s of the Tongue of Oc. But in
everything but actual speech the old impress remains, and the result is
that in Normandy, above all in Lower Normandy, the English historical
traveller finds himself more thoroughly at home than in any other part
of the Continent except in the lands where the speech once common to
England, to Bayeux, and to Northern Germany is still preserved.

FECAMP

1868

It has sometimes struck us that the mediaeval founders of towns and
castles and monasteries were not so wholly uninfluenced by
considerations of mere picturesque beauty as we are apt to fancy. We are
apt to think that they had nothing in their minds but mere convenience,
according to their several standards of convenience, convenience for
traffic, convenience for military defence or attack, convenience for the
chase, the convenience of solitude in one class of ecclesiastical
foundations, the convenience of the near neighbourhood of large centres
of men in another class. This may be so; but, if so, these
considerations of various kinds constantly led them, by some sort of
happy accident, to the choice of very attractive sites. And we venture
to think that it was not merely accident, because we often come upon
descriptions of sites in mediaeval writers which seem to show that the
men of those times were capable of appreciating the picturesque
position of this or that castle or abbey, as well as its direct
suitableness for military or monastic purposes. Giraldus, for instance,
evidently admired the site of Llanthony, and, if he expressed himself
about it in rather exaggerated language, that is no more than what
naturally happens when any man, especially when Giraldus, expresses
himself in Latin, especially in mediaeval Latin. In the like sort, we
have come across one or two descriptions of the Abbey of Fecamp which
clearly show that the writers were struck, as any man of taste would be,
with the position in which that great and famous monastery had arisen.
And, to leap to scenes which far surpass either Fecamp or Llanthony, the
well-known story of Saint Bernard's absorption on the shores of the Lake
of Geneva really tells the other way. We are told that the saint was so
given up to pious contemplation that he travelled for a whole day
through that glorious region without noticing lake, mountains, or
anything else. Now we need hardly stop to show that the fact that
Bernard's absorption was thought worthy of record proves that, if