[Illustration: DOORWAY OF CATHEDRAL, CHARTRES.]
So there were two great forces at work in Normandy: this military spirit, the love of excitement, of activity, and adventure; and this strong religious feeling, which often made the other its willing servant, and was sometimes by far the most powerful of the two. Whether superstition or true, devout acceptance and unfolding of the ideas of the Christian religion moved the Normans and their contemporaries to most active service of the Church, we will not stop to discuss. The presence of the best scholars and saints in any age is a leaven and inspiration of that age, and men cannot help being more or less [Pg217] influenced by the dwelling among them of Christ's true disciples and ministers. That there was a large amount of credulity, of superstitious rites and observances, we cannot doubt, neither can we question that these exercised an amazing control over ignorant minds. Standing so near to a pagan ancestry, the people of large, and, relatively speaking, remote districts of Normandy, were no doubt confused by lingering vestiges of the older forms of belief. As yet, religion, in spite of the creeds of [Pg218] knighthood, showed itself more plainly in stone and mortar, in vestments, and fasts, and penances, and munificent endowments, than in simple truth and godliness of life. A Norman nobleman, in the time of the Conqueror, or earlier, thought that his estate would lack its chief ornament if he did not plant a company of monks in some corner of it. It was the proper thing for a rich man to found a monastery or religious house of some sort or other, and this was a most blessed thing for the scholars of their time. The profession of letters was already becoming dignified and respectable, and the students of the Venerable Bede, and other noble teachers from both north and south, had already scattered good seeds through the states of Europe. It was in this time that many great schools were founded, and in the more peaceful years of the early reign of the Conqueror, religion and learning found time to strike a deeper root in Normandy than ever before. There was more wealth for them to be nourished with, the farms were productive, and the great centres of industry and manufacture, like Falaise, were thriving famously. It was almost as respectable to be a monk as to be a soldier. There is something very beautiful in these earlier brotherhoods—a purer fashion of thought and of life, a simplicity of devotion to the higher duties of existence. But we can watch here, as in the later movements in England and Italy, a gradual change from poverty and holiness of life, to a love of riches and a satisfaction with corrupt ceremonies and petty authority. The snare of worldliness finds its victims always, and the temptation was easy then, [Pg219] as it is easy now, to forget the things that belong to the spirit. We have seen so much of the sword and shield in this short history that we turn gladly away for a little space to understand what influences were coming from the great abbeys of Bec and Saint Evreuil, and to make what acquaintance we can with the men who dwelt there, and held for their weapons only their mass-books and their principles of education and of holy living. Lanfranc we must surely know, for he was called the right-hand man of the Conqueror; and now let us go back a little way and take a quick survey of the founding of the Abbey of Bec, and trace its history, for that will help us to understand the monastic life, and the wave of monasticism that left so plain a mark upon the headlands and valleys of Normandy. Both in England and Norman France, you can find the same red-roofed villages clustered about high square church towers, with windows in the gray stone walls that look like dim fret-work or lace-work. The oldest houses are low and small, but the oldest minsters and parish churches are very noble buildings.