The religious history of the town is most profound, and as a place celebrated in warfare St. Lô ranks among the most important in Lower Normandy. The Catholics captured the town in 1574, after the Calvinists had been its masters for a dozen years, and massacred three thousand of its inhabitants.
During the Revolution St. Lô was called the "Rock of Liberty."
The very beautiful Church of Notre Dame, the _ci-devant_ cathedral, is admirably placed on the edge of the table-land overlooking the valley of the Vire. Before it became a cathedral it was an ancient collegiate church, but this fine Gothic edifice as seen to-day dates only from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.
Its towers quite rival, and are reminiscent of, those of either Chartres, Séez, or Senlis, and are far more beautiful and imposing than those of any church of its rank in all Normandy.
There is also a fifteenth-century open-air pulpit, almost a unique attribute of a great French church, which is artistically charming. From it were, and still are, read publicly the acts of episcopal jurisdiction.
In the Rue Poids-de-Ville, at No. 4, is the fifteenth-century Maison Dieu, a fine stone structure richly ornamented with stone sculptures.
On the square before the cathedral one notes a charming statue of a water-carrier, depicting the local custom which has not yet died out here. To-day even one may see these sturdy Cotentin maidens carrying their picturesque water-jugs in exactly the same pose as depicted in the statue itself.
From St. Lô to Coutances is thirty kilometres by road. The city is an ancient bishopric, and its great cathedral is one of the most imposing and celebrated of those of the second rank in all France.
Anciently known as Cosedia, the city became in time known as Constantia, after, it is believed, Constance Chlore, who fortified it and made of it a stronghold long before the end of the Roman occupation of Gaul.
The city was taken and retaken in the course of the wars which continued during the lives of the sons of Norman William, in the Hundred Years' War, and in the other religious wars.
During the massacres of St. Bartholomew it was saved through the moderation of its governor, the Count of Matignon.