Neither under the Norman dukes, nor at a subsequent period, does Lisieux
appear to have taken any prominent part in political transactions. Its
central situation, by securing it against the attacks of the French in
former times, and more recently of the English, also prevented it from
obtaining that historical celebrity, which, from its size and opulence,
it could scarcely have failed to have otherwise gained. The principal
events connected with it, upon record, are the following:--It was the
focus of the civil war in 1101, when Ralph Flambart, bishop of Durham,
escaping from the prison to which he had been committed by his
sovereign, fled hither, and raised the standard of rebellion against
Henry, in favor of his brother.--In 1136, Lisieux was attacked by the
forces of Anjou, under the command of Geoffrey Plantagenet, husband of
the Empress Maude, joined by those of William, Duke of Poitiers; and the
garrison, composed of Bretons, seeing no hope of resistance or of
rescue, burned the town.--Thirty-three years subsequently, the city was
honored by being selected by Thomas-a-Becket, as the place of his
retirement during his temporary disgrace. Arnulf, then bishop of
Lisieux, had labored diligently, though ineffectually, to restore amity
between the sovereign and the prelate, espousing, indeed, decidedly the
cause of the latter, but at the same time never forfeiting the
friendship of the former, for whom, after the murder of Becket, he wrote
a letter of excuse to the supreme pontiff, in the joint names of all the
bishops of England.--Lisieux, in 1213, passed from under the dominion of
the Norman dukes, to the sway of the French monarch. It opened its gates
to Philip-Augustus, immediately after the fall of Caen and Bayeux; and
its surrender was accompanied with that of Coutances and Seez, all of
them without a blow, as the king's poetical chronicler, Brito, relates
in the following lines:--

"Cumque diocesibus tribus illi tres sine bello
Sese sponte sua praeclari nominis urbes
Subjiciunt, Sagium, Constantia, Lexoviumque."

In subsequent times, Lisieux suffered severely, when taken by the
English army under Henry V. in 1417. Its recapture by Charles VII.
thirty-two years afterwards, was unstained by bloodshed.

A great part of the preceding account of Lisieux has been borrowed from
Mr. Turner's Tour in Normandy: what follows, relative to the church here
figured, will be entirely so:--"The cathedral, now the