remained the formal head, ecclesiastical and civil, of the Cotentin, the
"pagus Constantinus," which took its name from the city. The town of
Saint-Lo has now outstripped Coutances in the matter of temporal honour
as the head of the department of La Manche, though that dignity was not
assigned to it without a good deal of opposition on the part of the
elder seat of rule. The same series of changes gave to ecclesiastical
Coutances, if not a higher dignity, at least a wider jurisdiction. When
the episcopal church of Coutances, after being put to various strange
uses in the revolutionary time, became once more a place of Christian
worship and the head church of the diocese, that diocese was enlarged by
the ecclesiastical territory of Avranches. Avranches and Lisieux have
both vanished from the roll of the six suffragans of the Archbishop of
Rouen, Primate of Normandy. But Avranches has suffered worse things than
Lisieux. The Lexovian bishopstool has passed away; but the church that
held it is still there. From Avranches the church itself has vanished.
It is from its site only that we look down on the wide plain at our
foot, on the Mount of the Archangel in its bay, and the rocks of
Cancale beyond.[35]

There is no need to describe anew a building so well known as the
cathedral church of Coutances. There is no need to argue against, there
is hardly need to wonder at, the strange belief against which Gally
Knight and others had to fight, that this beautiful example of the fully
developed Early Gothic was really the work of that Bishop Geoffrey who
blessed the Norman host on its march from Hastings to Senlac.[36] That
belief was indeed a strange one. It implied that some nameless genius at
Coutances had, in the middle of the eleventh century, suddenly, at a
blow, invented the fully developed style of the thirteenth--that this
great discovery was kept hidden at Coutances till the very end of the
twelfth--that then various people in Normandy, France, England, and
above all Saint Hugh of Burgundy, began to make many, and at first not
very successful, attempts to imitate what the men of one spot in the
Cotentin had known, and must have been proud of, for a century and a
half. The local invention of Perpendicular at Gloucester, and its
spreading abroad by the great Bishops of Winchester forty or fifty years
later, is a remarkable fact; but it is a small matter to this fiction.
So strange a vagary need no longer be discussed; but