Cerisy, a small market-town, upon the road leading from Bayeux to St. Lo, and equally distant about four leagues from each of those places, is wholly indebted to its abbey for the celebrity it has enjoyed. In the secular history of the duchy, its name occurs upon only two occasions. The lord of Cerisy is enumerated among the companions in arms of Robert, son of the Conqueror, in his expedition to the Holy Land, in 1009; and the abbot of Cerisy was one of the twenty-one ecclesiastics from the bailiwick of Caen, cited by Philip le Bel to the Norman exchequer, in the beginning of the fourteenth century.

The convent, which was at all times of the Benedictine order, is said to have been founded as early as the year 560. It was under the invocation of St. Vigor, ninth bishop of Bayeux; and, according to some authors, was established by that saint himself. Du Monstier, in the Neustria Pia, recites the history of its origin at great length: how the prelate, moved by the entreaties of a rich man, of the name of Volusian, destroyed, by virtue of the sign of the cross, a monstrous serpent that ravaged the country; and how Volusian, in gratitude, ceded to him the domain of Cerisy, upon which he immediately erected a monastery, and endowed it with the revenues of the property. The annals of the convent being lost, what is recorded of its history is very short. After the general destruction of religious establishments by the Saxons and Normans, that of Cerisy appears to have been left in its ruins far longer than most others. No hand is said to have been lifted towards its restoration, till the reign of Robert, father of the Conqueror. By him the monastic writers all agree that a beginning was made towards the rebuilding of this monastery; and one of them, William of Jumieges, adds, that his care of it suffered no diminution from time or distance; for that, during his wars in the Holy Land, when the patriarch of Jerusalem rewarded his pious zeal with a present of some precious relics, he immediately directed them to be here deposited. His more illustrious successor, in one of the first years of his reign, completed and richly endowed the convent begun by his father, whose remains he commanded should be brought from Palestine, for the express purpose of their being interred at Cerisy. But they were allowed to proceed no further than Apulia. In the Neustria Pia is preserved a charter of King Charles VI. dated 1398, in which the various donations conferred upon the abbey of Cerisy, by the Norman Dukes, Robert, William, and Henry, are enumerated and confirmed. Its annual income, in the middle of the eighteenth century, was estimated by De Masseville at twenty thousand livres. The only property it appears ever to have possessed in England, was a priory of Benedictine monks at West Shirburne, in Hampshire.

Architecturally considered, the church of Cerisy is an interesting relic of Norman workmanship. The certainty of its date, not far removed from the year 1032, and the comparatively few alterations it has undergone, render it one of those landmarks, by the aid of which the observer of the present day can alone attain to any certainty in his inquiries into ancient art. And yet, in the portion here selected for engraving, the upper row of windows is of an Æra posterior to the rest; and the great arch in front has evidently changed its semi-circular form for a pointed one. Its height is unusual and impressive. Both taken collectively and in its parts, the church bears a strong resemblance to that nearly coeval at St. Georges; like which, it is now appropriated to parochial purposes, and is still of great size,[218] though the whole of the portion originally parochial, and which extended one hundred and twenty-four feet beyond what remains of the nave, has been recently pulled down. The principal front of the building, which faced the north, its position being north and south, has been consequently destroyed. The style of the edifice is characterized by a noble and severe simplicity: the capitals of the columns are, indeed, enriched with sculptured foliage or animals, or occasionally with small heads placed in the middle of a surface otherwise plain; but elsewhere the decorations are very sparingly distributed. They are confined to the chevron and billet mouldings; the latter the most ancient and most rare among the Norman ornaments. Both the transepts are parted off, as at St. Georges, by screens near the extremities: these screens at Cerisy are surmounted by an elegant parapet of semi-circular arches, a singular and very beautiful addition.