapel on each side. The arches look as if they had supplanted a sixth arch of the nave. But far greater changes were presently designed. As at Gisors, as at a hundred other places, the Flamboyant architects thought the elder building too plain, and above all things too low. In a great number of cases they rebuilt the choir after their own fashion, but never carried the work on to the nave. Here at Exmes the work in the eastern part was never finished. That seems most likely; but it is possible that the work was finished and has been pulled down. The apse at least was done, and very pretty it is; but a tall transept on each side with a large chapel to the east of each, perhaps built, certainly designed, are not there now. Within, there is no vaulting, and a mean wooden roof has been thrown across at about half the proper length. The nave, too, is covered with a wooden roof, a kind of coved roof with tie-beams. A real barrel-vault would be best of all; but a good flat ceiling, such as was common in Romanesque times, would do very well. It is one of the differences between French and English architecture that the French designers always meant or hoped to have a vault; the wooden roof in a French church is always a mere shift. It was the builders of English parish churches who found out that the wooden roof could be made into an equal substitute for the vault, preferred to it by a deliberate taste.

For one very anxious to work out in detail the curious little bit of history with which the two places are chiefly concerned, it might be better, if he could manage it, to take Exmes and Almeneches in a single round. But it is easier to make them the objects of two separate excursions from Argentan. We set out then from that town with a twofold anxiety on the mind. Shall we find any signs of the abbey of the persecuted Emma? We do not give up all hope till we shall see with our own eyes. Shall we find any signs of the "_munitio_" occupied by her brother Arnulf? Signs we may fairly look for, if not for the thing itself. Our guidebook describes a church of Almeneches, but it does not distinctly say whether it is the church of the abbey or a separate parish church. It speaks of a "beau tumulus" in the "environs" of Almeneches, and says that the neighbourhood is full of "equestrian memories," whatever those may be. One of them, to be sure, bears the name of the "Manoir de la Motte," which has a very tempting sound. On the ordnance map we can find nothing of this manor; but we do find "Almeneches" and "le Chateau d'Almeneches" marked as two distinct _communes_. This is encouraging; we seem to have lighted on what at home we should call "Abbess Almeneches" and "Castle Almeneches." We see Emma at the one and Arnulf at the other; but we still do not know what traces either sister or brother may have left. At last we reach Almeneches, Abbess Almeneches, and we see the church described in our Joanne. It is not very tempting in its general look, and there is nothing particular about its site, except that the ground does slope away from its east-end. Is this Emma's minster or its successor, or is it merely a parish church, and have we to look for the abbey elsewhere? Some signs of the cloister roof on the south side soon settle this question. But we begin to hope, for the credit of the house of Montgomery, that Emma, either before or after her troubles, and her niece after her, had a better church than this to preside over. We find from Joanne that Almeneches boasts of its church; but it doth falsely boast. Instead of the nave of Romsey or of Matilda's church at Caen, we have a single body of late Gothic, with windows like very bad Perpendicular, a form not uncommon hereabouts. We get its date from an inscription:--

"Ce temple lequel a este ruine par l'antiquite fut commence a
reedifier l'a^n de grace 1534 et fut perfaict l'a^n 1550 par
revere^nde dame Madame Loyse de Silly abbesse de cea^ns. Gloire et
hon^r. soyt au seigneur."

Louise of Silly's work may be just endured; it is at any rate better than the choir built by a later Abbess Louise--we have got out of the age of Emmas and Matildas--in 1674. That is the lowest depth of all; it is the depth reached by the choir of Saint Wulfram of Abbeville; that is, it is of no style at all; a decent Italian building would be welcome by the side of it. But its modern adornments may teach us the history of Saint Opportuna down to our own day. That may be said, because it represents her translation in the days of the second Republic in 1849. What most strikes one is the appearance in stained glass of modern uniforms and--we were going to say modern bonnets, only we are told that the bonnets of 1849 are not counted as modern in 1891. Still we are sure that neither Abbess Emma nor even Abbess Louise ever wore such before they entered religion. Altogether one never saw so poor an abbey church anywhere. One is curious to know what it immediately supplanted, and whether the sisterhood was again in such straits as those which it had been in the time of Emma of Montgomery. Did the house never recover from the seizure of its lands by King Henry?

Of the "Manoir de la Motte" nothing can be heard. But the "_munitio_" must be represented, at least in name, by Le Chateau d'Almeneches. Our driver protests that there is no _chateau_ there, only a _commune_. So much the better. If there is no _chateau_ there in his sense, that is, no intruding modern house, we are more likely to find the site of the real _chateau_, the _munitio_. And we presently do find it. We are going on in some difficulties, amidst a good deal of rain; but we see something in a field by the roadside, between Almeneches and the church of Le Chateau d'Almeneches which is evidently the right thing. There is a manifest mound and ditch of some kind. We go on to the church, one about as worthless as may be, but which will serve as a place at least of shelter. But by that time the rain has stopped, and we are able to study our mound and ditch without let or hindrance. Here is the castle, the _munitio_, of Almeneches, whence the Duke's followers first troubled Abbess Emma. But yet more, here is Joanne's "_beau tumulus_" thrown in along with it. A plan is almost needed to set forth what we see. Here is a piece of slightly elevated ground girded by a ditch on all sides except where the sluggish river Don--how many Dons are there in Europe?--which in times past clearly supplied the ditch with water, itself flows. Here then is the castle; at least here are its essential features. And they are all clearer, because there is no _chateau_ in the driver's sense, but only a farmhouse of decent age, which does no harm. But then the ditch, on one side at least, is prolonged to follow one side of a much more striking mound, a long mound which is clearly the "_beau tumulus_." We do not like to be too positive about prae-historic tumps, but this certainly looks very like one. Indeed it need not be prae-historic, it may cover the bones or ashes of some invading Northman, who was cut off too soon to be christened, to learn French, and to become the founder of a Norman house. The tump must be older than the _munitio_ proper; but we may be sure that the makers of the _munitio_ did not leave it out of their reckonings. It had to be guarded; it could not well be lived on. Here then we have found all that we want at Exmes and Almeneches. We understand the scene of the petty war which drove Abbess Emma to Saint-Evroul. We have found our two castles, all that we cared to find of them. We have found our abbey, or at least a successor on its site. And we have both the tump and the church of Exmes thrown in [Greek: en parergoo]. It is not at all a bad two days' work that we have done in the immediate land of the _Oximenses_.

LAIGLE AND SAINT-EVROUL

1892

Our next halting-place is Laigle on the Rille, the Rille that runs out to flow by Brionne and the Bec of Herlouin. We choose it as a halting-place less from any merits of its own than because it is the best centre for some very remarkable places indeed, and because the place itself calls up certain associations. There is, perhaps, more interest attaching to the name of Laigle and to the lords of Laigle than to Laigle itself. Its name supplies us with the crowning instance of the singular incapacity of so many in England to understand that these Norman towns and castles are real places. They give surnames to a crowd of men who figure in the English history of the eleventh and twelfth centuries; but, as we have said before, hardly anybody seems to understand that those surnames are taken from places which are still standing, and to most of which the railway is open. There is the renowned Bishop William of Durham in the days of the Conqueror and the Red King, the greatest name in the history of Romanesque art. He is _Willelmus de Sancto Carilefo_, just like William of Malmesbury or William of Newburgh, simply because he had been monk and prior in the monastery of _Sanctus Carilefus_, in modern form, _Saint-Calais_, in the land of Maine. It is better to say "William of Saint-Calais" than "William of Saint-Carilef," because the use of the modern form shows that we know where the place is; but "William of Saint-Carilef" is not so bad as "Bishop Carilef," as if Carilef were no place at all, and as if it had been usual in those days to talk of Bishops or anybody else by their casual surnames. So with Laigle, _Aquila_, a place which must have somehow taken its name from an eagle, possibly from some incident or legend, as there is certainly nothing in the look of Laigle to suggest eagles in a general way. Its lords of course called themselves "Gilbertus," "Richeras," or anything else "de Aquila," "of Laigle." On the whole, for the same reason as in the case of Saint-Calais, it is better to speak in English of the place and its lords by the now received form _Laigle_ rather than _L'Aigle_, though _L'Aigle_ is not quite forgotten on the spot. But the events of the Norman Conquest brought men of the house of Laigle into England, and their presence led to a possession in Sussex being called "Honor de Aquila." When South-Saxon antiquaries, or possibly lawyers, of whatever age, translated this into "the Honour of the Eagle," they plainly did not know that _Aquila_, _Laigle_, was a real place from which men had taken their name and brought it into Sussex. And we have heard of an Englishman being christened "Richard de Aquila," as if it were hopeless trying to put "de Aquila" into plain English. We have also heard of a man being christened "Joseph of Arimathaea"; but that was at least in English, and not in French, Latin, or Hebrew.

"Richard de Aquila" is a form notable on another ground, as implying a confusion between the two wholly distinct names of _Richard_ and _Richer_. We do not at this moment remember a Richard of Laigle, but Richer of Laigle is, perhaps, the man of his house who is best worth remembering. He lived in the days of the Conqueror, he bears the best character possible in those times, and his one recorded act bears it out. He was fighting for William, Duke and king, against that castle of Sainte-Susanne in Maine which the Conqueror of Le Mans and Exeter could not take. In a skirmish below the castle a beardless-boy, sheltered behind a thicket, aimed an arrow which gave Richer a mortal wound. His comrades would have killed the lad; but Richer bade them spare him; his own sins deserved death. For want of a priest, he confessed those sins to his comrades, and died.

The lords of Laigle did plenty of other things besides this; but it is the thought of the last act of Richer which cleaves most firmly in the memory, and makes us most wish to see the place where the lords of Laigle dwelled. And we set out with some vague notion, a notion not exactly to be fulfilled, that the home of the lords of Laigle--"domini de Aquila"--must be something of an eagle's nest. But alas, when we reach Laigle from Argentan, we find that, with all its historic associations, it is in itself far from being a town of the same interest as Argentan. The position of the two is quite different. The chief buildings of Argentan cover a small hill in the midst of scenery in no way strongly marked. Laigle covers the slope of the hill which forms one side of the valley of the young Rille, while another height matches it on the opposite side. At Laigle the chief church, standing out with a dignity which it hardly keeps when we come near to it, is the one striking object. Of the castle we see nothing but the surrounding woods, and in truth there is nothing more to see. The large brick house known as _le vieux chateau_, standing a little to the east of the church, marks, it is to be supposed, the site of the home of Richer and all the rest of the brood of the eagle. But no site of any castle can well be further from the eagle's nest which we came in search of. The town, as distinguished from castle and church, has little or nothing to show; like Flers, it has risen to some modern importance through manufactures. The chief church, St Martin, has already struck us on our approach by its stately tower of late Gothic such as in England we might have looked to see crowned with battlement and pinnacles, but which here is finished with a high roof bearing statues on its ridge. Beside the tower there is something, one hardly knows what, a very high roof and a kind of spire. When we come near, we find that the church, though very short, has two western towers. The northern one is the rich piece of Flamboyant work with which we have already got familiar--or rather not familiar, as its narrow windows may in the distance be taken for a Romanesque arcade. Its southern fellow is a real Romanesque tower with pilaster buttresses, which bears the spire. It is very plain, of the eleventh century rather than of the twelfth, so that the lord of Laigle, who awakens an interest above the rest of his house, may have looked at it or even built it. The same may be said of the apse which ends the central of the three bodies--they are hardly to be called nave and aisles--which make up the church of Laigle. But a Romanesque apse, rich or plain, is not improved by first cutting pointed windows in it and then blocking them up. And the apse, thus sadly mutilated, is further imprisoned. It barely peeps out between the east ends of the northern and southern bodies, of which the northern takes the form of a kind of transept. They are in the worst style of the late French Gothic, with windows of the same wretched Perpendicular as those of Almeneches. Whence came this strange taste? Henry the Fifth and John Duke of Bedford might, somewhat earlier, have taught their Norman subjects to build good Perpendicular, but not this kind of stuff.

There is not much more to see in Laigle itself. Of the castle we can hardly be said to have even seen the site. The house which represents it has ceased to be a _chateau_ even in the latter sense. It stands pleasantly at the end of the town, with fields beyond it, and a good slope down to the river, if only it could be seen. But the whole way from the castle to the Rille is blocked with modern buildings. We wish that the home of Richer was in the same case as the head of the _Oximenses_, where the gardens in the ditch do comparatively little harm. Or rather we cherish a hope that the _vieux chateau_ may not be the true _castrum de Aquila_. We cannot say that we saw any other castle anywhere else at Laigle; but we saw one or two sites higher up the hill where a castle might have stood very fittingly.

But the main object at Laigle is not Laigle. The place may be used, like Argentan, as a centre for seeing several objects, and in the case of Laigle the objects to be seen from the centre are certainly of higher interest than the centre itself. There are the famous border castles of Verneuil and Tillieres, easily to be reached by railway, and there is an ecclesiastical spot of still higher fame which can in a rather complicated way be reached by railway, but which it is pleasanter and certainly more appropriate to take by road. Yet as a means of approaching Ouche, Aticum, Saint-Evroul, even the road seems too modern. It is essentially a place of pilgrimage, not a Canterbury pilgrimage, but a pilgrimage to the cell of a hermit, to the _scriptorium_ of a chronicler of whom we get more personally fond than of any other.

At Saint-Evroul we ought to think first of all of Saint Evroul; we do think first of all of Orderic the Englishman, called in religion Vital.[55] We called him just now a chronicler; but that is assuredly not his right description. If he were more of a chronicler, that is, if he told his story in a more orderly way, without so many repetitions and runnings to and fro, that is, if he were other than the kindly, gossiping, rambling old monk who has made Saint-Evroul a household word for all students of English and Norman history in his own day we ought not to feel so warmly drawn to him as we are. It was the home of Orderic that we wished to see. But it was very hard to find out whether his home had anything left to show us. Not a word could we find in any guidebook to say whether the abbey was living or ruined or desecrated or wholly swept away. It might be as unlucky as Avranches or as lucky as Saint Peter-on-Dives. And a monastic site from which everything monastic has been swept away is not so instructive as a fortified site from which the fortifications are gone. We should be best pleased to find at Saint-Evroul a church in which Orderic may have worshipped, but it would be better to find a later church--we had almost said one with discontinuous imposts to its pillars--rather than no church at all. We set forth in faith, not knowing what we are to find, but determined that we will at least see the place where the Ecclesiastical History of Normandy was written. One little incident of the journey may be mentioned. We reached Saint-Evroul; we saw more of Saint-Evroul's Abbey than we had ventured to hope that we should find there. But before we reached it our driver stopped near a house and buildings which seemed in no way attractive. Asked why he stopped there, he said that was where the landlady at Laigle had told him to stop. There were the great glass-works for which Saint-Evroul is now best known. And it was the Saint-Evroul of the glass-work that we were thought to have set forth to see, not the Saint-Evroul of Orderic or of Saint Evroul himself.

Orderic, son of a French father and an English mother, born by the banks of the Severn ten years after King William came into England, in the year of the martyrdom of Waltheof, was before all things Orderic the Englishman. If we are to take his words literally, English must have been the only language of his childhood. He was sent in his childhood to be a monk of Saint-Evroul;[56] one wonders why, as his father might surely have found him a cell either in the Orleans of his birth or the Shrewsbury of his adoption. Himself more truly the founder of Shrewsbury Abbey than his patron, Earl Roger, Odelerius of Ettingsham, the married priest, preferred Saint-Evroul to any other house of religion as the home of his son. The Abbey had lately been set up again, after a time of decay, by the bounty of several members of the houses of Geroy and Grantmesnil, one of whom, Abbot Robert, who plays also a part in Calabria and Sicily, was at least as turbulent as bountiful. But nothing would have more deeply grieved the monastic soul of Orderic than the thought that any one could think more of him than of the local saint and first founder. "Father Evroul," "Pater Ebrulfus," the man of the world who turned hermit in the days of Chlotocher, and around whose cell the monastery first grew up, lived in the devout memory of his spiritual children. One asks whether Orderic, "tenellus exsul" in his Norman monastery, like Joseph in Egypt hearing a strange language, ever stopped to think of the true meaning of his patron's name, how the softened _Ebrulfus_ and _Evroul_ disguised the two fierce beasts which went to make up the name of _Eoforwulf_. Perhaps, indeed, Orderic the Englishman, and all other Englishmen, had some right to see a kinsman, however distant, in the saint who bore so terrible a name. For Ebrulfus came of the city or land of Bayeux, and in Chlotocher's day, and long after, the land of Bayeux was still the _Otlingua Saxonica_, an abiding trace of those harryings and settlements of Sidonius's times, which planted the Saxon on both sides of the Channel. Still, to us Orderic is more than Evroul, even in the form of Eoforwulf. It is for his sake that we take our journey through the wood of Ouche till we come to the little stream of the Charenton, where the hermit chose out his solitary cell, where the monastery twice arose in his honour, and where now the glass-works are thought to be a greater attraction than the monastery.

The remains of the abbey soon catch our eye, as we draw near from the east side, the side of Laigle. They are not placed quite at the bottom of the valley; they gently climb up the hill to the west, the hill up which the small low street of Saint-Evroul leads to the highest point, where we find another sign of our own day in the railway station. The church of the monastery is a mere ruin; but it at least stands open to the sky; it is not desecrated and disfigured by being put to any profane use. Quite enough is left to put together the whole plan of the building. There is perhaps a slight feeling of disappointment at finding that here at Saint-Evroul there is nothing directly to remind us of the man for whose sake we have come thither. We would fain see something that had met the eyes of the island-born child in the first years of his coming to his foreign home. We would fain see even the church of Robert of Grantmesnil, much more the elder church from which the High Chancellor of Duke Hugh the Great carried away the body of Saint Evroul himself, as a piece of holy spoil which Normandy had to yield to France.[57] We would fain see the cloister where in Orderic's day, King Henry of England, victor of Tinchebray, sat a long time in thought, and the chapter-house where the Lion of Justice conferred with the brethren, where he praised their good order and devotion, and was, at his earnest request, admitted to their spiritual fellowship. And truly nowhere in kingdom or duchy had he a more loyal subject than the chronicler who knew so well what a work it was to bring some approach to peace and order into a land torn in pieces by noble brigands. Hopes of this kind, hopes of any immediate memory of the days of Orderic or of days before Orderic are not fated to be gratified; but we have done well to come to Saint-Evroul none the less.

The ruined church offers us much to see and study. The only thing that suggests itself as a possible memorial of Orderic's day is the foundation of the apse. But as it is only a foundation and not a crypt, there is no need to think that he ever saw it. The apse itself has fallen; but traces enough are left to show that inside at least it was polygonal. But it was an apse of the old simple pattern, without surrounding aisles and chapels. It could not have been there when the young novice from Shropshire came to Saint-Evroul. It may have been built in the latter part of his long sojourn. And the stumps of the great round pillars of the choir are most likely of the same date. The use of such pillars is a fashion English rather than Norman; but it is hard to believe that the "tenellus exsul" from Ettingsham brought with him any architectural tastes. The choir was of some length, and its length was broken by an apsidal chapel on each side, pointing north and south, so as to form a kind of small eastern transept. But the greater part of what is left is very fine work of the thirteenth century, finished at the west end in the fourteenth. The pillars and arches of the nave are broken down, leaving only stumps; but enough is left at the west end and at the crossing to show the design. Clustering shafts surrounded a central pillar; the mouldings of the arches are, as often happens in Normandy, as well and deeply cut as they would be in England. Above the arcade was a tall clerestory, seemingly without any triforium or with the triforium thrown into the clerestory. Altogether there is about enough left to suggest the memory of Glastonbury, though Saint-Evroul is certainly not on the scale of Glastonbury, even without the western church. The west front must have been very remarkable. The first impression on approaching from outside is that two western towers stood out in front of the nave, as at Holyrood, or as the single towers at Dunkeld and Brechin. A second glance shows that what seemed to be the lower part of a south-western tower is really a building in advance of such a tower. That is to say, a large porch, or rather portico, with three tall arches, stood out in front of the western towers and of the end of the nave. It must have looked just enough like Peterborough to suggest Peterborough, but also to suggest the contrast between Peterborough and itself. At Peterborough the great portico stands indeed, as here, in advance of a west front with two towers. But it may be said to have supplanted that front. One tower was never finished; the other was thrown into insignificance. The portico is of the full height, and became the real west front. Here at Saint-Evroul the portico was not the whole of the west front, but only part; the towers must have risen a long way above it. One would like to be able to judge of the effect of such a design.

There is little or nothing left of the other buildings of the abbey, except the gateway by which we enter, with a larger and a smaller pointed arch. The field to the south of the church, where cloister, chapter-house, refectory, and the rest must have stood, had a locked gateway, and the owner had gone off with the key. But there seemed to be nothing, at least nothing standing up. Yet we should have liked to see at least the traces of the cloister on the southern wall. But Saint Evroul is not forgotten in his own place, or even within the walls of his own abbey. For a little chapel has been made within the buildings of the gate-house. He has also a cross and fountain, of which the cross, a modern one, is more visible than the fountain. And in the parish church on the opposite hill some relics of the abbey, indeed of the saint himself, are still preserved. There is specially a good fragment of an ancient triptych. The surviving small church looks down on the relics of the great one below. And the thought comes, so different from any suggested by the monastic ruins of England, how short a time it after all is since the great church of Saint-Evroul was a living thing as well as the small one. A visitor of no wonderful age could do a sum and find that his own father was at least able to walk and talk while Robert of Grantmesnil had still a less famous, but perhaps less unquiet successor.

TILLIERES AND VERNEUIL

1892

Our second excursion from Laigle has quite another kind of interest from that of Saint-Evroul. We go more strictly to see places, and not as it were to commune with a single man. And the places that we go to see are primarily military, and not ecclesiastical. We do not go for a great church, not knowing whether we shall find it perfect or ruined, or wholly swept away. We go to see two castles or sites of castles, knowing that we shall find something more than their sites, and with a notion that we shall also get something ecclesiastical thrown into the balance. Our object is to see the two border castles of Tillieres and Verneuil, both easily reached by railway from our central point at Laigle, and which by a more roundabout way, may be reached from Evreux also. Tillieres is famous in the early wars of Normandy and France. Verneuil is best known in the days when Normandy had become the battle ground of England and France, and when Scotland threw herself on the French side. As a matter of fact, we saw Verneuil first; we then went on to Tillieres, and thence back to Laigle, getting of course a second clear view of Verneuil by the way. But it will be more convenient to speak first of the place of more ancient fame.

Tillieres, Tillieres on the Arve, if it were left in its ancient state, would be an almost ideal border-fortress. It is close indeed on the border. When Wace describes Alencon, he tells us that one side of the water was Norman and the other side was Mansel. So here at Tillieres one side of the water was Norman and the other side was French. But the stream of Arve at Tillieres is so much narrower than the stream of Sarthe at Alencon that French and Norman stood much nearer together at Tillieres than Mansel and Norman stood at Alencon. Alencon again, as far as its history goes back, has always been a considerable town. Tillieres is now a mere village, except so far as so many of these villages put on the character of very small towns. But town or village, Tillieres is simply something which has grown up at the foot of the castle, while at Alencon one might say that one object at least of the castle was to defend the town. There is high ground on each side of the stream; that on the north side is Norman soil, that on the south is French. A projecting point of the Norman height was seized for the building of the great border-fortress of Normandy. A few dwellings of men, dependants doubtless of the castle and its lords, arose under its shadow, just within the Norman border. That this was done while France and Normandy were still foreign and hostile lands is shown by the western doorway of the church of Tillieres, a piece of plain Romanesque, of late eleventh or early twelfth century. Meanwhile, it does not appear that the opposite height was crowned by any French fortress. Tillieres must have been a standing menace to France, without there being any standing menace to Normandy back again. Here are our topographical facts, very clear and simple, quite enough to account for the part which Tillieres plays in the history of the Norman duchy.

That part may be told in a few sentences, but it is a striking story none the less. Tillieres, _Tegulense castrum_, bears a name cognate with the Kerameikos of Athens and with the Tuilleries of Paris. It was first fortified by Duke Richard the Good, the Duke who would have none but gentlemen about him, and in whose days the peasants arose against their masters. He gave his sister Matilda in marriage to Odo, Count of Chartres; he gave her lands by the Arve as her dowry; but when she died childless, he held that he had a right to take them back again. To this doctrine the widower naturally did not agree; disputes arose between the two princes, and the fortress of Tillieres--one would like to know its exact shape in those days--arose as a bulwark of Normandy, beneath whose walls the Count of Chartres underwent a defeat at the hands of Duke Richard's lieutenants. They were Neal of Coutances and Ralph of Toesny, speaking names in Norman history. We next hear of Tillieres in the young days of William the Great, when King Henry could no longer endure such a standing menace to France as the castle above the Arve. It is the Norman writers who tell us, and we have no French tale to set against this, how the King of the French demanded the castle of Tillieres--how the young duke's guardians found it prudent to yield to his demand--how its valiant governor, Gilbert Crispin, refused to give it up--how the united forces of France and Normandy constrained him--how the border-fortress was burned before all men, while the King swore that it should not be set again for four years. But they go on to tell us how the faithless King went on into the land of Exmes, how he burned Argentan, and came back to fortify Tillieres again as a bulwark of France against Normandy.[58] Time passed on. King Henry fought with Duke William at Val-es-dunes, and fled before him at Varaville; and, as a fruit of the last Norman victory, Tillieres passed back again to its old use as the border defence of Normandy.

With such a history as this, and with a site so well suited to the history, one could wish that there was more at Tillieres to describe than there actually is. We should be best pleased of all if the castle hill of Tillieres was still crowned with an ancient donjon; next to that we should like to see it in the same case as Exmes or rather as Almeneches. But the height is taken possession of by a house of much more pretension than the harmless farm at Almeneches, and the passing wayfarer can do little more than follow the outer wall of the castle--a wall with work of endless dates--round a good part of its compass. Looking down from the height, looking up from the village, best of all perhaps from a point of the railway just west of the Tillieres station, the general relations of castle, village, stream, and the once hostile hills beyond, can be well taken in; but not much more than the general relations. And the village has little to show beyond its church; and there the Romanesque doorway is the choicest thing, as being part of our chain of evidence. But it seems not to be on this ground that the church of Tillieres is counted among "historic monuments," that is, forbidden to be pulled about by any one else, but destined sooner or later, to be pulled about by the national powers. Its qualification for admission into this class seems to be the _Renaissance_ choir. On the outside this is about as poor a jumble of bad Gothic and bad Italian as can well be thought of; within it has a somewhat better effect with a vault and rich pendants. Still they are nothing like so striking as those in Saint Gervase at Falaise, which do really make us wonder how they are kept up. More really interesting, perhaps, is the wooden roof of the nave, evidently as great a feat as a French artist was capable of in the way of wooden roofs. And an eye from Somerset looks kindly at this outlandish attempt to make a kind of coved roof, and to paint it withal. Such a one hopes that the French Republic will not turn diocesan architect, and try to get rid of it. But he thinks that he could show better coved roofs at home, and he wonders why, if the coved shaped was chosen, a system of South-Saxon tie-beams and king-posts was thrust in as well.

We turn to the other famous border-fortress of Verneuil. Here the position, as a position, is in no way to be compared to that of Tillieres; but we have one grand military tower; we have a much larger town, containing several important churches and houses, and one ecclesiastical tower which may claim a place in the very first rank of its own class. Verneuil is a border-fortress; but it is not so ideal a border-fortress as Tillieres. It is not so close on the border; for here Normandy has a small _Peraia_, a certain amount of territory beyond the river. And, as Verneuil presented no such commanding point for a castle site as Tillieres did, the fortress was not placed on a height at all, but in the lower part of the town, to guard the stream. There is a distinct ascent in Verneuil; but nothing like the slope at Tillieres from the Norman castle down to the border-stream and from the border-stream up again to the French hills. But there is enough rise to make the grand ecclesiastical tower on the high ground stand out as the most prominent object in the approach, while the grand military tower down below makes no show at all. We were a little puzzled by Joanne's account of Verneuil, in which he said that the castle had been completely demolished, but that the donjon existed still. It seems that at Verneuil, as at Argentan, castle and donjon are distinguished; but at Verneuil castle and donjon are not, as at Argentan, separate buildings joined only by a long wall; they stand close together and formed part of one work. Nor is the castle as distinguished from the donjon, completely demolished; there is a considerable fragment standing very near. The donjon, called locally _Tourgrise_ from the colour of its stone, is a round tower, not quite a rival of Coucy, but tall enough and big enough to have a very striking effect. It has been lately restored or set up again in some way, perhaps cleared out and roofed in. Anyhow Verneuil is not a little proud of the fact, and marks its thankfulness by a great number of rather foolish inscriptions. The tower is proclaimed to be the work of Henry I., our Henry of Tinchebray, not the developed rebuilder of Tillieres; but this seems out of the question, as the small doorways--we cannot guarantee the windows--have pointed arches, which seem to be original. But the ruined fragment of the castle hard by, with its ruder masonry and a shattered round-headed window seemed certainly to be as early as Henry's day and very likely a good bit earlier. Hard by the donjon seems to be a small piece of town walls; otherwise the walls have vanished, and are, as usual, marked by boulevards. That on the north side still keeps the character of a rampart, and is a good place for studying the most visible ornaments of the town.

Verneuil has much to show both in churches and houses. Of the latter, besides a good many of timber and brick, which are always pleasant to see, there are two which are more remarkable. One is a singularly good bit of late Gothic with windows and a graceful _tourelle_. The other has a _tourelle_ of the same kind, but it runs off into _Renaissance_. Both have a curious kind of masonry, squares alternately of brick and stone. The greatest church is that of Saint Mary Magdalen, in the great open place in the upper part of the town. Here is the grand tower, built between 1506 and 1530, a noble design, and carried out without any infection of foreign detail. It is practically detached, standing at the south-west corner of a low nave. If the nave had ever been rebuilt, as was doubtless designed, to match the later and loftier choir, the effect of the tower would have suffered a good deal. As it is, from some points, where the nave is not seen at all, it reminded one a little of Limoges Cathedral, as it stood before the rebuilding of the nave was begun. It rises by two tall stages above the church; then the square tower changes to an octagon, a very small octagon supporting one still smaller. It would have been far better to have given the octagon more importance, as in most of the other great examples, French and English, starting with Boston stump. It is further complained, and the complaint is true, that the upper part of the square tower looks top-heavy. It was just the same with the other Magdalen tower at Taunton till its rebuilding. Since then, strange to say, though no difference of detail can be seen in the rebuilt tower, the effect of top-heaviness is gone. In both cases that effect was, doubtless, due to the piling of stage upon stage, without making them gradually increase in lightness and richness towards the top, as at Bishops Lydeard. But it is not a case to find fault; the vast height, the grandeur of design, the purity of detail at so late a time, all mark this tower as one of the noblest works of the late French Gothic. A little way to the west is another tower, attached to a now desecrated church, we believe of Saint John, which was clearly built as a rival to the Magdalen tower. It is rather smaller, and in its lower stages plainer--no fault in that; but a little higher it begins to Italianise, and then stops altogether. An ugly modern top is all that answers to the upper stages and octagon of the Magdalen. The people of the Magdalen parish must have been strongly tempted to say of their nearest neighbours, "These men began to build, and were not able to finish."

The church to which this most stately tower is attached is not of any great interest, beyond a simple Romanesque doorway and window in the west front, and some very plain arches to match in the transepts. The choir is rather poor late Gothic, spoiled by a great blank space between arcade and clerestory. Of the nave we hardly know what to say. As it stands, it is plainly modern; the great round pillars are hollow; but the design is one which we can hardly fancy coming into anybody's head, unless it reproduced something older. It is something like Boxgrove, something like some German churches, but not exactly. A pair of pier-arches are grouped under a single arch containing a single clerestory window, and there is a barrel-vault above all. A church in the hands of Huguenots, called "La Salle des Conferences," seems to have a Romanesque shell and keeps three windows in a flat east end. Not far from the donjon is the Decorated church of Saint Lawrence, where the usual late Gothic dies off into _Renaissance_ at the west end. But the other great piece of ecclesiastical work in Verneuil, besides the Magdalen tower, is the choir of the church of Our Lady, lower down in the town. 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. We purpose to look at it once more before we finally turn away from Verneuil; but good intentions are not always carried out. Let us dream of another Arvernian journey, so planned as to take Verneuil on the road.

BEAUMONT-LE-ROGER

1892