Roman relics, however, abound.  The vases and statues dug up near this city, have afforded employment to the pen and the pencil of Count Caylus, who, judging from the style of art, refers the greater part of them to the times of Julius and Augustus Caesar.  Medals of the earliest emperors have likewise frequently been detected among the foundations of the houses of the city; and even so recently as in the beginning of the present century, mutilated cippi, covered with Latin inscriptions, have been brought to light.  These discoveries all tend to shew the Roman origin of Bayeux, and two Roman causeways also join here; so that, notwithstanding the arguments of the Abbe le Beuf, most antiquaries still believe that Bayeux was the city called by Ptolemy the Naeomagus Viducassium.—­The term Viducasses or Biducasses was in early ages changed to Bajocasses; and the city, following the custom that prevailed in Gaul, took the appellation of Bajocae, or, as it was occasionally written, of Baiae or Bagicae.  Its name in French has likewise been subject to alterations.—­During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it was Baex and Bajeves; in the fourteenth Bajex; in the sixteenth Baieux; and soon afterwards it settled info the present orthography.

Pursuing the history of Bayeux somewhat farther, we find this city in the Notitia Galileae holding the first rank among the towns of the Secunda Lugdunensis.  During the Merovingian and Carlovingian dynasties, its importance is proved by the mint which was established here.  Golden coins, struck under the first race of French sovereigns, inscribed HBAJOCAS, and silver pieces, coined by Charles the Bald, with the legend HBAJOCAS-CIVITAS, are mentioned by Le Blanc.  Bayeux was also in those times, one of the head-quarters of the high functionaries, entitled Missi Dominici, who were annually deputed by the monarchy for the promulgation of their decrees and the administration of justice.  Two other cities only in Neustria, Rouen and Lisieux, were distinguished with the same privilege.—­Nor did Bayeux suffer any diminution of its honors, under the Norman Dukes:  they regarded it as the second town of the duchy, and had a palace here, and frequently made it the seat of their Aula Regio.

The destruction of the Roman Bayeux is commonly ascribed, like that of the Roman Lisieux, to the Saxon invasion.  No traces of the Viducassian capital are to be found in history, subsequently to the reign of Constantine; no medals, no inscriptions of a later period, have been dug up within its precincts.  During the earliest incursions of the Saxons in Gaul, they seem to have made this immediate neighborhood the seat of a permanent settlement.  The Abbe Le Beuf places the district, known by the name of the Otlingua Saxonia, between Bayeux and Isigny; and Gregory of Tours, in his relation of the events that occurred