ible. It really seems as if some people thought that the
Conqueror was accompanied to England by a Bishop of the city where John
Huss was burned ages afterwards.

We have called the Cotentin a peninsula, and so it is. Sir Francis
Palgrave points out, with a kind of triumph, that the two Danish
peninsulas, the original Juetland and this of the Cotentin, are the only
two in Europe which point northward. And the Cotentin does look on the
map very much as if it were inviting settlers from more northern parts.
But the fact is that the land is not really so peninsular as it looks
and as it feels. The actual projection northward from the coast of the
Bessin or Calvados is not very great. It is the long coast to the west,
the coast which looks out on the Norman islands, the coast which forms a
right angle with the Breton coast by the Mount of Saint Michael, which
really gives the land its peninsular air. We are apt to forget that the
nearest coast due west of the city of Coutances does not lie in Europe.
We are apt further to forget that the whole of that west coast is not
Cotentin. Avranches has its district also, and the modern department of
Manche takes in both, as the modern diocese of Coutances takes in the
older dioceses of Coutances and Avranches.

Part of the Cotentin then is a true peninsula, a peninsula stretching
out a long finger to the north-west in the shape of Cape La Hague; and
this most characteristic part of the land has impressed a kind of
peninsular character on the whole region. But we must not forget that
the land of Coutances is not wholly peninsular, but also partly insular.
The Norman islands, those fragments of the duchy which remained faithful
to their natural Duke when the mainland passed under the yoke of Paris,
are essential parts of the Constantine land, diocese and county. Modern
arrangements have transferred their ecclesiastical allegiance to the
church of Winchester, and their civil allegiance to the Empire of India;
but historically those islands are that part of the land of Coutances
which remained Norman while the rest stooped to become French.[27] The
peninsula pointing northwards, with its neighbouring islands, save that
the islands lie to the west and not to the east, might pass for no inapt
figure of the northern land of the Dane. They formed a land which the
Dane was, by a kind of congruity, called on to make his own. And his
own he made it and thoroughly. Added to the Norman duchy by W