will not have touched the coast nor seen how Normandy is based upon the
sea, and you will not have known the Cotentin, which is a little State
of its own and is the quadrilateral which Normandy thrusts forth into
the Channel. If you have the leisure, therefore, return by the north.
Pass through Coutances and Valognes to Cherbourg, thence through Caen
and Bayeux to the crossing of Seine at Honfleur, and then on by the
chalk uplands and edges of the cliffs till you reach Eu upon the Bresle
again. In such a double journey the character of the whole will be
revealed, and if you have studied the past of the place before starting
you will find your journey full. Avranches, Coutances, Lisieux, Bayeux,
Rouen are not chance sites. Their great churches mark the bishoprics;
the bishoprics in turn were the administrative centres of Rome, and Rome
chose them because they were the strongholds or the sacred cities each
of a Gallic tribe. The wealth of the valleys permitted everywhere that
astonishing richness of detail which marks the stonework in village
after village; the connexion with England, especially the last connexion
under Henry V, explains the innumerable churches, splendid even in
hamlets as are our own. The Bresle and the Couesnon, those little
streams, are boundaries not of these last few centuries, but of a time
beyond view; the Romans found them so. Diocletian made them the limits
of the "Second Lyonesse," "Lugdunensis Secunda," which was the last
Roman name of the province.

Here and there, near the west especially, you will discover names which
recall the chief adventure of Normandy, the accident which baptized it
with its Christian name, the landing of the Scandinavian pirates, the
thousandth anniversary of which is now being celebrated. They came--we
cannot tell in what numbers, some thousands--and harried the land. The
old policy of the Empire, the policy already seven hundred years old,
was had recourse to; the barbarians were granted settlement,