The interior of the church at Dives has been restored, repaired, and
whitewashed; but neither time nor whitewash can conceal the lovely
proportions of the building; the pillars and aisles, and the carving
over the doorways which the twelfth-century mason fashioned so tenderly
have little left of his most delicate workmanship; half of the stained
glass in the chancel windows has been destroyed, and the pinnacles on
the roof have been broken down by rude hands. Nevertheless it is a
church worth going far to see; and it will have exceptional interest for
those who believe that their ancestors 'came over with the Conqueror,'
for on the western wall there is a list of the names of the principal
persons who were known to have accompanied him. Some of these names are
very familiar to English ears, such as PERCY, TALBOT, VERNON, LOVEL,
GIFFARD, BREWER, PIGOT, CARTERET, CRESPEN, &c.; and there are at
least a hundred others, all in legible characters, which any visitor may
decipher for himself. There is a small grass-grown church-yard
surrounded by a low wall, but the tablets are of comparatively modern
date.
If, before leaving Dives, we take a walk up the hill on the east side of
the town, and look down upon the broad valley, with the river Dives
winding southwards through a rich pasture land, flanked with thickly
wooded hills--and beyond it the river Orne, leading to Caen--we shall
see at once what a favourable and convenient spot this must have been
for the collecting together of an army of fifty thousand men, for the
construction of vessels, and for the embarkation of troops and horses,
and the _materiel_ of war; and, if we continue our walk, through one or
two cornfields in the direction of Beuzeval, we shall find, on a
promontory facing the sea, and overlooking the mouth of the river, a not
very ornamental, round stone pillar placed here by the Archaeological
Society of France in 1861; 'AU SOUVENIR DU PLUS GRAND EVENEMENT
HISTORIQUE DES ANNALES NORMANDES--LE DEPART DU DUC GUILLAUME LE BATARD
POUR LA CONQUETE DE L'ANGLETERRE EN 1066;' and, if the reader
should be as fortunate as we were in 1869, he might find a french
gentleman _standing upon the top of this column_, and (forgetting
probably that Normandy was not _always_ part of France) blowing a blast
of triumph seaward, from a cracked french horn.
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