Coutances and Bayeux are interesting, but Caen is a Romanesque Mecca.  There William the Conqueror dealt with the same architectural problems, and put his solution in his Abbaye-aux-Hommes, which bears the name of Saint Stephen.  Queen Matilda put her solution into her Abbaye-aux-Femmes, the Church of the Trinity.  One ought particularly to look at the beautiful central clocher of the church at Vaucelles in the suburbs; and one must drive out to Thaon to see its eleventh-century church, with a charming Romanesque blind arcade on the outside, and a little clocher, “the more interesting to us,” according to Viollet-le-Duc, “because it bears the stamp of the traditions of defence of the primitive towers which were built over the porches.”  Even “a sort of chemin de ronde” remains around the clocher, perhaps once provided with a parapet of defence.  “C’est la, du reste, un charmant edifice.”  A tower with stone fleche, which actually served for defence in a famous recorded instance, is that of the church at Secqueville, not far off; this beautiful tower, as charming as anything in Norman art, is known to have served as a fortress in 1105, which gives a valuable date.  The pretty old Romanesque front of the little church at Ouistreham, with its portal that seems to come fresh from Poitiers and Moissac, can be taken in, while driving past; but we must on no account fail to make a serious pilgrimage to Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives, where the church-tower and fleche are not only classed among the best in Normandy, but have an exact date, 1145, and a very close relation with Chartres, as will appear.  Finally, if for no other reason, at least for interest in Arlette, the tanner’s daughter, one must go to Falaise, and look at the superb clocher of Saint-Gervais, which was finished and consecrated by 1135.

Some day, if you like, we can follow this Romanesque style to the south, and on even to Italy where it may be supposed to have been born; but France had an architectural life fully a thousand years old when these twelfth-century churches were built, and was long since artistically, as she was politically, independent.  The Normans were new in France, but not the Romanesque architecture; they only took the forms and stamped on them their own character.  It is the stamp we want to distinguish, in order to trace up our lines of artistic ancestry.  The Norman twelfth-century stamp was not easily effaced.  If we have not seen enough of it at Mont-Saint-Michel, Coutances, Bayeux, and Caen, we can go to Rouen, and drive out to Boscherville, and visit the ruined Abbey of Jumieges.  Wherever there is a church-tower with a tall fleche, as at Boscherville, Secqueville, Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives, Caen, and Bayeux, Viollet-le-Duc bids notice how the octagonal steeple is fitted on to the square tower.  Always the passage from the octagon to the square seems to be quite simply made.  The Gothic or Romanesque spire had the advantage that a wooden fleche was as reasonable a covering for it as a stone one, and the Normans might have indulged in freaks of form very easily, if they chose, but they seem never to have thought of it.  The nearest approach to the freedom of wooden roofs is not in the lofty fleches, but in the covering of the great square central towers, like Falaise or Vaucelles, a huge four-sided roof which tries to be a fleche, and is as massive as the heavy structure it covers.