Ch. 1- Saint Michiel de la Mer del Peril - Page 2

towards Coutances and the Cotentin,--the Constantinus
pagus,--whose shore, facing us, recalls the coast of New England.
The relation between the granite of one coast and that of the
other may be fanciful, but the relation between the people who live
on each is as hard and practical a fact as the granite itself. When
one enters the church, one notes first the four great triumphal
piers or columns, at the intersection of the nave and transepts, and
on looking into M. Corroyer's architectural study which is the chief
source of all one's acquaintance with the Mount, one learns that
these piers were constructed in 1058. Four out of five American
tourists will instantly recall the only date of mediaeval history
they ever knew, the date of the Norman Conquest. Eight years after
these piers were built, in 1066, Duke William of Normandy raised an
army of forty thousand men in these parts, and in northern France,
whom he took to England, where they mostly stayed. For a hundred and
fifty years, until 1204, Normandy and England were united; the
Norman peasant went freely to England with his lord, spiritual or
temporal; the Norman woman, a very capable person, followed her
husband or her parents; Normans held nearly all the English fiefs;
filled the English Church; crowded the English Court; created the
English law; and we know that French was still currently spoken in
England as late as 1400, or thereabouts, "After the scole of
Stratford atte bowe." The aristocratic Norman names still survive in
part, and if we look up their origin here we shall generally find
them in villages so remote and insignificant that their place can
hardly be found on any ordinary map; but the common people had no
surnames, and cannot be traced, although for every noble whose name
or blood survived in England or in Normandy, we must reckon hundreds
of peasants. Since the generation which followed William to England
in 1066, we can reckon twenty-eight or thirty from father to son,
and, if you care to figure up the sum, you will find that you had
about two hundred and fifty million arithmetical ancestors living in
the middle of the eleventh century. The whole population of England
and northern France may then have numbered five million, but if it
were fifty it would not much affect the certainty that, if you have
any English blood at all, you have also Norman. If we could go back
and live again in all our two hundred and fifty million arithmetical
ancestors of the eleventh century, we should find ourselves doing
many surprising things, but among the rest we should pretty
certainly be ploughing most of the fields of the Cotentin and
Calvados; going to mass in every parish church in Normandy;
rendering military service to every lord,