The Written World: Past and Place in the Work of Orderic Vitalis

Ouche: The History of a Place

C H A P T E R 1 Ouche The History of a Place Normandy’s characteristic rolling hills grow more pronounced in the Pays d’Ouche. The peaks there are more panoramic, the valleys more thoroughly folded away. Set along the border where in the eleventh and twelfth centuries the duchy of Normandy collided, often violently, with the county of Maine, the forested Ouche boasts the area’s highest elevations, some 300 meters above sea-level, and a network of rivers flow down from its heights. Past Gacé to the west and south beyond Mortagne the Ouche’s hills slide towards the plains of the Argentan and the Perche where the region’s largest rivers, the Orne and the Sarthe, provided the peasants with the only decent agricultural land around. Here in the first centuries of Norman sway, scattered vineyards struggled to produce a palatable wine and apple orchards provided the barely-drinkable genesis of Normandy’s famous cidre. Vital cereals paved the land with shimmering drifts of verdigris in the spring and, if prayers were answered, with rich gold at the harvest, while underneath the Ouche’s tangled forests veins of iron ore were just beginning to surface.1 L ’Aigle was in the twelfth century, as it is still today, the region’s largest town. Standing on the Risle roughly eighty-seven kilometers southeast of Caen, eightythree southwest of Rouen, and seventy-two northwest of Chartres, the hilltop castle provided its lords with a masterful view of their lands and those of their numerous noble neighbors. For L ’Aigle was by no means the Ouche’s only castle. By 1135 the fortifications at L ’Aigle, Bonsmoulins, Moulins-la-Marche, Échauffour, Gacé, Le Sap, 1 Anceins, Pont-Échanfray, Montreuil l’Argillé, and Glos-la-Ferrière dominated the landscape, and a bit further afield the castle at Exmes anchored the pagus of the Hiémois for its lords the Montgomerys, and that at Breteuil the lordship of William fitzOsbern and his kin.2 Tucked away in the Charentonne valley a little more than twelve kilometers west-northwest of L ’Aigle, on the way to Gacé, was the Benedictine abbey of Ouche. This abbey—which Orderic Vitalis entered as a ten-year-old oblate in 1085, thirty-five years after its foundation— took its name from the marcher region of Ouche where in 1050 two linked noble families, the Giroie and Grandmesnil, adopted for their own Benedictine foundation the place and patronage of the Merovingian confessor St. Evroul, who had established a monastic community on that very spot some four hundred years before. The Norman monastery of Ouche stood in the fee of Bocquencé, which one of the abbey’s founding families had held from the Norman dukes before Ouche’s abbot purchased it in 1050.3 But the monks needed only to look east to the Charentonne’s opposite bank to see the lands held by the barons of La Ferté-Frênel from the powerful lords of Breteuil. By 1136 the town that had grown up around the abbey’s walls included at least eighty-four houses—for that was how many, Orderic noted with exquisite precision, were burned to the ground when the men of L ’Aigle sacked the town in that year.4 The abbey of Ouche dangled at the southeastern tip of the diocese of Lisieux in a region where three influential Norman bishoprics—Lisieux, Sées, and Évreux—met up not far from the French see of Chartres and the Manceau diocese of Le Mans. Ouche was actually much nearer to the episcopal city of Sées, which lay some thirty-one kilometers southwest of the abbey, than it was to Lisieux, a forty-three kilometer trip almost due north, and the monastery’s lands straddled the Charentonne, which, Orderic noted, “divides the diocese of Lisieux from that of Évreux ,” as well as separating the fee of Bocquencé from that of Le FertéFr ênel.5 Orderic attributed this peculiarity of diocesan geography to a choice made by the Breton Giroie, the paterfamilias of Ouche’s founding family, when he first acquired the lands of the Norman knight Heugon.6 Arriving in the Ouche around 1015, Giroie, Orderic reported, “asked the inhabitants of that land under whose episcopal authority they were.” 2 The Written World Imagine his surprise when his new tenants “declared themselves to be in no one’s diocese...