Valognes

It is a country of green fields and orchards and sunken lanes, of dank parks and mouldering châteaux, of deserted mills and ancient parish churches, of quaint timbered houses and long village streets, of silent streams, small ports and pebbly beaches, the whole merging ultimately in the neighbouring lands of Brittany and Maine.

Its typical places are Falaise, Vire and Argentan, with their ancient castles of the Norman dukes, Bayeux and Coutances, the foundations of whose soaring cathedrals carry us back to the princely prelates of the conquest, provincial capitals of the old regime like Valognes or the new like Saint-Lô, and best of all the crowning glories of the marvel of Mont Saint-Michel.

Its chief town is Caen, stern and grey, the heart of Normandy, as Rouen is its head.

An old poet tells us no ancient Roman capital but the creation of the medieval dukes, who reared its great abbey churches to commemorate the marriage and the piety of William the Conqueror and Matilda, and who established their exchequer in its castle.

The Norman vassals, always turbulent and rebellious, seem to have broken forth anew upon the death of Robert the Magnificent, and such accounts as have reached us of the events of the next twelve years reveal a constant state of anarchy and disorder.

The revolt of the barons came to a head in 1047, when the whole of Lower Normandy rose under the leadership of the two chief vicomtes of the region, Ranulph of Bayeux and Nael of Saint-Sauveur, the ruins of whose family castle of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte still greet the traveler who leaves Cherbourg for Paris.

William, who was hunting in the neighborhood of Valognes, was obliged to flee half-clad in the night and to pick his way alone by devious paths across the enemy's country to his castle of Falaise.

With the assistance of the French king, he was able to collect an army from Upper Normandy and meet the rebels on the great plain of Val-des-Dunes near Caen, where the Montjoie of the French and the Dex-Aie of the duke's followers answered the barons' appeals to their local saints of Saint-Sauveur, Saint-Sever, and Saint-Amant.