From the rocks of the Norman Scarborough, one of the only two railways which find their way into the Côtentin will carry the traveller through a district whose look, like that of so much of this side of Normandy, is thoroughly English, to Valognes, with its endless fragments of old domestic architecture, remnants of the days when Valognes was a large and aristocratic town, and with its church, where the architect has ventured, not wholly without success, on the bold experiment of giving its central parts the shape of a Gothic cupola. Is its effect improved or spoiled—it certainly is made stranger and more striking—by its grouping with a spire of late date immediately at its side? There is much to please at Valognes; but when we remember the part which the town plays in the history of the Conqueror, that it was from hence, one of his favourite dwelling-places, that he took the headlong ride which carried him away safely from the rebellious peninsula before Val-ès-dunes, we are inclined to grumble that all that now shows itself in the place itself is of far later date. The castle is clean gone; and the traveller to whom Normandy is chiefly attractive in its Norman aspect may perhaps sacrifice the Roman remains of Alleaume if the choice lies between them and a full examination of the castle and abbey of Saint Saviour on the Douve, Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, the home of the two Neals, the centre, in the days of the second of the rebellions which caused William to ride so hard from Valognes to Rye.[29] A characteristic church or two, among them Colomby, with its long lancets, may be taken on the way; but the great object of the journey is where the little town of Saint Saviour lies on its slope, with the castle on the one hand, the abbey on the other, rising above the river at its feet. The abbey, Neal's abbey, where his monks supplanted an earlier foundation of canons, has gone through many ups and downs. Its Romanesque plan remained untouched through a great reconstruction of its upper part in the later Gothic. It fell into ruin at the Revolution, but one side of the nave and the central saddle-backed tower still stood, and now the ruin is again a perfect church, where Sisters of Mercy have replaced the monks of Saint Benedict. Here then a great part of the work of the ancient lords remains; with the castle which should be their most direct memorial the case is less clear. Besides round towers—one great one specially which some one surely must have set down as Phœnician—the great feature is the huge square tower which forms the main feature of the building, and which has thoroughly the air of a Norman keep of the eleventh or twelfth century. But when we come nearer, there is hardly a detail—round arches of course alone prove nothing—which does not suggest a later time. And the tower is attributed to Sir John Chandos, who held the castle in Edward the Third's time. Did he most ingeniously recast every detail of an elder keep, or did he choose to build exactly according to the type of an age long before his own? Anyhow, as far as general effect goes, the tower thoroughly carries us back to the days of the earlier fame of Saint Saviour. The view from its top stretches far away over the peninsula of which it was once the citadel to the backs of the hills which look down on Cherbourg and the sea, the sea which, if we believe the tale, bore the fleet of Æthelred when the elder Neal drove back English invaders more than three hundred years before Sir John Chandos.
Abbey of Lessay, S.W.
The visitor to Saint Saviour may perhaps manage to make his way straight from that place to Coutances without going back to Valognes. In any case his main object between Saint Saviour and Coutances will be the great Romanesque abbey of Lessay; only, by going back to Valognes and taking the railway to Carentan, he will be able to combine with Lessay the two very fine churches of Carentan and Periers. Of these, Carentan has considerable Romanesque portions, the arches of the central lantern and the pillars of the nave which have been ingeniously lengthened and made to bear pointed arches. Lessay, we fancy, is very little known. It is out of the way, and the country round about it, flat and dreary, is widely different from the generally rich, and often beautiful, scenery of the district. But few churches of its own class surpass it as an example of an almost untouched Norman minster, not quite of the first class in point of scale. We say untouched, because it is so practically, though a good deal of the vaulting was most ingeniously repaired after the English wars, just as Saint Stephen at Caen was after the Huguenot wars. Some miles over the landes bring us again into the hilly region round the episcopal city, and Coutances is seen on its hill, truly a city which cannot be hid. Of its lovely minster we once spoke in some detail;[30] of the city itself we may add that none more truly bespeaks its origin as a hill-fort. The hill is of no extraordinary height; but it is thoroughly isolated, not forming part of a range like the hills of Avranches and Le Mans. And, saving the open place before the cathedral—perhaps the forum of Constantia—there is not a flat yard of ground in Coutances. The church itself is on a slope; you walk up the incline of one street and see the houses sloping down the incline of the other. In the valley on the west side of the city is a singular curiosity, several of the arches of a mediæval aqueduct.[31] Pointed arches, and buttresses against the piers, are what we are not used to in such buildings. A road by a few small churches leads to Granville on its peninsula, with its strange church where Flamboyant and Renaissance die away into a kind of Romanesque most unlike that of Ragusa, and the Côtentin has been gone through from north to south. The modern department and the modern diocese go on further; but the "pagus Constantinus" is now done with; the land of Avranches, the march against the Breton, has a history of its own.
THE AVRANCHIN
1876
The town of Avranches is well known as one of those Continental spots on which Englishmen have settled down and formed a kind of little colony. A colony of this kind has two aspects in the eyes of the traveller who lights upon it. On the one hand, it is a nuisance to find one's self, on sitting down to a table-d'hôte in a foreign town, in the middle of ordinary English chatter. Full of the particular part of the world in which he is, the traveller may hear all parts of the world discussed from some purely personal or professional aspect, without a single original observation to add anything to his stock of ideas. On the other hand, it must be allowed that the presence of an English settlement anywhere always brings with it a degree of civilisation in many points such as is not always found in towns of much greater size which our countrymen do not frequent. But to the historical traveller Avranches is almost dead. A few stones heaped together are all that remains of the cathedral, and another stone marks the sight of the north door where Henry the Second received absolution for his share in the murder of Thomas. The city which formed the halting-place of Lanfranc on his way from Pavia to Bec is now chiefly to be noticed for its splendid site, and as a convenient starting-point for other places where more has been spared. Avranches, like Coutances, is a hill-city, and, as regards actual elevation, it is even more of a hill-city than Coutances. But then the hill of Coutances is an isolated hill, while Avranches stands on the projecting bluff of a range. Seen from the sands of Saint Michael's Bay, the site proclaims itself as one which, before the fall of its chief ornament, must have been glorious beyond words. It might have been Laon, as it were, with, at favourable tides at least, the estuary washing the foot of its hill. What the view is from the height itself is implied in what has just been said. The bay, with the consecrated Mount and the smaller Tombelaine by its side, the Breton coast stretching far away, the Mount of Dol coming, perhaps within the range of sight, certainly within the range of ideas, the goodly land on either side of the city, the woods, the fields—for in the Avranchin we are still in a land of pasture and hedgerows—all tell us that it was no despicable heritage of his own to which Hugh of Avranches added his palatine earldom of Chester. And if Avranches gave a lord to one great district of England, England presently gave a lord to Avranches. The Avranchin formed part of the fief of the Ætheling Henry, the fief so often lost and won again, but where men had at least some moments of order under the stern rule of the Lion of Justice, while the rest of Normandy in the days of Robert was torn in pieces by the feuds of rival lords and countesses. But musings of this kind would be more to the point if the city itself had something more to show than a tower or two of no particular importance—if, in short, the hill of Avranches was crowned by such a diadem of spires and cupolas as the hill of Coutances. As it is, Avranches is less attractive in itself than it is as the best point for several excursions in the Avranchin land. The excursion to the famous Mount of Saint Michael and its fortified abbey need not here be dwelled on. No one can walk five minutes in the streets of Avranches without being reminded that the city is the starting-place for "le mont Saint-Michel." But no one suggests a visit to Saint James nor even to Mortain and its waterfalls. Nor should we ourselves suggest a visit to Saint James, except to those who may be satisfied with a beautiful bit of natural scenery, heightened by the thought that the spot is directly connected with the memory of William, indirectly with that of Harold.