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This spot is Ambrières, a town of the smallest class, hardly rising above a village, but which holds an important place in the wars of William and Geoffrey. There William built a castle, and the shattered piece of wall which overhangs the road running on the right bank of the Varenne may well be a part of his building.
Imbedded in later additions, we still find the choir, transepts, and lantern of a comparatively small Romanesque church, perhaps hardly on a level with Ambrières, but its nave has given way to a vast Angevin nave as wide as the transepts of the original building, and itself furnished with transepts to the west of them.
Maine was far off from the land of the Saracen, and the pointed arch would here be a sign that later forms were not far off. From Ambrières either the railway or, if the traveller likes it better, a road leading up and down over a series of low hills, will take him to another scene of William's victories at Mayenne.
He now annexed Cenomannian that is just now Angevin territory at more points than one, but chiefly on the line of his earlier advances to Domfront and Ambrieres. Ambrieres had perhaps been lost; for William now sent Geoffrey a challenge to come on the fortieth day. He came on the fortieth day, and found Ambrieres strongly fortified and occupied by a Norman garrison.
The original work is nearly untouched, except that the barbarism of modern times has removed about half the nave. After Domfront had submitted to William and had become permanently incorporated with Normandy, he himself founded the fortress of Ambrières, as a border stronghold. A fragment of the castle still overlooks the lower course of the Varenne, but the ground is no longer Norman.
It tells us in what direction we are travelling; its aisleless nave, though it would be narrow in Anjou, would be wide in England or Normandy; and there is another feature which looks as if the men of Ambrières had got on almost too fast in their tendencies towards a southern type of architecture.
A large cruciform building of nearly untouched and rather early Romanesque, it is thoroughly in harmony with the memories of the place. But the church of Ambrières is more than this.
William had thus won back his own rebellious town, and had enlarged his borders by his first conquest. He went farther south, and fortified another castle at Ambrieres; but Ambrieres was only a temporary conquest. Domfront has ever since been counted as part of Normandy.
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