greatest military effort that has been made in western Europe since Charlemagne and Roland were defeated at Roncesvalles three hundred years ago.  For the moment, we are helping to quarry granite for the Abbey Church, and to haul it to the Mount, or load it on our boat.  We never fail to make our annual pilgrimage to the Mount on the Archangel’s Day, October 16.  We expect to be called out for a new campaign which Duke William threatens against Brittany, and we hear stories that Harold the Saxon, the powerful Earl of Wessex in England, is a guest, or, as some say, a prisoner or a hostage, at the Duke’s Court, and will go with us on the campaign.  The year is 1058.

All this time we have been standing on the parvis, looking out over the sea and sands which are as good eleventh-century landscape as they ever were; or turning at times towards the church door which is the pons seclorum, the bridge of ages, between us and our ancestors.  Now that we have made an attempt, such as it is, to get our minds into a condition to cross the bridge without breaking down in the effort, we enter the church and stand face to face with eleventh-century architecture; a ground-plan which dates from 1020; a central tower, or its piers, dating from 1058; and a church completed in 1135.  France can offer few buildings of this importance equally old, with dates so exact.  Perhaps the closest parallel to Mont-Saint-Michel is Saint-Benoit-sur-Loire, above Orleans, which seems to have been a shrine almost as popular as the Mount, at the same time.  Chartres was also a famous shrine, but of the Virgin, and the west porch of Chartres, which is to be our peculiar pilgrimage, was a hundred years later than the ground-plan of Mont-Saint-Michel, although Chartres porch is the usual starting-point of northern French art.  Queen Matilda’s Abbaye-aux-Dames, now the Church of the Trinity, at Caen, dates from 1066.  Saint Sernin at Toulouse, the porch of the Abbey Church at Moissac, Notre-Dame-du-Port at Clermont, the Abbey Church at Vezelay, are all said to be twelfth-century.  Even San Marco at Venice was new in 1020.

Yet in 1020 Norman art was already too ambitious.  Certainly nine hundred years leave their traces on granite as well as on other material, but the granite of Abbot Hildebert would have stood securely enough, if the Abbot had not asked too much from it.  Perhaps he asked too much from the Archangel, for the thought of the Archangel’s superiority was clearly the inspiration of his plan.  The apex of the granite rock rose like a sugar-loaf two hundred and forty feet (73.6 metres) above mean sea-level.  Instead of cutting the summit away to give his church a secure rock foundation, which would have sacrificed about thirty feet of height, the Abbot took the apex of the rock for his level, and on all sides built out foundations of masonry to support the walls of his church.  The apex of the rock is the floor of the croisee, the intersection of nave and transept.