Tinchebray station. We are looking out for a
possible site for the battle, and we soon rule that the ground where the
station itself stands, the flat ground to the north of the town, will do
perfectly well for the purpose; but we do not as yet know whether there
may not be some other site which may do equally well. We walk up from
the station, and we find Tinchebray itself a somewhat larger town than
we had looked for, though still but small. It strikes us almost at once
that it is a town of the same class as Carlisle, Stirling, and
Edinburgh, where a single long street, with more or less of slope, leads
up to a castle at one end. Here at Tinchebray it is the east end, where
the castle hill rises boldly enough over the little stream of the
Noireau, the Norman Blackwater, which gives a surname to that Conde
which became the seat of princes. On the opposite side of the narrow and
grassy valley rise higher hills on which King Henry may well have
planted his _Malvoisin_. To the south, the hills have withdrawn to a
greater distance; the castle hill rises above a meadow which in times
past seems to have been a marsh. On the northern side, the hill slopes
away more gradually to the plain. Here the castle must have trusted
wholly to its own defences. It is on this north side only, where the
railway runs, that the battle could have been fought. For the fight of
Tinchebray really was a battle, one of the very few pitched battles of
the age. The campaign indeed began in an attack on the fortress; but it
grew into something more on both sides. And it is only to the north that
there was room for the operations of two armies of any size; the earlier
besieging could take place from all points, but specially, one would
think, from the east and north. But we have to make out these things as
well as we can from the look of the ground. The contemporary accounts
give us the facts; but they give them without local colouring.

Of the buildings of the castle fairly full accounts have been preserved,
which may be studied in a History of Tinchebray in three volumes by the
Abbe L.V. Dumaine (Paris: 1883). It is a book most praiseworthy for
bringing together all manner of local facts of all manner of dates. And
it is full of plans and plates to illustrate particular subjects. For
historical criticism we do not look; but we should have liked a clear
plan of the castle and town, and, if possible, the reproduction of some
old drawing of the castle, s