church, an inside seen from outside, with its sheltered windows and
vaulting-shafts, standing against the side of the castle-hill. How was
it when both abbey and castle were perfect? As it is, the abbey is the
more prominent of the two. We can see at least a piece of it, while we
have to guess at the castle; none of its fragments stand out at any
distance. Yet, even looking thus, the abbey seems something subordinate,
something dependent; it seems crowded into an unnatural position in
order to be an appendage to something else. The parish church stands out
boldly enough. It has a right to do so; it came in the order of nature.
It proclaims the separate being of the town of Beaumont. The town of
Beaumont doubtless sprang up because of the presence of the castle; but
it sprang up by an independent growth; it was not the personal creation
of any of its lords. The abbey, on the other hand, placed on so strange
a site, was clearly the personal device of its own founder, who may have
felt a number of very different feelings gratified, as he saw an abbey
of his own making at his feet.

The result is an abbatial church unlike all other abbatial churches. The
abbey of Beaumont is very beautiful, while the abbey of Almeneches is
very ugly; yet Almeneches comes one degree nearer than Beaumont to one's
ordinary notion of an abbey church. The abbey of Beaumont must have been
a lovely chapel, but only a chapel. If it stood in its perfect state at
Caen, among that wonderful group of noble minsters and great parish
churches, it would strike us as a beautiful, but a small thing. This is
not the usual position of the church of an abbey. It was, in fact, a
pious and artistic fancy; while not, in strictness of description, a
_sainte chapelle_ or other chapel of a castle, it has all the effect of
being such. Or in its position against the hill-side, it may call up the
memory of Brantome far away in Perigord;[60] it has nothing in common
with a typical abbey church like Saint-Evroul, except the accident of
being much of the same date and style.

One building still remains to be noticed in the Beaumont of Roger. That
is the church of his earliest home at Les Vieilles. It had, or was meant
to have, a pretty thirteenth-century tower. But the church is a mere
fragment, mutilated, desecrated, shut up. A decently kept ruin is far
less offensive than a church in such a state as this. But the thought
again comes, as at Saint-Evroul, how short a tim