NORMAN ECCLESIASTICAL ARCHITECTURE.

MR. URBAN,-During last autumn I made a tour in Normandy for the purpose of investigating some of its architectural antiquities. In the neighbour hood of Caen and Rouen, where I resided a few weeks, I took notes of the most interesting churches, and as such subjects are peculiarly adapted to your valuable Repertory, I herewith send you an account of one of them, not noticed except incidentally in Mr. Cotman's excellent work.

The curious and critical investigator of the architecture of our more ancient English edifices meets occasionally with a peculiar style of building, which on account of its form is not unaptly called by masons Herring-bone work, and, from the similarity of its arrangement to the grains in an ear of corn, sometimes more classically termed "spicata testacea."

This kind of angular masonry is rare in England, where it occurs only in a few courses alternating with horizontal masonry, as in Lincoln City walls, Castleton, Colchester and Guildford Castles, the round tower of Bungay Church, and the walls of Cambridge Castle. Mr. Essex says, "the age of this sort of masonry is not easily ascertained." It has been attributed to that of the Romans and the Saxons. Morant states, that "the easternmost wall of Colchester Castle is built in the Roman, i. e. the herring-bone fashion." Others call it Roman, for no better reason than because they sometimes find it forming part of edifices, which, from their containing Roman bricks, have been supposed to be of Roman origin. It is probable, however, that all such buildings were erected by the Saxons, with the old materials of the Roman stations to which many of their towns succeeded.

I do not recollect ever to have witnessed any specimen of herring-bone masonry among the Roman ruins of old Rome itself. In the "opus reticulatum," which is there so common, the stones are rectangular, equilateral, of equal size, with polished surfaces, and are placed lozengy, that is, at angles of 45o, and only used as a facing to walls commonly backed by uncoursed rubble. The angular work which we sometimes find in old chimneys, and the clinker pavement of stables, are always at right angles, whereas, the stones of genuine herring-bone masonry are long rough parallelograms, and are laid upon their edges at acute angles with the horizon. Generally, I believe, this angular position of the stones is continued throughout the whole thickness of the walls, and without any transverse bonding, except at their openings and angles; but in the herring-bone masonry of England, where it is always intermingled with other kinds of masonry, it may be only an occasional facing.

I am therefore of opinion that to the Saxons, or to the Normans, who were aboriginally the same people as the Saxons, rather than to the Romans, should be assigned the introduction of this style. Several of the English examples of it above-mentioned were, no doubt, erected since the Norman conquest; but from the following circumstances, we may conclude that one of them, the castle of the Peak in Derbyshire, was constructed antecedent even to the preaching of Christianity in that wild part. It was granted to William Peverel, by his reputed father William the Conqueror, on their hostile arrival in this country; and tradition says, that it was once a royal Saxon palace, and that when taken possession of by Peverel, he found it to contain a small chamber, which had evidently been a Saxon idol chapel, but had its door blocked up in order to prevent contamination from the entering such an unhallowed place.

If the Saxons introduced herring-bone masonry here, they also carried it into those parts of Neustria, or ancient Normandy, so often subjected to their irruptions during the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, and thence denominated "Littus Saxonicum," previous to their final settlement in the district once occupied, as Ptolemy asserts, by the Unelli, which laid between the rivers Dive and Orne, and from these pirates likewise called Otlingua Saxonia, by which name it is mentioned in an ordinance of Charles the Bald in the middle of the ninth century.

I have been led to these preliminary observations from visiting last autumn

some of the obscure village churches in the neighbourhood of Caen, in many of which herring-bone masonry may be seen, pure and unmixed with other methods of construction, and constituting their entire walls. From among these the subject which I have selected, and shall now proceed to describe, as briefly, but I hope intelligibly, as possible, is the church of Mathieu, which is not only interesting as a specimen of herring-bone work, but also affords examples of an elliptical arch and a primitive font, and moreover has not been noticed, except incidentally, in the very accurate and faithful work of Messrs. Cotman and Dawson Turner, on the Antiquities of Normandy.

Mathieu is a small village in the canton of Douvres, about two leagues north from Caen. It was named in early charters Mathomum; at the end of the thirteenth century Matho and Matheon, in the fourteenth Mathieum, but not till the fifteenth Mathieu. In a register of 1316, it is called Machoen and Machyeu. In 1222, Richard de Mathan, who was Lord of Beuville, the adjoining parish, as well as of Than, not far distant, gave the patronage of Mathieu to the Bishopric of Bayeux. It is probable, therefore, that Mathan was also an ancient name of Mathieu, and that the present Marquis of Mathan, one of the peers of France, and chief of the municipal council of Caen, inherits his title from this little village.

Its

Like most edifices of the eleventh century, the latest assignable date of its foundation, Mathieu church is, in its plan, extremely simple, consisting merely of a nave and chancel, without either ailes, transepts, porch, or tower. herring-bone work exists only in the side walls; the east end being flat, and therefore probably more recent than the sides, and of large squared stones, as is also the present west end, which is evidently modern. The chancel is, as usual, somewhat narrower than the nave, but they are of equal height. The nave is shorter than it originally was, as appears from a ruined portion of its south wall, yet remaining, which is of herring-bone work, and clearly shows us that in Normandy this style was used not only for a facing, but also, as before observed, throughout the whole substance of the very thick walls, so common in the times when it was prevalent. The materials are rag sand-stones, eight inches long and three in width, and a coarse hard mortar cementing them together, probably made with sea-sand from the neighbouring coast, and constituting about one-sixth part of the aggregate bulk of the walls. Their but tresses, however, their quoins, and the dressings of their various openings, were formed of small roughly squared stones, as also their scaffold holes. These, no doubt, were left unclosed, lest, at any future reparations of the structure which time might render necessary, its solidity should be impaired by breaking in new holes: so little did the architects of those days contemplate the pseudo-restorations, the tasteless improvements, the wanton and avaricious destructions, and useless, jobbing, re-edifications of the present.

The north wall is divided into four compartments, (originally there were five, two belonging to the chancel, and three to the nave) by broad, flat, pilasterlike double buttresses, of which the undermost and broadest are peculiar in having small slope-topped pilasters attached against and dying into their own proper east and west sides or returns. These under-buttresses terminate in a parapet supported by a corbel tablet of heads of men and inferior animals, the outer buttresses being continued over the face of this parapet to dripping eaves which run over a chamfered moulding with the hatched ornament. These are the only horizontal tablets or string courses of the edifice.

Some of the windows, of which there was one in the upper part of each compartment, have been enlarged. The originals are about five feet high by two in width, and their glazing (diagonal) is nearly flush with the exterior face of the wall. They have plain sloped sides widening considerably inwards, plain semicircular heads, and semicircular drip-stones formed of two small fillets over a billet moulding. In the western compartments of the chancel is a small door-way recently blocked up, plain sided and semicircular headed under a semicircular drip-stone, consisting of a fillet and small chevron moulding, but, although this door-way is of ancient form and members, it appears to have been an old innovation.

The east end is flat, with gabled top, of horizontal masonry, and bearing the

remaining mouldings of a large pointed window of two lights; it is probably of modern date, but if ever of herring-bone masonry, like the side walls, may be doubted, as I am not aware that this style was adopted in curvilinear constructions.

The south wall is similar to that of the north, as to its buttresses and parapet, and is also of herring-bone masonry, except its upper part and eastern extremity, which are probably of the same date as the east end. Its chancel windows have moulded sides, with pointed heads and drip-stones. The chancel had also a small door-way nearly opposite to that on the north side. It had a cusped cinque-foiled head under a straight-sided or gable-formed drip-stone, with a kind of toothed moulding, and each spandrel had a well-executed plain quatre-foil; from which ornament this doorway might also be suspected, like the northern one, to be comparatively modern, had we not seen at Caen, the quatre foil profusely employed in buildings undoubtedly erected in the twelfth century. The west end, as I have before said, is certainly of recent date. It is gabled, and has no feature but a central door-way in the Romanized style, between two plain buttresses of three stages. Formerly, however, the west end was the length of one compartment, that is one-fifth part of the whole length of the ancient fabric, further westward than it is at present, as proved by the remains of the south wall, which is an instructive specimen of the mode of building we have above so fully spoken of. Near the western termination of this ruined portion was an original semicircular arched door-way, and almost above it, a semicircular-headed window case, of which one jamb has the shaft of a column still attached to it.

The roof is ridged, and formed of flat tiles.

The interior of the church of Mathieu, which is dedicated to St. John, is as devoid of ornament as its exterior. The floor of the chancel is one step higher than that of the nave, and both are irregularly paved with large flag-stones, but which have no memorials. The walls are plastered, and also quite plain. The chancel arch is, however, very interesting on account of its deviation from the usual semicircular form of the arches of this building and others of the same date. It is elliptical. Its soffit or intrados is narrow and plain, but the arch-stones are embellished with a row of intagliated or ingraved intersecting chevrons, between two rows of a kind of relieved quatre-foils set diagonally in a small sunk square. This arch is very wide, and springs from plain imposts on the rectangular ends of short massive transverse walls, which divide the chancel from the nave, but it seems from two square piers which occupy the angle formed by the partition and the chancel walls, that they formerly had springing from them another transverse arch, so that the chancel arch was double, or of two recesses. The door-ways on the north and south side of the chancel, of which the northern one, semicircular-headed, is blocked up only exteriorly, are interiorly quite plain. The ancient window cases are of two recesses, of which the outer is slope-sided, the inner having in its corners attached columns, some of whose capitals are enriched by angular volutes and figures of animals, the edge of the abacus having small interlaced chevrons and billet mouldings, but their archivolts are plain. The more modern window cases I shall not describe.

The ceiling is of wooden planks, laid longitudinally upon slender transverse beams. It is coved, being lowly concave round the margin, and flat in the middle, but, although black and much decayed, is probably no older than the west end.

Not so, however, is the Font, which has every appearance of being coeval with the most ancient parts of the edifice. This font is monolith, of a hard reddish sandstone, rudely polished, and stands on the floor, near the west end of the church. It is cylindrical, quite plain, except two torus mouldings near its rim, and a few irregularly placed holes, the work, perhaps, of wanton children. It is about three feet high. Its cavity is straight-sided, flat-bottomed; and, being about two feet and a half wide, it is sufficiently capacious for the immersion of the body of a young child. A flat wooden cover, with an iron bar and padlock, secure its sanctified contents from unhallowed pollution.