Later ancient Gaul became again divided, so far as the present limits of France are concerned, into four great divisions, of which Neustria, a vast triangle between the mouth of the Escaut, the source of the Seine, and Bretagne, which included the whole of Normandy, was one of the most important.
The Neustri Kingdom (_ne-ost-reich_, the kingdom which is not of the east) was further distinguished from the _Ostrasien_ by manners and customs which were climatically influenced to differ from those of the _ost reich_, which were manifestly Germanic.
In 1789 the Assembly reconstructed the map of France--the great rhomboid of France, as the French school geographies put it--into eighty-three departments, when Normandy was dismembered to form the Departments of Calvados, Orne, Manche, Eure, and the Lower Seine.
DÉPARTEMENTS. PRÉFECTURES. SOUS-PRÉFECTURES.
Lower Seine. Rouen. Havre, Yvetot, Dieppe, Neufchâtel.
Eure. Evreux. Bernay, Pt. Audemer, Louviers, Les Andelys.
Manche. St. Lô. Cherbourg, Valognes, Coutances, Avranches, Mortain.
Orne. Alençon. Domfront, Argentan, Mortagne.
Calvados. Caen. Vire, Bayeux, Falaise, Pont l'Évêque, Lisieux.
Normandy, as a powerful independent state in the middle ages, was greatly helped by its natural advantages.
Its great spread of territory, along the Channel coast between the Bresle and the Couesnon, for a matter of six hundred kilometres, has its shore lined with numerous creeks and valleys and marked by jutting fangs of rock, with here and there a sand-spread shore lying beneath a chalky cliff.
Upper Normandy was the name given to that portion of the province lying to the eastward, and Lower Normandy to that lying to the westward; the dividing line being the Pays d'Auge, lying between the valleys of the Touques and the Dives.
Upper Normandy is a series of plateaus, not unlike Picardy and Artois. The streams run through deep valleys which divide these plateaus into distinct blocks, each with a striking individuality.
To the west is the Pays de Caux, which has for a subdivision a restricted region between the Bresle and Dieppe known as the Petit-Caux.
Dieppe, Havre, and Rouen are the three angles of this elevated plain, which, on its western boundary, is bordered by the Seine, where a great promontory known as the Nez de Tancarville juts out into the river.