Normandy had also something to say to the world in that most mediæval of arts, architecture, and especially in that Romanesque form of building which flourished in the eleventh century and the first half of the twelfth. The great Norman churches of this epoch were the natural outgrowth of its life—the wealth of the abbeys, the splendor of princely prelates like Odo of Bayeux and Geoffrey of Coutances, the piety and penance of William the Conqueror and Matilda, expiating by two abbeys their marriage within the prohibited degrees, the religious devotion of the people as illustrated by the processions of 1145. The biographer of Geoffrey de Mowbray, for example, tells58 us how the bishop labored day and night for the enlargement and beautification of his church at Coutances (dedicated in 1056), buying the better half of the city from the duke to get space for the cathedral and palace, travelling as far as Apulia to secure gold and gems and vestments from Robert Guiscard and his fellow Normans, and maintaining from his rents a force of sculptors, masons, goldsmiths, and workers in glass. Nearly forty years later, when the church had been damaged by earthquake and tempest, he brought a plumber from England to restore the leaden roof and the fallen stones of the towers and to replace the gilded cock which crowned the whole; and when he saw the cock once more glistening at the summit, he gave thanks to God and shortly passed away, pronouncing eternal maledictions upon those who should injure his church. Of this famous structure nothing now remains above the ground, for the noble towers which look from the hill of Coutances toward the western sea are Gothic, like the rest of the church; and for surviving monuments of cathedrals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries we must go to the naves of Bayeux and Évreux and the St. Romain’s tower of Rouen. Even here the impression will be fragmentary, broken by Gothic choirs and by towers and spires of a still later age, just as the simple lines of the early church of Mont-Saint-Michel are swallowed up in the ornate Gothic of the loftier parts of the great pile. Edifices wholly of the Romanesque period must be sought in the parish churches in which Normandy is so rich, or in the larger abbey-churches which meet us at Lessay, Cerisy, Caen, Jumièges, and Bocherville. Jumièges, though in ruins, preserves the full outline of the style of the middle of the eleventh century; Caen presents in the Abbaye aux Hommes and the Abbaye aux Dames two perfect though contrasted types of a few years later, the one simple and austere, the other richer and less grand. Freeman may seem fanciful when he suggests that these sister churches express the spirit of their respective founders, “the imperial will of the conquering duke” and the milder temper of his “loving and faithful duchess,”59 but in any event they are Norman and typical of their age and country. There are elements in the ornamentation of Norman churches in this period which have been explained by reference to the distant influence of the Scandinavian north or the Farther East, there are perhaps traces of Lombard architecture in their plan, but their structure as a whole is as Norman as the stone of which they are built, distinguished by local traits from the other varieties of French Romanesque to which this period gave rise. Not the least Norman feature of these buildings is the persistent common sense of design and execution; the Norman architects did not attempt the architecturally impossible or undertake tasks, like the cathedral of Beauvais, which they were unable to finish in their own time and style. “What they began, they completed,” writes the Nestor of American historians in his sympathetic interpretation of the art and the spirit of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. In Norman art, as in other phases of Norman achievement, the last word cannot be said till we have followed it far beyond the borders of the duchy, northward to Durham, “half house of God, half castle ’gainst the Scot,” and the other massive monuments which made ‘Norman’ synonymous with a whole style and period of English architecture, and southward to those more ornate structures which Norman princes reared at Bari and Cefalù, Palermo and Monreale. “No art—either Greek or Byzantine, Italian, or Arab—” says Henry Adams,60 “has ever created two religious types so beautiful, so serious, so impressive, and yet so different, as Mont-Saint-Michel watching over its northern ocean, and Monreale, looking down over its forests of orange and lemon, on Palermo and the Sicilian seas.”
There is no general account of Norman life and culture in any period of the Middle Ages, and no general study of Norman feudalism. For conditions in France generally, see Luchaire, La société française au temps de Philippe-Auguste (Paris, 1909), translated by Krehbiel (New York, 1912); for England, Miss M. Bateson, Mediæval England (New York and London, 1904). On castles, see C. Enlart, Manuel d’archéologie française, II (Paris, 1904, with bibliography), and Mrs. E. S. Armitage, The Early Norman Castles of the British Isles (London, 1912). For William the Marshal, see Paul Meyer’s introduction to his edition of the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal (Paris, 1891–1901); the poem has been utilized by Jusserand for his account of tournaments, Les sports et jeux d’exercice dans l’ancienne France (Paris, 1901), ch. 2.
The work of Delisle, Études sur la condition de la classe agricole et l’état de l’agriculture en Normandie au moyen âge (Évreux, 1851), is a classic.
The best studies of Norman municipal institutions are A. Chéruel, Histoire de Rouen pendant l’époque communale (Rouen, 1843); A. Giry, Les Établissements de Rouen (Paris, 1883–85), supplemented by Valin, Recherches sur les origines de la commune de Rouen (Précis of the Rouen Academy, 1911); Charles de Beaurepaire, La Vicomté de l’Eau de Rouen (Évreux, 1856); E. de Fréville, Mémoire sur le commerce maritime de Rouen (Rouen, 1857); Miss Bateson, The Laws of Breteuil, in English Historical Review, XV, XVI; R. Génestal, La tenure en bourgage (Paris, 1900); Legras, Le bourgage de Caen (Paris, 1911).
The excellent account of the Norman church in H. Böhmer, Kirche und Staat in England und in der Normandie (Leipzig, 1899), stops with 1154. On Odo and on Philip d’Harcourt see V. Bourrienne’s articles in the Revue Catholique de Normandie, VII-X, XVIII-XXIII. The register of Eudes Rigaud (ed. Bonnin, Rouen, 1852) is analyzed by Delisle, in Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, VIII, pp. 479–99; the Miracula Ecclesie Constantiensis and the letter of Abbot Haimo are discussed by him, ibid., IX, pp. 339–52; XXI, pp. 113–39. For the mortuary rolls, see his facsimile edition of the Rouleau mortuaire du B. Vital (Paris, 1909). The best monograph on a Norman monastery is that of R. N. Sauvage, L’abbaye de S. Martin de Troarn (Caen, 1911), where other such studies are listed. See also Génestal, Rôle des monastères comme établissements de crédit étudié en Normandie (Paris, 1901), and Delisle’s edition of Robert of Torigni.
The schools of Bec are described by A. Porée, Histoire de l’abbaye du Bec (Évreux, 1901). Notices of the various Norman historians are given by A. Molinier, Les sources de l’histoire de France (Paris, 1901–06), especially II, chs. 25, 33. For Ordericus and St. Évroul see Delisle’s introduction to the edition of the Historia Ecclesiastica published by the Société de l’Histoire de France, and the volumes issued by the Société historique et archéologique de l’Orne on the occasion of the Fêtes of 1912 (Alençon, 1912). Other early catalogues of libraries, including that of Philip of Bayeux, are in the first two volumes of the Catalogue général des MSS. des départements (Paris, 1886–88). For the vernacular literature, see Gaston Paris, La littérature normande avant l’annexion (Paris, 1899); and L. E. Menger, The Anglo-Norman Dialect (New York, 1904). For the latest discussions of the Chanson de Roland see J. Bédier, Les légendes épiques, III (Paris, 1912); and W. Tavernier’s studies in the Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Litteratur, XXXVI-XLII (1910–14), and the Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, XXXVIII (1914). Enlart, Manuel d’archéologie française, I, mentions the principal works on Norman ecclesiastical architecture. See also R. de Lasteyrie, L’architecture religieuse en France à l’époque romane (Paris, 1912), ch. 15; Enlart, Rouen (Paris, 1904); H. Prentout, Caen et Bayeux (Paris, 1900); Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (Boston, 1913).