tter ourselves that we have lighted on the site.
He who has read Wace's story of Duke William's ride from Valognes and of
his greeting by Hubert of Rye will remember how Hubert was standing
"entre le moutier et la motte."[46] The "moutier" and the "motte," the
church and the castle, have, in these places, a way of standing near
together. So, having got the church and marked that it stands on a bit
of high ground with a slope to the south-east, we run down a lane and
into a field to the north-west, and there find a charming site for the
"motte." The little hill rises with a fair amount of steepness above a
flat piece of land with a small stream wriggling about in it. Then we go
on and find that there is a near slope to the north-east also, so we
have our "moutier" and the almost certain site of our "motte." They are
fixed, as they should be, on one end of a peninsular hill, though we
must confess that the hill is not very lofty. Here then, we feel fairly
satisfied, it was that William Patry--written, it seems, in Latin
_Patricius_--welcomed as a peaceful guest the Earl whom in after-days he
was to meet in arms as King on the day of the great battle.[47]

But Tinchebray is much more than La Lande-Patry, and the site is much
more certain. There it was, as Englishmen at the time deemed, that the
assize of God's judgment on Senlac was reversed after forty years.[48]
England had been won by the Duke of the Normans; Normandy was now to be
won by a King of the English. To be sure the English King was the son of
the Norman Duke; but he was born in England; he spoke the English
tongue; Englishmen had chosen him to be their king rather than his
purely Norman brother. King Henry's host was most likely far more
largely Norman--specially West-Norman--than English; the chief men above
all were Norman; still there were Englishmen in it, and those
Englishmen looked on the fight as a national struggle and on the result
as a national victory. William of Malmesbury witnesses to the feeling;
it is odd that there is not a word of it in "Ordericus Angligena,"
writing at Saint-Evroul. We read our Orderic; we read the little that
there is in Wace; we read the contemporary account in a letter by a
Norman partisan of Henry. We then go forth to make out what we can of
the site, knowing perfectly well that we shall not find a castle
standing up as at Falaise.

The railway takes us from Flers to Montsecret junction, and from
Montsecret junction to