Part 7

It is common enough in England to find a grand doorway of the twelfth century left in a church where everything else has been rebuilt. Later builders clearly admired them and spared them. Much more would this be the case at Mortain, where the building of the new church must have begun no very long time after the adding of this last finish to the old. The style of the building is Transition, and advanced Transition; it is all but early Gothic. The pointed arch alone is used; the only trace of Romanesque feeling is to be seen in the short columns of the arcade, and in the extreme simplicity of the triforium and clerestory, a single unadorned lancet in each. The vaulting is naturally a little later; that at least, with the English-looking shafts from which it springs, is in the fully developed Pointed style.

The plan of the church of Saint Evroul, Mortain, is as simple as a church that has aisles can be. We were going to say that it is a perfect basilica; but no; the basilica commonly has the transepts and the arch of triumph. At Mortain the same simple arcade runs round nave, choir, and apse without break of any kind. Within the building the effect of this austere and untouched simplicity--no one at Mortain has altered a window or added a chapel--is perfectly satisfactory. Many buildings are larger and more enriched; not many can be said to be more perfect wholes. Save in the matter of multiplied aisles within and flying buttresses without, Mortain may pass for Bourges in small. And, just as at Bourges, the external outline is less satisfactory than the internal effect. A single body of this kind has in itself no outline at all; it depends on its tower or towers. At Mortain the usual central tower of a great Norman church could not be; but neither has Saint Evroul the two Western towers of Saint-Lo and Séez; the arrangement designed was rather a development of the side towers common in the smaller churches of the district. A tower on each side was designed and begun. They stand near the east end; but they are not eastern towers like those of Geneva and many German churches. They stand outside the aisles, so as not to interrupt the continuous design within. They therefore do not really group with the apse; they are detached towers whose lowest stage just touches that of the church. But we are speaking as if both towers were there. In truth only the southern one was carried up, and that only to a height very little above the ridge of the roof, and there furnished with a saddle-back. Such a tower lends the building hardly any increase of outline in the distance, and in a near view it is chiefly remarkable for the oddness of the wonderfully long coupled windows on the west side, which are not continued all round. Save only the simple and graceful west front and the general goodness of the design and execution, the beauties of the church of Mortain are certainly to be sought within.

The castle looks up at the church, which stands on the rather steep slope of the hill, the effect of which is that the east end can hardly be seen, except from a considerable distance. Above it is the hospice, with the fragment of a church with a saddle-back to its central tower. Above again is the chapel of Saint Michael. Of quite another value from Saint Michael is a church a little way out of Mortain, in the near neighbourhood of the waterfalls, with rocks above it and rocks below. This is the church of nuns known as l'Abbaye Blanche, a foundation of Count William of Mortain in 1105. As the next year he was taken at Tinchebray and kept in prison for the rest of his days, he was not likely to do much in the way of building. The church described long ago by Gally Knight and De Caumont is palpably later than his day. It is of the Transition, and it is a much less advanced example of the Transition than the church of Mortain. Whatever Count William meant to found, the actual house was Cistercian, and the church carries Cistercian severity to its extremest point. One thinks of Kirkstall; but Kirkstall, plain as it is, drew majesty from its grand and simple outline; the White Abbey is small; it has, through the lack of a central tower, no outline without, and its small scale hinders the effect of Kirkstall. One might even say that, in buildings of this class--not in those of more elaborate design--something is gained, as with the monuments of Rome, by being somewhat out of repair. Anyhow, in connexion with Mortain, the White Abbey does not lack architectural importance. It is very odd if anybody took the collegiate church to be the older. The White Abbey is a truly Cistercian building, a simple cross with a flat east end, no aisles to the nave, but chapels east of the transepts. It follows the usual law of Transitional buildings. The main constructive arches are pointed; the windows are round-headed in the eastern part, pointed in the western. The cloister and chapter-house have round arches; the remains of the cloister have small single shafts, not the Saracenic coupling to which we have got used in Italy, Sicily, and Southern Gaul. In an odd position to the west of the church, forbidding any west front, is an undercroft with columns with good, but not very rich, twelfth-century capitals, clearly of a piece with the cloister.

Lastly, on the opposite side of the valley, forming a picturesque object on the road from Mortain to the White Abbey, is the small plain church of Neufbourg. The spot marks the solitary dwelling of the Blessed Vital, him who strove to make peace between the contending brothers at Tinchebray, and who gave up his prebend at Mortain and all that he had, to dwell as a hermit amid the woods and rocks. The church, bating a few later insertions, is a perfect Transitional cross church, with a flat east end and no aisles. In this part of Normandy the small churches that one lights on in the villages, though commonly of pleasing outline, have seldom any remarkable work. In this they are distinguished in a marked way from the wonderful series of parish churches round Caen and Bayeux. Those we are tempted to compare with the churches of our own Holland, Marshland, and Northern Northamptonshire. But the comparison does not strictly apply. In each case there is a series of notable churches which never were collegiate or monastic. But in the English district the churches are, as parish churches, of considerable size, sometimes indeed very large, though never affecting the character of a minster. The churches in the Bessin are mainly small, but of singular excellence of work, largely Romanesque of the twelfth century. We may come to some of them before we have done.

MORTAIN TO ARGENTAN

1892

One great object in the parts of Mortain is to see the historic site of Tinchebray, so closely connected with Mortain in its history, though the two places are, and seem always to have been, in different divisions, ecclesiastical and civil. We debate whether Tinchebray can be best got at from Mortain, Vire, or Flers. Mortain would be the best way by railway, if only trains ran on every part of the line. But between Sourdeval and Tinchebray no trains now run. We rule then that Tinchebray will be best got at by road from Flers, and owing to the gap on the railway, the way by train from Mortain to Flers is by Vire. We thus get a few hours at Vire. It is the Feast of the Assumption; the great church is crowded with worshippers. It is therefore impossible to make a study of its interior. But we can see that it has a grand nave, nearly of the same style as Mortain, but loftier. There are many additions and changes in the later styles, and the only tower is at the side and of no great height. We would fain see more of this church on some less venerated day. Then there is the gateway with the tower-belfry; there is the donjon on its mound, crowning another of the peninsular heights on which castles rose, this time a real peninsula, with the river below from which the town takes its name. There is a glimpse to be taken of the famous valley of Vire, and we go back to the station to betake us to Flers. It is not altogether for the sake of its own merits that we go to Flers, but because we have ruled that it is on the whole the best place from whence to make the journey to Tinchebray. Flers, we imagine, is as old as other places; but there seems to be nothing to say about it. It has no church of any importance, it has a respectable castle of late mediæval lines, standing in a real moat. This has become in an odd way a dependency of a later house, which happily has not swallowed it up. Flers itself has of late years risen to some importance as a manufacturing town. And we are bound to say that these French manufacturing towns look much cleaner and tidier than their fellows in England. But for historical and antiquarian purposes Flers counts for very little. And it is, after all, possible that it may not be the best starting point for Tinchebray. We cannot say till we have made the attempt from Vire.

We had meant to go by carriage from Flers to Tinchebray, and to take on the way La Lande-Patry the house of that William Patry who appears in Wace as having entertained Earl Harold as a guest at the time of his stay in Normandy. And we did get to La Lande-Patry another day. Strange to say, while De Caumont spoke of traces of the castle in the past tense, Joanne, so much later, spoke of them in the present. At any rate, the thing was worth trying; one might at least muse on the spot. We found the place a little way from Flers, a church and a few houses, called distinctively La Lande-patry, as distinguished from a neighbouring village called by some such name as La Fontaine de Patry. The church is not quite wholly new, though it is mostly so; but there is nothing that could have been built or looked on by any one who received Harold. Nor do we distinctly see anything in the way of mounds or ditches. And yet we flatter ourselves that we have lighted on the site. He who has read Wace's story of Duke William's ride from Valognes and of his greeting by Hubert of Rye will remember how Hubert was standing "entre le moutier et la motte." The "moutier" and the "motte," the church and the castle, have, in these places, a way of standing near together. So, having got the church and marked that it stands on a bit of high ground with a slope to the south-east, we run down a lane and into a field to the north-west, and there find a charming site for the "motte." The little hill rises with a fair amount of steepness above a flat piece of land with a small stream wriggling about in it. Then we go on and find that there is a near slope to the north-east also, so we have our "moutier" and the almost certain site of our "motte." They are fixed, as they should be, on one end of a peninsular hill, though we must confess that the hill is not very lofty. Here then, we feel fairly satisfied, it was that William Patry--written, it seems, in Latin Patricius--welcomed as a peaceful guest the Earl whom in after-days he was to meet in arms as King on the day of the great battle.

But Tinchebray is much more than La Lande-Patry, and the site is much more certain. There it was, as Englishmen at the time deemed, that the assize of God's judgment on Senlac was reversed after forty years. England had been won by the Duke of the Normans; Normandy was now to be won by a King of the English. To be sure the English King was the son of the Norman Duke; but he was born in England; he spoke the English tongue; Englishmen had chosen him to be their king rather than his purely Norman brother. King Henry's host was most likely far more largely Norman--specially West-Norman--than English; the chief men above all were Norman; still there were Englishmen in it, and those Englishmen looked on the fight as a national struggle and on the result as a national victory. William of Malmesbury witnesses to the feeling; it is odd that there is not a word of it in "Ordericus Angligena," writing at Saint-Evroul. We read our Orderic; we read the little that there is in Wace; we read the contemporary account in a letter by a Norman partisan of Henry. We then go forth to make out what we can of the site, knowing perfectly well that we shall not find a castle standing up as at Falaise.

The railway takes us from Flers to Montsecret junction, and from Montsecret junction to Tinchebray station. We are looking out for a possible site for the battle, and we soon rule that the ground where the station itself stands, the flat ground to the north of the town, will do perfectly well for the purpose; but we do not as yet know whether there may not be some other site which may do equally well. We walk up from the station, and we find Tinchebray itself a somewhat larger town than we had looked for, though still but small. It strikes us almost at once that it is a town of the same class as Carlisle, Stirling, and Edinburgh, where a single long street, with more or less of slope, leads up to a castle at one end. Here at Tinchebray it is the east end, where the castle hill rises boldly enough over the little stream of the Noireau, the Norman Blackwater, which gives a surname to that Condé which became the seat of princes. On the opposite side of the narrow and grassy valley rise higher hills on which King Henry may well have planted his Malvoisin. To the south, the hills have withdrawn to a greater distance; the castle hill rises above a meadow which in times past seems to have been a marsh. On the northern side, the hill slopes away more gradually to the plain. Here the castle must have trusted wholly to its own defences. It is on this north side only, where the railway runs, that the battle could have been fought. For the fight of Tinchebray really was a battle, one of the very few pitched battles of the age. The campaign indeed began in an attack on the fortress; but it grew into something more on both sides. And it is only to the north that there was room for the operations of two armies of any size; the earlier besieging could take place from all points, but specially, one would think, from the east and north. But we have to make out these things as well as we can from the look of the ground. The contemporary accounts give us the facts; but they give them without local colouring.

Of the buildings of the castle fairly full accounts have been preserved, which may be studied in a History of Tinchebray in three volumes by the Abbé L.V. Dumaine (Paris: 1883). It is a book most praiseworthy for bringing together all manner of local facts of all manner of dates. And it is full of plans and plates to illustrate particular subjects. For historical criticism we do not look; but we should have liked a clear plan of the castle and town, and, if possible, the reproduction of some old drawing of the castle, such as one often finds. As things are, we have to put up with M. Dumaine's description. Towards the river and the marsh the castle trusted mainly to its natural defences; but at least on the side towards the town it had a ditch which has now vanished. The gates are gone, but the likeness survives of a building near the eastern gate with two pointed arches rising from a pillar, known as Les Porches. Here was the Champ Belle-Noe, and on the hill on the opposite site of the valley was Beaulieu. The names were not ill deserved; the stream and its accompaniments make a pleasant look-out. But of the buildings of the castle nothing now is left; the utmost that we can do is to make out, not the eastern gate itself, but its site. No walls and bulwarks stand up; we must be content with calling up an imagination what there once was. But that is enough; the castle of Henry's day standing up would be best of all; a simple empty space would be next best; but the scattered buildings of the little suburb which occupies the castle site do not seriously hinder us from understanding what we want to understand. In other lines all that Tinchebray has to show is a desecrated fragment of the church of Saint Remigius just outside the castle. Here is a central tower with a very short eastern limb. On the eastern face of the tower is a Romanesque arcade, so very simple and even rude that one is inclined to assign it to a time a good bit earlier than the day of Tinchebray. But there is no such arcade on the other sides, and the western arch of the tower is pointed. What are we to infer when the place is locked and it is hopeless trying to get the key? We do at least remember that the four lantern-arches at Saint David's are not all of the same date; and we hope that, whenever the pointed arch was made, the plain arcade was there on the 28th day of September, 1106, just forty years after the father of the contending princes had landed at Pevensey.

Our accounts are not very clear in their topography, and they do not distinctly point out the site of the battle. The relieving force under Duke Robert and Count William came from Mortain--that is, from the south-west. A striking tale is told of their march. In crossing the forest of Lande-Pourrie to the south of Tinchebray the army heard mass under a tree from the mouth of Vital, the holy solitary of Neufbourg. Count William was his lord, if one who had renounced the world could be said to have an earthly lord, and he was only in his allegiance if he accompanied the forces of Mortain. The object of the holy man was to reconcile the brothers, and he made an attempt on the mind of Henry also. But, according to Orderic, the King of the English was able to show that the fault rested wholly with Robert, and that he himself had entered Normandy only from the purest motives. Anyhow arms were to decide. Only on what spot? The south side of the castle, the natural approach from Mortain, gave no opportunities for fighting an open battle, hardly even for an assault on the castle. The ducal army, with William of Mortain and the terrible Robert of Bellême, must have gone round to some other point. The name of Champ Henriet, borne by a site to the west of the town, therefore away from the castle, does not seem to prove much. The north side seems to furnish the best fighting-ground, and it is the weakest side of the castle. The King's forces would most likely be on that side, and the Duke would come round to attack them. But one cannot pretend to certainty.

The combatants, some of them, awaken a more lively interest than the immediate scene of their exploits. It is hard to throw ourselves into the feeling of those men of the time who saw in the fight of Tinchebray a national victory of Englishmen over Normans. In some sort it was so; from that day no once could say that a Duke of the Normans held England; it was the King of the English who held Normandy. And the invasion of Normandy by Englishmen and their King, and the fighting of the victorious battle on the forty years' anniversary of the Conqueror's landing, could not have failed to strike men's minds. One strange turning-about of things indeed there was. The man whom Englishmen had once chosen as their King, the heir of Alfred, Cerdic, and Woden, fought at Tinchebray in the following of Duke Robert. Eadgar and Robert had been comrades in the Crusade, and the two men were not unlike in character. Neither could ever act for himself; both could sometimes act for others. And if Eadgar thought at all, he may have seen a rival in Henry, while he assuredly could not have seen one in Robert. Anyhow the Ætheling who had marched on York with Waltheof and Mærleswegen now marched on Tinchebray with William of Mortain and Robert of Bellême. Englishmen may well have seen a truer countryman in the son of the Conqueror, born in England, chosen to his crown by Englishmen and leading Englishmen to battle, than in the grandson of Æthelred, born in Hungary, and fighting alongside of the foreign oppressors whom England and her King had cast out. And the best and the worst of the warrior princes and nobles of the time were there on opposite sides. With Duke Robert came Robert of Bellême, no longer of Shrewsbury or Arundel. With King Henry came the Count of Maine, Helias of La Flèche.

Orderic witnesses to the presence of Englishmen in the battle. The contemporary letter-writer only implies it by mentioning others, of whom he speaks a little scornfully, as well as the men of Bayeux, Avranches, and Coutances, and the Breton and Mansel allies. When Robert of Torigny speaks of the "acies Anglorum," he doubtless simply means, according to a very common form of speech, the force of the King of the English, whatever they might be, either "genere" or "natione." But all who were under the King's immediate command had in some sort to become Englishmen in the hour of battle. Like Brihtnoth and Harold, King Henry stood and waited for the enemy on foot. So did Randolf of Bayeux and the younger William of Warren; so did the wary counsellor who had little love for Englishmen, Robert of Beaumont, Count of Meulan, and presently to be Earl of Leicester, forefather in the female line of another Earl who loved them well. Seven hundred horsemen only kept the two flanks of the infantry. The main body of the horse, Breton and Mansel, stood apart. King Henry's footmen, perhaps with some little advantage of the ground, stood as firm in their ranks as the fathers of some of them had stood forty years before when the lord of Meulan was foremost in the charge against them. They bore up against every charge of the ducal force till Count Helias, with his reserve, chose a happy moment and broke in on their assailants with his horsemen. The lord of Bellême fled for his life; the Duke of the Normans and the Count of Mortain became the prisoners of their conqueror and near kinsman.

The prison of Count William was a strait one. Henry might fairly look on him as a traitor, and it was the general belief that he paid for his treason with his eyes. Here we may perhaps see the groundwork for the foolish story that Duke Robert's fate was equally hard. But Henry was far too wise to commit so useless a crime. The captive Duke spent the remaining twenty-eight years of his life in this castle, and that, treated with all honour, but kept under such restraint as was needful, specially after he had once tried to get away altogether. He did not even cease to be Duke of the Normans. His brother administered his duchy for him; but he never took the ducal title while Robert lived. Robert, in short, was in much the same case as Henry III. was at the hands of Earl Simon. To be carefully looked after at Bristol or Cardiff must have been dull work for one who had scaled the walls of Jerusalem; but in his brother's keeping Robert assuredly never had to lie in bed for want of clothes. As for his comrade Eadgar, he was let go free altogether. The crowned King had no need to fear the momentary King-elect of forty years before. We only wish to know whether he did himself live to so preternatural an age as to be a pensioner of Henry II., or whether he who bears his name in the accounts of that reign is a son of whom history has no tale to tell.

We go back from Tinchebray to Flers. Next day the main line takes us to Argentan. The name of Tenarcebrai is written in our own Chronicles; so is that of Argentses; only is that really Argentan or only Argences?

ARGENTAN

1892

A good many of the places which we go through on such a journey as we are now taking in Western Normandy, full as they are of historic and local interest on particular grounds, might easily fail to attract, not only the ordinary tourist, but even the general antiquarian traveller. No one, for instance, need go to La Lande-Patry, unless he is anxious to get a better understanding of a single sentence of the Roman de Rou. Even at Tinchebray the strictly historic interest is all. Unless we except that single arcade on the tower of St. Remigius, there is really nothing memorable to show in the shape of either church or castle. With Argentan the case is different. Any one who has a turn for mediæval antiquities in any shape would surely reckon that town as one of high interest. With no such single memory as the great fight of Tinchebray, it plays a certain part in history through many ages; the local history of the town itself is remarkable, and its existing monuments are of various kinds and instructive in several ways. And the means of getting there are as simple as any means well can be; for Argentan is a principal station on the line from Paris to Granville. It is also a station on the great cross line from Caen to Le Mans. This position makes it a good centre for seeing several places in various directions, to say nothing of others for which none of the many railways of Normandy has as yet done anything. In the journey now recorded it served as a centre for Falaise and Séez, and for what will to most people be the less familiar names of Exmes and Almenèches, and it might easily have been made a centre for other places.

Argentan is a kind of town to which it would be hard to find an exact fellow in England. It is not the head of any district; it is not the seat of any great ecclesiastical foundation; such importance as it has in history seems to have come from the presence of a castle which not uncommonly received princely sojourners. Yet it is plainly something more than one of those towns which have simply sprung up at the gate of a castle. It has one main characteristic of a class of towns much greater than its own: the fortress and the great church stand side by side in its most prominent quarter. That in the general view the church is far more conspicuous than the fortress is the result of later havoc; but we are surprised to find that a church of such dignity in itself and placed in such a position as the chief church of Argentan was never the seat of abbot or dean. Falaise is now a larger town than Argentan; but we feel that at Falaise the town has simply grown up at the foot of the castle hill. Saint Gervase at Falaise is no fellow to the mighty fortress on the felsen, as Saint German of Argentan must have been to the donjon of Argentan, even when that donjon was better seen than it is now. The name of Argentan does not at once lead us to some Gaulish tribe or to some Roman prince; but it does not, like that of Falaise, at once carry its own meaning with it in the speech of some or other of the Teutonic conquerors of Gaul. We feel that Falaise, looking up to the great keep and to the tower of Talbot, is merely a magnificent Dunster or Richmond--we cannot say Windsor; for the sainte chapelle of Saint George has no fellow there. But Argentan is a miniature, a very small miniature certainly, but still a miniature, of Durham and Lincoln and Angers. That is, church and fortress stand together on the highest point in the town.

Is Argentan therefore to be set down among the hill-towns? Falaise, of all places in the world, assuredly is not; the castle is set on a hill, but not the town. But can we give the name to Argentan? Some scruple may be felt by one who has come from Saint-Lo, from Coutances, or from Avranches. Yet the ascent from the Orne to the upper part of the town is very marked, and as the chief buildings, ecclesiastical and military, are gathered together on the higher ground, there is a true akropolis. And there is no doubt that this akropolis had its own circuit of wall, distinct from that of the lower town. This last took in a large space, and was of a strangely complicated shape, running out hither and thither in various directions. According to all our experience of other places, we would take for granted that the inner circuit was the older. Here, we should say, was the original settlement; the town, after the usual manner of towns, outstripped its boundaries; it spread itself in whatever directions suited its inhabitants; lastly, the suburbs which thus grew up were taken into the town, and were fenced in by a second wall. This, one need hardly say, is a thing which has happened over and over again, in this place and that, till we take it for granted as the explanation of such a state of things as we see at Argentan. But in a local book, in which a great deal of information about Argentan is brought together, Le Vieil Argentan, by M. Eugène Vimont, it is distinctly asserted that the case is the other way. The wider circuit, he tells us, is the older. In the wars of the early days of William, King Henry of France burned Argentan. The burning is undoubted; it is recorded by William of Jumièges. But M. Vimont's inference seems strange--namely, that after this destruction the town was rebuilt, but on a smaller scale. The case would be something like one stage in the history of Périgueux, when only a part of old Vesona was fortified at the time of the barbarian invasion of 407, and the part outside the new walls was forsaken. But an ordinary burning of a town in warfare like that which went on between France and Normandy did not commonly lead to such great changes as this, and it is very hard to believe that the town of Argentan can, in the first half of the eleventh century, have reached this great extent and this irregular shape. We are bound to suppose that a local writer who shows much local knowledge has some reason for what he says. But for a thing so hard to believe some direct authority should be quoted, and M. Vimont quotes none. Till some other convincing authority is produced, we shall believe that the growth of Argentan followed the same law as that of other towns.

It is only in a few small pieces here and there that either the wider or the narrower circuit of wall has left any sign of itself. But we can believe both on M. Vimont's witness, and indeed they hardly need any witness. Each circuit has left its stamp behind it in the way that town walls do leave it, even when, as walls, they have altogether vanished. We hold, then, that the narrower circuit, taking in only the higher ground with the church of Saint German, and the two castles, is the oldest. The church and the donjon doubtless had predecessors before King Henry came against Argentan. His burning need not have wrought any more of lasting destruction than a hundred other such burnings. The town sprang up again; in course of time, when Argentan flourished under princely favour, it grew beyond its old bounds. The growth of the inhabited town called for a wider circuit of walls. The new suburbs, with the church of Saint Martin, were taken within the fortified area. Argentan no longer merely looked down on the Orne, but was washed by it.

The upper town, then, besides the church of Saint German, contains not only one, but two castles. On the highest ground of all, in the north-west corner of the enclosure, are the remains of a large polygonal keep, which keeps its name of the donjon. It makes very little show, being sadly crowded in by houses. Somewhat lower down is the château, a graceful building of the late French Gothic, now used as the Palace of Justice. The building itself has hardly any defensive character about it, but it stands as part of the general line of defence, and it was also connected with the donjon by an inner wall, parting the two castles from the town. Some parts of the wall in this neighbourhood, both inner and outer, are still standing; and near the château is the desecrated chapel of Saint Nicolas, keeping some good windows.

The château would attract anywhere; the fragment of the donjon simply peeps over houses. The chief thing in Argentan after all is the great church of Saint German. Both this and the smaller church of Saint Martin down below give us most instructive lessons in the course by which the late Gothic of France gradually changed into Renaissance. As we have often said, this transition has in England to be studied almost wholly in houses, while in France we trace it in churches, and grand churches also. The church of Saint German at Argentan is undoubtedly a noble pile. At a distance it suggests the memory of Saint Peter at Coutances on a larger scale. We seem to look on the same grouping of central and western towers, though the central tower of Saint German's is not octagonal, but square. But the western tower at Argentan is not western in the same sense as the western tower at Coutances. That is, it does not stand in the same line with the central tower. It is not a western, but a north-western tower. This allows a greater variety of outline than can be had at Saint Peter's. But the general effect of the towers, all of which evidently received their last finish after the days of pure Gothic had passed away, is essentially the same in the two cases. In the central tower of Saint German this finish is nothing more than a cupola of wood and lead on a handsome but not lofty lantern of late Gothic, wonderfully good, outside at least, for the date of 1555. But the general effect is not bad. The north-western tower, known as la grosse tour, has a more curious history. The lowest stage is good and rich Flamboyant, with a highly adorned porch. On this is a much plainer stage, from which the Gothic feeling has passed, but which has no distinctly Renaissance detail. It has long narrow windows with flat-arched heads. This must have been building in 1617, when the governor of the town forbade the tower to be carried higher, lest it should overlook the donjon. We think of William Rufus bidding Hildebert of Le Mans to pull down his pair of newly built towers. The hindrance was afterwards withdrawn, and in 1638 the tower was finished with its fantastic, but certainly taking, cupola. The nave was begun in 1421, when Normandy was ruled for a season by the descendants of its ancient dukes. It was carried on gradually for 220 years, and was finished in 1641. The changes in style during this time are easily traced. The nave is late but pure Gothic, a really fine design, though a good deal spoiled by the loss of tracery in so many of the windows both in aisles and clerestory. In a large panelled triforium a very keen eye may possibly detect in the lowest range of ornament a tendency--it is nothing more--to Renaissance ideas. Or it may only be fancy suggested by the stages further east. Certainly the nave, if not quite of first-rate merit, has a really striking effect, and is far better than most panel work of the time. The transepts are of the same style. They are finished north and south with apses, which are really graceful, though we miss the rose-windows which we should otherwise have looked for in a French church on such a scale as this. The choir too, as seen out of the nave, is well-proportioned and effective, though we see that the windows in the apse have flat arches and no tracery. The apse, if we can call it so, has the strange singularity of ending in a point, and some odd details have crept into the bosses of the vault. But, in the general view from the nave, the only thing that mars the general harmony and good effect is the treatment of the lantern. The four lantern arches have the flattened shape of the latest Gothic; but, oddly enough, the variety here chosen is the English four-centred arch, not the usual French shape, three-centred, elliptic, or actually flat-headed. But both the English and the French form are quite unsuited for pier-arches, and for lantern arches yet more. And, though the work of the lantern is quite good outside, yet within we see that the enemy has begun to take possession. There is perhaps no actual un-Gothic detail, but the feeling of the arcade of flat-headed arches which forms the gallery shows the way in which things are tending.

We go into the choir. There, setting aside the apse windows, the arcade, triforium, clerestory, are still pure, if very late Gothic; the new fashion comes in one detail only; the vaulting shafts have an odd kind of Ionic capital. It is in the latest part of all, the chapels round the choir, that the new taste comes in most strongly, and even there it is not altogether dominant. It is very strange outside, where heavy flying-buttresses are tricked out with little columns. Within, pairs of such little columns are the chief ornament. But they support no arches, only scraps of entablature. The arches of the roof, the windows, and everything else, are still of the elliptic shape, and they still keep the late Gothic mouldings. No building better shows what a long fight was waged between the two styles. Saint German at Argentan is not like Saint Eustace, where we see a grand Gothic conception carried out without a single correct Gothic detail. Here not only the conception, but the great mass of the internal detail, is purely Gothic; the new fashion thrusts itself in only in particular parts.

This last remark is specially true of the smaller church of Argentan, that of Saint Martin. Here we have not the full cruciform shape. There is no central tower or lantern, but only lower transepts projecting from a continuous nave and choir, whose roof-line, within and without, runs uninterruptedly from east to west. The only tower is a small octagonal one with a spire at the north-west corner. The peculiarity within is that, while the arcade and clerestory are still late Gothic, the triforium between them has run off into Renaissance. The reason seems clear. The new fashion affected details long before it touched the great lines of the building. The triforium at this date is, as at Saint German, simply a matter of detail, an arrangement of panelling and the like. That stage, therefore, was naturally touched by the intruding foes, while the main features, like the pillars and pier-arches, are as yet not all affected. At Saint Martin the windows are some of them good Flamboyant, while some are a kind of very bad Perpendicular. From others, as at Saint German, the tracery has been cut away altogether. This church, smaller than Saint German, of a less effective outline, and standing in the lower part of the town, has nothing like the same grand effect as the two towers of Saint German on the hill. But it has, with its tall clerestory, a stately look from some approaches, and it has its lesson to tell in the history of art.

One is surprised to hear that in the old days Argentan had but a single curé, whose sphere of usefulness took in both Saint German and Saint Martin. One fully expects to find that such a church as Saint German was collegiate. But this is one of the characteristic features of French architecture. We are used in England to great town churches, which never were more than parish churches, covering a good deal more ground than Saint German's. But we are not used, save at Shoreham and Bristol, to see them built, like Saint German, so thoroughly on the type of churches of higher rank. Boston, Newark, Saint Michael's at Coventry, Trinity Church at Hull, are as grand in their way as Saint German at Argentan, only it is in quite another way.

There are a few other things to see at Argentan. On the slope of the hill is a good late Gothic house, with two arches of street arcade in front. Add a little more, and we should have the arcade of Carentan; add a great deal more, and we should have the arcades of Bern. Those who seek for it will also find a mediæval bridge of two pointed arches over one of the branches of the Orne. And it is grievous when, after moving from Argentan to new quarters at Laigle, we take another look at M. Vimont's book, and find that we have failed to see a small desecrated Romanesque church called Notre-Dame de la Place. We relieve ourselves by finding fault with M. Vimont, who certainly does not always put things in those parts of his book where we should most naturally look for them.