When we write "Saint James," we are not translating.[32] The "castrum sancti Jacobi" appears as "Saint James" in Wace, and it is "Saint James" to this day alike in speech and in writing. The fact is worthy of some notice in the puzzling history of the various forms of the apostolic names Jacobus and Johannes and their diminutives. Jacques and Jack must surely be the same; how then came Jack to be the diminutive of John? Anyhow this Norman fortress bears the name of the Saint of Compostela in a form chiefly familiar in Britain and Aragon, though it is not without a cognate in the Italian Giacomo. The English forms of apostolic names are sometimes borne even now by Romance-speaking owners, as M. James Fazy and M. John Lemoinne bear witness. But here the name is far too old for any imitative process of this kind. And it is only as applied to the place itself that the form "James"[33] is used; the inn is the "Hôtel Saint-Jacques," and "Saint-Jacques" is the acknowledged patron of the parish. Anyhow the effect is to give the name of the place an unexpectedly English air. Perhaps such an air is not wholly out of place in the name of a spot which was fortified against the Breton by a prince who was to become King of the English, and whose fortification led to a war in which two future and rival Kings of the English fought side by side.
For the castle of Saint James was one of the fortresses raised by William's policy to strengthen the Norman frontier against the Bret-Welsh of Gaul, just as in after days he and his Earls raised fortresses on English ground to strengthen the English frontier against the Bret-Welsh of Britain. It stands very near to the border, and we can well understand how its building might give offence to the Breton Count Conan, and so lead to the war in which William and Harold marched together across the sands which surround the consecrated Mount. In this way Saint James plays an indirect part in English history, and it plays another when it was one of the first points of his lost territory to be won back by Henry the Ætheling after his brothers had driven him out of the Mount and all else that he had.[34] But the place keeps hardly anything but its memories and the natural beauty of its site. A steep peninsular hill looks down on a narrow and wooded valley with a beck—that is the right word in the land which contains Caudebec and Bec Herlouin—running round its base. The church—a strange modern building with some ancient portions used up again—stands on the extreme point of the promontory. This seems the best point for commanding the whole valley, and we may perhaps guess that a less devout prince than William would not have scrupled to raise his donjon at least within the consecrated precinct. But he chose the southern side of the hill, the side to be sure most directly looking towards the enemy; and church and castle stood side by side on the hill without interfering with each other. But the visitor to Saint James—if Saint James should ever get any visitors—must take care not to ask for the château. If he does, he will be sent to the other side of the valley, to a modern house, on a lovely site certainly, and working in some portions of mediæval work, but which has nothing to do with the castle of the Conqueror. The name for that, so far as it keeps a name, is "le fort." The open space by the church is the "place du Fort," and the inquirer will soon find that on the south the hill-side is scarped and strengthened by a wall. That is all that is left of the castle of Saint James; but it is enough to call up memories of days which, from an English as well as from a local point of view, are worth remembering.
COUTANCES AND SAINT-LO
1891
Geoffrey of Mowbray, Bishop of Coutances, appears once in Domesday as Bishop of Saint-Lo, but it must not therefore be thought that he had his bishopstool in the town so called, or that the great church of Saint-Lo was ever the spiritual head of the peninsular land of Coutances. There is indeed every opportunity for confusion on the subject. The Bishops of Coutances were lords of Saint-Lo in the present department of La Manche; but, so far as they were Bishops of Saint-Lo at all, it was of quite another Saint-Lo, namely, of a church so called in the city of Rouen. There, when the Côtentin was over-run by the still heathen Northmen, the Bishops of Coutances took refuge, carrying with them Saint-Lo himself—Sanctus Laudus, a predecessor in the bishopric—in the form of his relics. When heathen Northmen were turned into Christian Normans, the Bishops of Coutances went home again, but the title which they had picked up on their travels seems to have stuck to them. As they had to do with two things, both called Saint-Lo, as well as with their own city, the error of speech was not wonderful. But, setting aside times of havoc, when there was nothing left to be head of, Coutances always remained the formal head, ecclesiastical and civil, of the Côtentin, the "pagus Constantinus," which took its name from the city. The town of Saint-Lo has now outstripped Coutances in the matter of temporal honour as the head of the department of La Manche, though that dignity was not assigned to it without a good deal of opposition on the part of the elder seat of rule. The same series of changes gave to ecclesiastical Coutances, if not a higher dignity, at least a wider jurisdiction. When the episcopal church of Coutances, after being put to various strange uses in the revolutionary time, became once more a place of Christian worship and the head church of the diocese, that diocese was enlarged by the ecclesiastical territory of Avranches. Avranches and Lisieux have both vanished from the roll of the six suffragans of the Archbishop of Rouen, Primate of Normandy. But Avranches has suffered worse things than Lisieux. The Lexovian bishopstool has passed away; but the church that held it is still there. From Avranches the church itself has vanished. It is from its site only that we look down on the wide plain at our foot, on the Mount of the Archangel in its bay, and the rocks of Cancale beyond.[35]
There is no need to describe anew a building so well known as the cathedral church of Coutances. There is no need to argue against, there is hardly need to wonder at, the strange belief against which Gally Knight and others had to fight, that this beautiful example of the fully developed Early Gothic was really the work of that Bishop Geoffrey who blessed the Norman host on its march from Hastings to Senlac.[36] That belief was indeed a strange one. It implied that some nameless genius at Coutances had, in the middle of the eleventh century, suddenly, at a blow, invented the fully developed style of the thirteenth—that this great discovery was kept hidden at Coutances till the very end of the twelfth—that then various people in Normandy, France, England, and above all Saint Hugh of Burgundy, began to make many, and at first not very successful, attempts to imitate what the men of one spot in the Côtentin had known, and must have been proud of, for a century and a half. The local invention of Perpendicular at Gloucester, and its spreading abroad by the great Bishops of Winchester forty or fifty years later, is a remarkable fact; but it is a small matter to this fiction. So strange a vagary need no longer be discussed; but it is worthy of a place in the memory among odd delusions. As an honest delusion, it is at least more respectable than making Alfred found things at Oxford and Ripon.
Notre-Dame, Saint-Lo, S.E.