Plate 36. Church of St. Jacques, at Dieppe.
East end.
The church of St. Jacques, figured in the [thirty-fifth] and [thirty-sixth] plates, is the largest, and considerably the most interesting of the two parochial churches of the place. It had the singular good fortune of escaping, together with the castle, nearly uninjured from the bombardment, during the reign of our third William, which laid the town in ashes. It was begun about the year 1260, but was little advanced at the commencement of the following century; nor were its nineteen chapels, the works of the piety of individuals, completed before 1350. The roof of the choir remained imperfect till ninety years afterwards; while that of the transept is as recent as 1628. Thus it is a valuable specimen of the ecclesiastical architecture of successive ages. In the lines of the transepts are traces of the early pointed style, apparently coeval with the church at Eu: the friezes are ornamented with small pierced quatrefoils, as in that building; and the portals, now mutilated, are in the same style.—The nave is of much later date; and the vaulting, though Gothic, is intermixed with Grecian members and scrolls.—The triforium in the choir is filled with elegant perpendicular tracery. The Lady-Chapel is perhaps one of the last specimens of Gothic art, but still very pure, except in some of the smaller members, such as the niches in the tabernacles, which end in scallop-shells, instead of terminating with a groined canopy. The bosses of the groined roof are of the most delicate filagree work, and the vaulting is also ornamented with knots pendant from the ribs.—The pannel-work round the chapel takes circular terminations in each pannel; but filled within with an elegant tracery, terminating with the acanthus.—The windows of the chapel are acutely pointed.—The horizontal mullions, (an unusual feature in French architecture,) are ornamented on the outside with the ovolo. The nave is supported by flying buttresses, each filled with tracery of eight mullions.—The tower at the south angle of the west front is lofty, and in the perpendicular style. In the north aisle of the choir is an elegant screen, which probably incloses a chantry-chapel, and, like the lady-chapel, exhibits a singular mixture of pointed forms, interspersed with Roman members: parts of it resemble the tomb of Bishop Fox, at Winchester.
FOOTNOTES:
[67] Mémoires Chronologiques pour servir à l'Histoire de Dieppe et à celle de la Navigation Française, Paris, 1785.—(2 vols. 8vo.)
[68] This festival was attended with ceremonies of the most absurd description, which were continued till the time of the revolution. They are detailed at length in the Histoire de Dieppe I. p. 68; and a brief account has lately been given of them in English, in Turner's Tour in Normandy, I. p. 24.
PLATE XXXVII.
TOWER OF THE CHURCH AT HAUTE ALLEMAGNE,
NEAR CAEN.
The village of Haute Allemagne is situated at the distance of about a league to the south of Caen. Mention of it is to be found in the latin charters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, under the appellation of Alamannia, or Alemannia; and the older historians contend that it derived this name from having been the site of a colony of the Alani, a Scythian tribe, who ravaged a portion of Gaul in the early years of the fifth century, and afterwards, with the consent of the Roman emperors, established themselves in various parts of the country. This opinion, in the judgment of the Abbé De la Rue, receives confirmation from the circumstance of there being another village called Allemagne, in the vicinity of Valence, where it is known that a body of the same people was fixed; and it may perhaps be adduced as a still farther proof of its correctness, that the village of Allemagne, near Caen, formerly embraced a considerably greater extent of country.
