George Edmund Street: Unpublished Notes and Reprinted Papers

by George Edmund Street

The discussion in detail of the many churches in Caen seems hardly to call for printing as mere record, for the ground has been well covered by later travellers and not, this time, reached by the German army.

June 26.

To-day we changed our diligence travelling for a more agreeable mode, by hiring a phaeton to take us to Bayeux in order that we might be able to stop on our way at one or two churches.

At 8 A.M., we started; the view of Caen on leaving is fine, its towers and spires standing up well against the sky. A village is passed very soon with an early church whose bell-tower on the chancel end is of good character. One or two steeples with saddleback roofs are seen near the road, and at the end of about seven or eight miles the tall spire of Bretteville l’Orgueilleuse rises on the road. The design is most curiously like S. Pierre, Caen, but it is earlier and has been much mutilated. All the piercings in the spire are filled in, and one only of the spire-lights remains in its place, though there are evident traces of others having existed. The tower rises above the chancel and east of it is a sacrarium of the same date, square-ended and with two lancets in the east wall, but groined in such a way as to make one think that its architect could not forget his apsidal terminations. The nave is modern, or perhaps I should rather say modernized. The windows of the tower and sacrarium and the doorway in the north wall of the former, are of very good detail—the transition from Romanesque. There is a piscina in the south wall. East of this chancel has been built within the last year or two a most frightful sacristy, intended I suppose to be pagan but at present not very definite, as all the stones which compose its wall are built up in block to be hewn out afterwards. This of course blocks up the curious east end, but the priest to whom I protested against this wanton piece of barbarism made very light of the matter. I cannot see that the clergy anywhere take the interest that one would expect in such matters, for I have seen nowhere any restorations of at all proper character, except such as are being carried out by government with public funds.

From Bretteville a drive of about a mile brought us to Norrey, whose church is so remarkable that I measured its plan and sketched many of its details.

It consists of a nave without aisles and a choir and transepts with aisles and two apsidal chapels to the choir aisle. The nave is similar in its detail of windows and doors to Bretteville, and in no way worth particular notice, but the rest of the church is most singular. Its decorations are extremely elaborate, the mouldings and ornamental carvings being carved out with a depth of elaborate elegance seldom rivalled. The mouldings are singularly deep and effective, and the carving all very good. The style is thoroughly good pure first-pointed, and looks more like English work than foreign. The dimensions are exceedingly small, the width in the clear of the choir being only about sixteen feet and of the aisle not seven feet, whilst some of the intercolumniations are not more than three feet and a half and three feet ten inches. The plan is nevertheless similar in all respects to that of a large church of the first order, save in the absence of a central chapel at the east end, and it is therefore much more properly called a “model cathedral” than churches so dignified generally are. The piscinae of the chapels are good and have one orifice and a large space of shelf. One of the altars is original and has a mass of masonry under it for, I suppose, relics. The whole church is in the most wretchedly damp, dirty and neglected state, and a disgrace to all who have any charge of it.

The main entrance is now by a beautiful porch to the north transept, which is, unfortunately, rapidly decaying—as much of the other work executed in Caen stone is doing everywhere. The small chapels of the apse are roofed with most extraordinary stone roofs, of very steep pitch, which at a little distance look like two great pinnacles, and when seen close at hand look like nothing else that ever was built or designed. There are very curious marks, in the exterior, of a change of plan in some respects as the work went on, some of the choir windows having been commenced with most elaborate mouldings outside as well as inside, but altered either in one jamb or at their heads into a plain double chamfer, in a most singular manner. There is some good arcading commenced outside, and a beautiful arcade runs all round the inside wall below the windows. The tower is just like Bretteville, but the spire must have differed considerably from it; unhappily it was struck by lightning some twelve years since, and there is now a poor slated roof in place of the spire. The angle pinnacles still remain and I think they prove that the transition from the tower to the spire must always have been very abrupt. I think from the character of all the detail and especially from the great love shown for the round trefoil, that this church must have been designed by the same man who built the eastern part of the cathedral at Bayeux. The mouldings are excessively similar and the abaci are constantly used octangular in plan in conjunction with square and circular.

An interesting road took us from Norrey to Bayeux, where we arrived at 3 P.M.

The general view of this cathedral is most magnificent,—owing to its two completed and similar western spires and to the great height of a central tower of flamboyant work capped with a pagan cupola which, though of bad details and inconsistent with all the rest of the work, certainly aids much in making the magnificence of the whole so great. This central steeple is on the point of being taken down, I believe, as the piers below are giving way; and the church is now filled with timber shores, etc. I do not like the steeple but cannot help regretting its loss....

There is a curious old chimney near the west front of the cathedral, rising out of a modern house. Attached to a seminary near the Hôtel Dieu is a good simple chapel of first-pointed date. It is a parallelogram groined simply and lighted with windows of two lights in each bay. The whole is wretchedly whitewashed everywhere and contrasts strongly with the magnificent colour of the stonework throughout the interior of the cathedral.