Page:The Normans in European History.djvu/201

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NORMAN LIFE AND CULTURE
187

goldsmiths, and workers in glass. Nearly forty years later, when the church had been damaged by earthquake and tempest, he brought a plumber from England to restore the leaden roof and the fallen stones of the towers and to replace the gilded cock which crowned the whole; and when he saw the cock once more glistening at the summit, he gave thanks to God and shortly passed away, pronouncing eternal maledictions upon those who should injure his church. Of this famous structure nothing now remains above the ground, for the noble towers which look from the hill of Coutances toward the western sea are Gothic, like the rest of the church; and for surviving monuments of cathedrals of the eleventh and twelfth centuries we must go to the naves of Bayeux and Évreux and the St. Romain's tower of Rouen. Even here the impression will be fragmentary, broken by Gothic choirs and by towers and spires of a still later age, just as the simple lines of the early church of Mont-Saint-Michel are swallowed up in the ornate Gothic of the loftier parts of the great pile. Edifices wholly of the Romanesque period must be sought in the parish churches in which Normandy is so rich, or in the larger abbey-churches which meet us at Lessay, Cerisy, Caen, Jumièges, and Bocherville. Jumièges, though in ruins, preserves the full outline of the style of the middle of the eleventh century; Caen presents in the Abbaye aux Hommes and the Abbaye aux Dames two perfect though contrasted types of a few years