The beginnings of the Norman Conquest, in its more personal and picturesque point of view, are to be found in the Castle of Falaise. There, as Sir Francis Palgrave sums up the story, "Arletta's pretty feet twinkling in the brook made her the mother of William the Bastard." And certainly, if great events depend upon great men, and if great men are in any way influenced by the places of their birth, there is no place which seems more distinctly designed by nature to be the cradle of great events. The spot is one which history would have dealt with unfairly if it had not contrived to find its way into her most striking pages. And certainly in this respect Falaise has nothing to complain of. Except one or two of the great cities of the province, no place is brought more constantly under our notice during five centuries of Norman history. And Norman history, we must not forget, includes in this case some of the most memorable scenes in the history of England, France, and Scotland. The siege by Henry the Fourth was in a manner local; it was part of a warfare within the kingdom of France. But that warfare was one in which all the Powers of Europe felt themselves to be closely interested; it was a warfare in which one at least of them directly partook; it was one in which the two great religions of Western Europe felt that their own fates were to be in a manner decided. In the earlier warfare of the fifteenth century Falaise plays a prominent part. Town and castle were taken and retaken, and the ancient fortress itself received a lasting and remarkable addition from the hand of one of the greatest of English captains. The tall round tower of Talbot, a model of the military masonry of its time, goes far to share the attention of the visitor with the massive keep of the ancient Dukes. Thence we leap back to the earliest great historical event which we can connect, with any certainty, with any part of the existing building. It was here, in a land beyond the borders of the Isle of Britain, but in a comparatively neighbouring portion of the wide dominions of the House of Anjou, that the fullest homage was paid which ever was paid by a King of Scots to a King of England. Here William the Lion, the captive of Alnwick, became most effectually the "man" of Henry Fitz-Empress, and burdened his kingdom with new and onerous engagements from which his next overlord found it convenient to relieve him. Earlier in the twelfth century, and in the eleventh, Falaise plays its part in the troubled politics of the Norman Duchy, in the wars of Henry the First and in the wars of his father. Still going back through a political and military history spread over so many ages, the culminating interest of Falaise continues to centre round its first historic mention. Henry of Navarre, our own Talbot, William the Lion, Robert of BellÊme, all fail to kindle the same emotions as are aroused by the spot which was the favourite dwelling-place of the pilgrim of Jerusalem, the birthplace of the Conqueror of England.

Local tradition of course affirms the existing building to be the scene of William's birth. The window is shown from which Duke Robert first beheld the tanner's daughter, and the room in which William first saw what, if it really be the spot, must certainly have been light of an artificial kind. A pompous inscription in the modern French style calls on us to reverence the spot where the "legislator of ancient England" "fut engendrÉ et naquit." The odd notion of William being the legislator of England calls forth a passing smile, and another somewhat longer train of thought is suggested. William, early in his reign, tried to learn English. He proved no very apt scholar, and he presently gave up his studies; but we may fairly believe that he learned enough to understand the simple formulÆ of his own English charters. This leads one to ask the question: Would he not have been as likely to understand his own praises in the tongue of the conquered English as in what is supposed to represent his own native speech? Have we, after all, departed any further from the tongue of the oldest Charter of London than the Imperial dialect of abstractions and antitheses has departed from the simple and vigorous speech of the Roman de Rou? And, if he could spell it out in either tongue, he would find it somewhat faint praise to be told that, judged by the standard of the nineteenth century, he was a mere barbarian, but that M.F. Galeron would condescend so far as to suggest to his contemporaries to judge the local hero by a less rigid rule. If this is all the credit that the great William can get from his own people in his own birthplace, we can only say that, while demurring to his title of legislator of England, we would give him much better measure than this, even if we were writing on the site of the choir of Waltham.

Antiquaries have, till lately, generally acquiesced in the local belief that the existing building is the actual castle of Robert the Devil. The belief in no way commits us to the details of the local legend. Robert must have had an astonishingly keen sight if he could, from any window of the existing keep, judge of the whiteness of a pair of feet and ankles at the bottom of the rock. Nor does it at all follow that, if the present keep was standing at the time of William's birth, William was therefore born in it. The Duke's mistress would be just as likely to be lodged in some of the other buildings within the circuit of the castle as in the great square tower of defence. And, if we accept the belief, which is now becoming more prevalent, that the present keep is of the twelfth century and not of the eleventh, we are not thereby at all committed to the dogma that, because Robert the Devil lived before 1066, he could not possibly have had a castle of stone. In the wars of the eleventh and twelfth centuries many castles in Normandy were destroyed, not a few of them by William himself after the great revolt which was put down at Val-Ès-dunes. The Norman castle, evidently of the type used after the Conquest, was introduced into England before the Conquest by the foreign favourites of Edward the Confessor. They could have built only in imitation of what they had been used to build in Normandy, and unless the new fashion, with its new name, had been a distinct advance on anything in the way of fortification already known in England, it would not have caused so much amazement as it did. Englishmen were perfectly familiar with stone walls to a town, but the Norman keep was something new, something for which there was no English name, and which therefore retained its French name of "castel." On the whole, the evidence is in favour of the belief that the present castle of Falaise is of the twelfth century. But there is no reason to deny, and there is every reason to believe, that Robert the Devil may have inhabited a castle of essentially the same type in the eleventh century.

Adjoining the keep is the tall round tower of the great Talbot. The two towers suggest exactly opposite remembrances. One sets before us the Norman dominant in England, the other sets before us the Englishman dominant in Normandy. Or the case may be put in another shape. Talbot, like so many of his comrades, was probably of Norman descent. Such returned to the land of their fathers in the character of Englishmen. And yet after all, when the descendants of Rolf's Danes and of the older Saxons of Bayeux assumed the character of Englishmen, they were but casting away the French husk and standing forth once more in the genuine character of their earlier forefathers. Such changes were doubtless quite unconscious; long before the fifteenth century the Norman in England had become thoroughly English, and the Norman in Normandy had become thoroughly French. French indeed in speech and manners he had been for ages, but by the time of Henry the Fifth he had become French in national feeling also. The tower of Talbot was no doubt felt by the people of Falaise to be a badge of bondage. It stands nobly and proudly, overtopping the older keep; its genuine masonry as good as on the day it was built, while the stuff with which its upper part was mended twenty years back has already crumbled away. Within, a few details of purely English character tell their tale in most intelligible language.

The position of the castle is striking beyond measure. It is all the more so because it comes on the traveller who reaches the place in the way in which travellers are now most likely to reach it as a thorough surprise. In the approach by the railway the castle hardly shows at all. We pass through the streets of the town; the eye is caught by the splendid church of St. Gervase, but of the castle we get only the faintest glimpse, nothing at all to suggest the full glory of its position. We pass on by the fine but very inferior church of the Holy Trinity; we contemplate the statue of the local hero; we pass through the castle gate; we pass by a beautiful desecrated chapel of the twelfth century; we feel by the rise of the ground and by the sight of the walks below that we are ascending, but it is not till we are close to the keep itself, till we have reached the very edge of the precipice, that we fully realise there is a precipice at all. At last we are on the brow; we see plainly enough the falaises, the felsen—the honest Teutonic word still surviving, and giving its name to the town itself, and to its distinguishing feature. The castle stands on the very edge of the steep and rugged rock; opposite to it frowns another mass of rocks, not sharp and peaked, but chaotic, like a mass of huge boulders rolled close together. From this point the English cannon played successfully on the ancient keep, which, under the older conditions of warfare, must have been well nigh impregnable. It is from this opposing height that the castle is now best surveyed by the peaceful antiquary. Between the two points tumbles along the same little beck in which the pretty feet are said to have twinkled, and not far off the trade of the damsel's father is still plied, perhaps on the very spot where that unsavoury craft, of old the craft of the demagogue, was so strangely to connect itself with the mightiest of Norman warriors and princes.

What, it may be asked, is the condition of this most interesting monument of an age which has utterly passed away? If there is any building in the world which belongs wholly to the past, towards which the duty of the present is simply to preserve, to guard every stone, to prop if need be, but to disturb nothing, to stay from falling as long as human power can stay it, but to abstain from supplanting one jot or one tittle of the ancient work by the most perfect of modern copies—it is surely the donjon-keep of Falaise. But, like every other building in France, the birthplace of the Conqueror is hopelessly handed over to the demon of restoration. They who have turned all the ancient monuments of France upside down have come to Falaise also. They who were revelling ten years back in the destruction of PÉrigueux, they who are even now fresh from effacing all traces of antiquity from the noble minster of Matilda, they who have thrust their own handiworks even into the gloomy crypt of Odo, have at last stretched forth their hands to smite the cradle of the Conqueror himself. The Imperial architect, M. Ruprich Robert, has surveyed the building, he has drawn up a most clear and intelligent account of its character and history, and, on this showing, the work of destruction has begun. Controversy will soon be at an end; there will be no need to dispute whether any part be of the eleventh or of the twelfth century; both alike are making room for a spruce imitation of the nineteenth. We shall no longer see the dwelling-place either of Robert the Devil or of Henry Fitz-Empress; in its stead we shall trace the last masterpiece of the reign of Napoleon the Third. Sham Romanesque is grotesque everywhere, but it is more grotesque than all when we see newly-cut capitals stuck into the windows of a roofless castle, when the grey hue of age is wiped away from a building which has stood at least seven hundred years, and when the venerable fortress is made to look as spick and span as the last built range of shops at Paris. Among the endless pranks, at once grotesque and lamentable, played by the mania for restoration, surely the "restoration" of this venerable ruin is the most grotesque and lamentable of all. The municipality of Caen have lately made themselves a spectacle to mankind by pulling down, seemingly out of sheer wantonness, one half of one of the most curious churches of their city.[10] We commend them not; but we do not place even them on a level with the subtler destroyers of Falaise. The savages of Caen are satisfied with simple, open destruction; what they cannot understand or appreciate they make away with. But there is no hypocrisy, no pretence about them; they simply destroy, they do not presume to replace. But the restorer not only takes away the work of the men of old, he impudently puts his own work in its stead. He takes away the truth and puts a lie in its place. Our readers know very well with what reservations this doctrine must be taken—reservations which in the case of churches or other buildings actually applied to appropriate modern uses, are very considerable. But in the case of a mere monument of antiquity, a building whose only value is that it has stood so many years, that it exhibits the style of such an age, that it has beheld such and such great events, there is no reservation to be made at all. In the castle of Falaise we may adopt, word for word, the most vehement of Mr. Ruskin's declamations on this head. The man who turns the ancient reality of the twelfth century into a sham of the nineteenth deserves no other fame than the fame which Eratostratus won at Ephesus, and which James Wyatt won in the chapter-house of Durham.