illiam
Longsword before Normans had wholly passed into Frenchmen, with the good
seed watered again by a new settlement straight from Denmark under
Harold Blaatand, the Danish land of Coutances, like the Saxon land of
Bayeux, was far slower than the lands beyond the Dive in putting on the
speech and the outward garb of France. And no part of the Norman duchy
sent forth more men or mightier, to put off that garb in the kindred, if
conquered, island, and to come back to their natural selves in the form
of Englishmen. The most Teutonic part of Normandy was the one part which
had a real grievance to avenge on Englishmen; in their land, and in
their land alone, had Englishmen, for a moment in the days of AEthelred,
shown themselves as invaders and ravagers. But before the men of the
Cotentin could show themselves as avengers at Senlac, they had first to
be themselves overthrown at Val-es-dunes. Before William could conquer
England, he had first to conquer his own duchy by the aid of France.
Bayeux and Coutances were to have no share in the spoil of York and
Winchester till they had been themselves subdued by the joint might of
Rouen and Paris.

It is singular enough that the two most prominent names among those
which connect the Bessin and the Cotentin with England should be those
of their two Bishops, Geoffrey of Mowbray, for a while Earl of
Northumberland, and the more famous Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of
Kent. Geoffrey would deserve a higher fame than he wins by the
possession of endless manors in Domesday and by the suppression of the
West-Saxon revolt at Montacute,[28] if we could believe that, according
to a legend which is even now hardly exploded, the existing church of
Coutances is his work. William of Durham and Roger of Salisbury would
seem feeble workers in the building art beside the man who consecrated
that building in the purest style of the thirteenth century in the year
1056. According to that theory, art must have been at Coutances a
hundred and fifty years in advance of the rest of the world, and, after
about a hundred and twenty years, the rest of the world must have begun
a series of rude attempts at imitating the long-neglected model. But
without attributing to the art of Coutances or the Cotentin so
miraculous a development as this, the district was at all times fertile
in men who could build in the styles of their several ages. A journey
through the peninsula shows its scenery, so varied and in man