y could
have built only in imitation of what they had been used to build in
Normandy, and unless the new fashion, with its new name, had been a
distinct advance on anything in the way of fortification already known
in England, it would not have caused so much amazement as it did.
Englishmen were perfectly familiar with stone walls to a town, but the
Norman keep was something new, something for which there was no English
name, and which therefore retained its French name of "castel." On the
whole, the evidence is in favour of the belief that the present castle
of Falaise is of the twelfth century. But there is no reason to deny,
and there is every reason to believe, that Robert the Devil may have
inhabited a castle of essentially the same type in the eleventh century.

Adjoining the keep is the tall round tower of the great Talbot. The two
towers suggest exactly opposite remembrances. One sets before us the
Norman dominant in England, the other sets before us the Englishman
dominant in Normandy. Or the case may be put in another shape. Talbot,
like so many of his comrades, was probably of Norman descent. Such
returned to the land of their fathers in the character of Englishmen.
And yet after all, when the descendants of Rolf's Danes and of the older
Saxons of Bayeux assumed the character of Englishmen, they were but
casting away the French husk and standing forth once more in the genuine
character of their earlier forefathers. Such changes were doubtless
quite unconscious; long before the fifteenth century the Norman in
England had become thoroughly English, and the Norman in Normandy had
become thoroughly French. French indeed in speech and manners he had
been for ages, but by the time of Henry the Fifth he had become French
in national feeling also. The tower of Talbot was no doubt felt by the
people of Falaise to be a badge of bondage. It stands nobly and
proudly, overtopping the older keep; its genuine masonry as good as on
the day it was built, while the stuff with which its upper part was
mended twenty years back has already crumbled away. Within, a few
details of purely English character tell their tale in most intelligible
language.

[Illustration: St. Gervase, Falaise, S.W.]

The position of the castle is striking beyond measure. It is all the
more so because it comes on the traveller who reaches the place in the
way in which travellers are now most likely to reach it as a thorough
surprise. In the approach b