EXMES AND ALMENÈCHES
1892
Exmes and Almenèches; one fancies that those names will sound strange to almost any one save those who have been lately reading the eleventh book of Orderic the Englishman. Exmes indeed is one of those unlucky places which, even in the year 1891, remain without the comfort of a railway. But Almenèches has a station happily placed on two lines; it is visited by trains between Granville and Paris, and also by trains between Caen and Le Mans. It thus seems to stand in a closer relation to the world of modern times than Exmes, to which he who does not care to trust himself to a Norman omnibus must go on his own account. To Almenèches too one may go on one's own account; each place makes a pleasant drive from Argentan. There is nothing very striking on the road to either, but the road to Almenèches decidedly goes through the prettier country. Each has a church and a castle to show, or rather each has a church and the site of a castle. As in so many places, the ecclesiastical building has outlived the fortress. And this is more to be noticed at Almenèches, where the church was monastic, and therefore ran greater chances of destruction in the days of havoc. In general history we cannot venture to say that either spot has a place. In special Norman history Exmes, under some or other of the forms of its name, Oximum, Hiesmes, anything else, often shows itself; its early importance is noticed by its giving its name to the large district, Pagus Oximensis, Oixmeiz, Hiesmsis. And the Oximenses are sometimes spoken of in a special way, as if they were a distinct people, capable of acting for themselves. Of Almenèches we hardly hear anything but at one particular moment, and then we hear of Exmes along with it.
In short, the history of Almenèches, as far as we are concerned with it, might be summed up under a sensational heading, as "The Sorrows of Abbess Emma." Her sorrows did not last long, but they were heavy while they lasted. It was hard for the head of a devout Sisterhood to have three of the great ones of the earth set upon her at once, one of them being her own brother. She was daughter of Roger of Montgomery, afterwards Earl of two shires in England, and of his first wife, Mabel of Bellême, who bears so evil a reputation for bloodshed and treachery. She was therefore sister to the heir of her mother's estates and crimes, to that Robert of Bellême who is charged with a crime from which the worst Merwing would have shrunk, that of pulling out the eyes of his little godson, seemingly only for the fun of the thing. But Emma and her sisters are described as being much better than any of their brothers, even those who were not so bad as Robert. She may therefore not have been wholly unfit for the post in which she was set when her father put her at the head of his newly founded abbey, though she could hardly have been qualified according to the rule which Gregory the Great laid down for the monasteries of Sicily, that no abbess should be under sixty years of age.
The troubles of Abbess Emma began in the year 1102, when her brother Robert was happily driven out of England, with his brothers and his whole followings and belongings. It might seem a little hard when King Henry, in getting rid of the whole stock, seized on the English lands which Earl Roger had given to his daughter's Norman Abbey. But we remember that, in so doing, he was forestalling, not the Eighth of his name, but the Fifth. We did not want alien priories in England. Robert came back to his native Normandy, began to work every kind of mischief there, and his brothers Arnulf and Roger helped him for awhile in so doing. Arnulf is famous at Pembroke.[52] Roger the Poitevin, so called from his marriage, had been lord of that land between Mersey and Ribble, which afterwards went to patch up the modern shire of Lancaster. Presently the brothers quarrelled. Robert of Bellême refused to give Arnulf and Roger any share in their father's inheritance. Then they forsook him, and Arnulf took an active part against him on behalf of Duke Robert. We read how, in June, 1103, he seized his brother's munitio of Almenèches, and how it was occupied for the Duke. This was dangerous to his sister's abbey, where his followers did not scruple to occupy the buildings and to stable their horses in the church. Then Robert of Bellême, looking on the abbey as a hostile fortress, comes down on Almenèches, burns the church and all the buildings of the monastery, and leaves his sister and her nuns to find shelter where they can. The Duke's followers, who fall into his hands, he deals with after his manner; they are killed, mutilated, or kept in hard bonds. Robert of Bellême, it must be remembered, is the man of whom it was said that he refused ransom for his prisoners, despising gain, compared with the keener pleasure of tormenting them. The Duke then and his following set forth to do something against the hateful tyrant—"odibilis tyrannus" he is called, a phrase in which we must not forget the ancient sense of "tyrannus."[53] Counts and lords are with him, and the whole force of the land of Exmes. They hold their councils in the castle of Exmes; they did what they could against the tyrant; but he was too strong for them. He defeated the Duke in battle, and got possession of the castle of Exmes.
Meanwhile Abbess Emma and her Sisterhood had to go whither they could. "Tener virginum conventus misere dispersus est." Some sought shelter with kinsfolk and friends. The Abbess herself and three nuns went to Saint-Evroul, where Orderic, who tells the story, dwelled as the monk Vital. They found a shelter and a place of worship in an ancient chapel where Saint Evroul himself had dwelled—"coelesti theoriae intentus solitarie degebat." There they abode six months, till in the next year they were able to go back to Almenèches and to begin to set up their ruined home again. For ten years Abbess Emma laboured at gathering the sisterhood together and rebuilding the church. Then she died, and, by as near an approach to hereditary succession as could be in the case of abbesses, her staff passed to her niece Matilda, daughter of her brother Philip. She, too, had to rebuild church and monastery after another fire. We are not told how it was kindled: but by that time her uncle Robert was safe in prison in England, shorn of all power of burning anything or of gouging out anybody's eyes.[54]
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 Bellême seized on standing up as they were in their day. Both Exmes and Almenèches, 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.