Produced by Julia Miller, Greg Bergquist and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by the Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF/Gallica) at http://gallica.bnf.fr) SKETCHES OF TRAVEL IN NORMANDY AND MAINE [Illustration: Decoration] [Illustration: St. Stephens, Caen, E. _Frontispiece_] SKETCHES OF TRAVEL IN NORMANDY AND MAINE BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM DRAWINGS BY THE AUTHOR AND A PREFACE BY W.H. HUTTON, B.D. FELLOW AND TUTOR OF S. JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD London MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1897 _All rights reserved_ RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BUNGAY. EDITOR'S NOTE The first eight and the last four of these sketches appeared in the _Saturday Review_, the others in the _Guardian_. They are here reprinted with a few omissions, but with no other alteration. The permission courteously given to reproduce them is gratefully acknowledged. FLORENCE FREEMAN. PREFACE "Beyond doubt the finished historian must be a traveller: he must see with his own eyes the true look of a wide land; he must see, too, with his eyes the very spots where great events happened; he must mark the lie of a city, and take in, as far as a non-technical eye can, all that is special about a battle-field." So wrote Mr. Freeman in his _Methods of Historical Study_,[1] and he possessed to the full the instincts of the traveller as well as of the historian. His studies and sketches of travels, already published, have shown him a wanderer in many lands and a keen observer of many peoples and their cities. He travelled always as a student of history and of architecture, and probably no man has ever so happily combined the knowledge of both. Though his thoughts were always set upon principles and upon the study of great subjects, he delighted in the details of local history and local building. "I cannot conceive," he wrote, "how either the study of the general sequence of architectural styles or the study of the history of particular buildings can be unworthy of the attention of any man. Besides their deep interest in themselves, such studies are really no small part of history. The way in which any people built, the form taken by their houses, their temples, their fortresses, their public buildings, is a part of their national life fully on a level with their language and their political institutions. And the buildings speak to us of the times to which they belong in a more living and, as it were, personal way than monuments or documents of almost any other kind."[2] And no less clearly and decisively did he write of the value of local history: "There is no district, no town, no parish, whose history is not worth working out in detail, if only it be borne in mind that the local work is a contribution to a greater work."[3]