h it is,
in both cases, a difference not of style but of taste. The eastern limb
of Fecamp--strictly the presbytery and not the choir--is more remarkable
in some ways than the nave. It is here that we find the only remains of
an earlier church, and these are of no very remarkable antiquity. M.
Bouet, in a short account of Fecamp, addressed to the Norman Antiquarian
Society, records his disappointment at finding at Fecamp no traces of
the days of the early Dukes, or even of days earlier still, such as he
found at Jumieges. This oldest part of Fecamp is part of a church begun
so late as 1085. One bay of its presbytery and two adjoining chapels
have been spared. The style is a little singular. There is something not
quite Norman about the very square arches of a single order, and the
capitals are not the usual Norman capitals of the second half of the
eleventh century. Except this bay, the presbytery has been rebuilt in
essentially the same style as the nave, though naturally a little
earlier. But on the south side a singular change took place in the
fourteenth century. As at Waltham, the builders of that day cut away the
triforium and threw the two lower stages into one. But what was done at
Waltham in the most awkward and bungling way in which anything ever was
done anywhere, was at Fecamp at least done very cleverly. Without
meddling with the vaulting or the vaulting-shafts, the pier-arches and
triforium range of the thirteenth century have been changed into arches
of the fourteenth, resting on tall slender pillars, almost recalling the
choir of Le Mans. Whether this change was an improvement or not is a
question of taste, but there can be no question as to the wonderful
skill, aesthetical and mechanical, with which the change was made, and it
is the more striking from the contrast with the wretched "botch" at
Waltham.

The church is finished to the east by a fine Flamboyant Lady Chapel. The
contrast between it and the earlier work suggests the effect of Henry
the Seventh's Chapel at Westminster, though the contrast is not quite so
strong. Altogether there can be no doubt of the claim of the church to a
place in the very first rank of the great minsters of a province
specially rich in such works.

We have dwelt so long on the position and the architecture of Fecamp
that we have no space left to add anything on its history. But the local
history of Fecamp naturally connects itself with several other more
general points