een swept away is not so instructive as a fortified site from which the
fortifications are gone. We should be best pleased to find at
Saint-Evroul a church in which Orderic may have worshipped, but it would
be better to find a later church--we had almost said one with
discontinuous imposts to its pillars--rather than no church at all. We
set forth in faith, not knowing what we are to find, but determined that
we will at least see the place where the Ecclesiastical History of
Normandy was written. One little incident of the journey may be
mentioned. We reached Saint-Evroul; we saw more of Saint-Evroul's Abbey
than we had ventured to hope that we should find there. But before we
reached it our driver stopped near a house and buildings which seemed in
no way attractive. Asked why he stopped there, he said that was where
the landlady at Laigle had told him to stop. There were the great
glass-works for which Saint-Evroul is now best known. And it was the
Saint-Evroul of the glass-work that we were thought to have set forth to
see, not the Saint-Evroul of Orderic or of Saint Evroul himself.

Orderic, son of a French father and an English mother, born by the
banks of the Severn ten years after King William came into England, in
the year of the martyrdom of Waltheof, was before all things Orderic the
Englishman. If we are to take his words literally, English must have
been the only language of his childhood. He was sent in his childhood to
be a monk of Saint-Evroul;[56] one wonders why, as his father might
surely have found him a cell either in the Orleans of his birth or the
Shrewsbury of his adoption. Himself more truly the founder of Shrewsbury
Abbey than his patron, Earl Roger, Odelerius of Ettingsham, the married
priest, preferred Saint-Evroul to any other house of religion as the
home of his son. The Abbey had lately been set up again, after a time of
decay, by the bounty of several members of the houses of Geroy and
Grantmesnil, one of whom, Abbot Robert, who plays also a part in
Calabria and Sicily, was at least as turbulent as bountiful. But nothing
would have more deeply grieved the monastic soul of Orderic than the
thought that any one could think more of him than of the local saint and
first founder. "Father Evroul," "Pater Ebrulfus," the man of the world
who turned hermit in the days of Chlotocher, and around whose cell the
monastery first grew up, lived in the devout memory of his spiritual
children. One asks wheth