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Updated: May 20, 2025
Anyhow Verneuil is not a little proud of the fact, and marks its thankfulness by a great number of rather foolish inscriptions. The tower is proclaimed to be the work of Henry I., our Henry of Tinchebray, not the developed rebuilder of Tillières; but this seems out of the question, as the small doorways we cannot guarantee the windows have pointed arches, which seem to be original.
We walk up from the station, and we find Tinchebray itself a somewhat larger town than we had looked for, though still but small. It strikes us almost at once that it is a town of the same class as Carlisle, Stirling, and Edinburgh, where a single long street, with more or less of slope, leads up to a castle at one end.
There is a glimpse to be taken of the famous valley of Vire, and we go back to the station to betake us to Flers. It is not altogether for the sake of its own merits that we go to Flers, but because we have ruled that it is on the whole the best place from whence to make the journey to Tinchebray. Flers, we imagine, is as old as other places; but there seems to be nothing to say about it.
For the fight of Tinchebray really was a battle, one of the very few pitched battles of the age. The campaign indeed began in an attack on the fortress; but it grew into something more on both sides.
We then go forth to make out what we can of the site, knowing perfectly well that we shall not find a castle standing up as at Falaise. The railway takes us from Flers to Montsecret junction, and from Montsecret junction to Tinchebray station.
And if Eadgar thought at all, he may have seen a rival in Henry, while he assuredly could not have seen one in Robert. Anyhow the Ætheling who had marched on York with Waltheof and Mærleswegen now marched on Tinchebray with William of Mortain and Robert of Bellême.
One great object in the parts of Mortain is to see the historic site of Tinchebray, so closely connected with Mortain in its history, though the two places are, and seem always to have been, in different divisions, ecclesiastical and civil. We debate whether Tinchebray can be best got at from Mortain, Vire, or Flers.
The crowned King had no need to fear the momentary King-elect of forty years before. We only wish to know whether he did himself live to so preternatural an age as to be a pensioner of Henry II., or whether he who bears his name in the accounts of that reign is a son of whom history has no tale to tell. We go back from Tinchebray to Flers. Next day the main line takes us to Argentan.
Here then, we feel fairly satisfied, it was that William Patry written, it seems, in Latin Patricius welcomed as a peaceful guest the Earl whom in after-days he was to meet in arms as King on the day of the great battle. But Tinchebray is much more than La Lande-Patry, and the site is much more certain.
This is the church of nuns known as l'Abbaye Blanche, a foundation of Count William of Mortain in 1105. As the next year he was taken at Tinchebray and kept in prison for the rest of his days, he was not likely to do much in the way of building. The church described long ago by Gally Knight and De Caumont is palpably later than his day.
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