SKETCHES OF TRAVEL
IN
NORMANDY AND MAINE
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 theSaturday Review, the others in the Guardian. They are here reprintedwith a few omissions, but with no other alteration. The permissioncourteously given to reproduce them is gratefully acknowledged.
FLORENCE FREEMAN.
PREFACE
"Beyond doubt the finished historian must be a traveller: he must seewith his own eyes the true look of a wide land; he must see, too, withhis eyes the very spots where great events happened; he must mark thelie of a city, and take in, as far as a non-technical eye can, all thatis special about a battle-field."
So wrote Mr. Freeman in his Methods of Historical Study,[1] and hepossessed to the full the instincts of the traveller as well as of thehistorian. His studies and sketches of travels, already published, haveshown him a wanderer in many lands and a keen observer of many peoplesand their cities. He travelled always as a student of history and ofarchitecture, and probably no man has ever so happily combined theknowledge of both. Though his thoughts were always set upon principlesand upon the study of great subjects, he delighted in the details oflocal history and local building. "I cannot conceive," he wrote, "howeither the study of the general sequence of architectural styles or thestudy of the history of particular buildings can be unworthy of theattention of any man. Besides their deep interest in themselves, suchstudies are really no small part of history. The way in which any peoplebuilt, the form taken by their houses, their temples, their fortresses,their public buildings, is a part of their national life fully on alevel with their language and their political institutions. And thebuildings speak to us of the times to which they belong in a more livingand, as it were, personal way than monuments or documents of almost anyother kind."[2]
And no less clearly and decisively did he write of the value of localhistory: "There is no district, no town, no