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, spiritual or temporal, in
all this region; and helping to build the Abbey Church at Mont-
Saint-Michel. From the roof of the Cathedral of Coutances over
yonder, one may look away over the hills and woods, the farms and
fields of Normandy, and so familiar, so homelike are they, one can
almost take oath that in this, or the other, or in all, one knew
life once and has never so fully known it since.

Never so fully known it since! For we of the eleventh century, hard-
headed, close-fisted, grasping, shrewd, as we were, and as Normans
are still said to be, stood more fully in the centre of the world's
movement than our English descendants ever did. We were a part, and
a great part, of the Church, of France, and of Europe. The Leos and
Gregories of the tenth and eleventh centuries leaned on us in their
great struggle for reform. Our Duke Richard-Sans-Peur, in 966,
turned the old canons out of the Mount in order to bring here the
highest influence of the time, the Benedictine monks of Monte
Cassino. Richard II, grandfather of William the Conqueror, began
this Abbey Church in 1020, and helped Abbot Hildebert to build it.
When William the Conqueror in 1066 set out to conquer England, Pope
Alexander II stood behind him and blessed his banner. From that
moment our Norman Dukes cast the Kings of France into the shade. Our
activity was not limited to northern Europe, or even confined by
Anjou and Gascony. When we stop at Coutances, we will drive out to
Hauteville to see where Tancred came from, whose sons Robert and
Roger were conquering Naples and Sicily at the time when the Abbey