Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

debates and disputes that had begun at home, engaging with the emerging antiquarian network in
France and drawing in their wake considerable numbers of tourists. Among the most important
authors were Turner and Britton, whose approaches were contrasting but complementary. Before
discussing them, however, it is important to consider what Normandy meant to the English and
indeed to the Normans in the early nineteenth century.
This was, in one sense, another antiquarian rescue project amid the ruins of the
Revolution for, legally, Normandy no longer existed. As an official entity it had been dissolved
in 1790 to be replaced by five departments. 82 The French and English antiquaries of the post-war
period were to give it ‘une identité retrospective’ [a retrospective identity], weaving back
together what time and war had torn apart and creating, once again a narrative as well as a
documentary account. 83 The story was one of shared history and rivalries too ancient to be
painful. As far as architecture was concerned Dawson Turner’s future son-in-law, Francis Cohen
Palgrave( 1788-1861), reviewing his prospective father-in-law’s A Tour in Normandy,
(anonymously), in the Quarterly Review in 1821, wrote that: ‘It is in Normandy, that the first
pages of the architectural annals of this island must be read.’ 84 This was at one level a simple
truth for, in the decade since Milner’s Treatise on Ecclesiastical Architecture, it had become
increasingly apparent that most of the British buildings antiquaries had described as ‘Saxon’
dated in fact from after the Conquest. Beyond and beneath Palgrave’s statement of historical fact,
however, lay the patriotic view of the Normans, that they were, in all important senses, British.
Palgrave could state playfully enough as an antiquary that:
[Normandy is] the most important of our transmarine provinces. The French King must not be offended…My Lord
Coke 85 has given an opinion, in his fourth Institute, that the King of England has not lost his legal right of entry on
the Duchy of Normandy… this, perhaps, is a state-affair, and … we do not choose to meddle …but it is quite certain
that in Normandy an Englishman feels himself as much within the pale of English history as if he were in
Yorkshire. 86
82
Seine inferieure, l’Eure, Calvados, Manche and l’Orne.
83
Laspougeas, ‘La Normandie au Temps d’Arcisse de Caumont’, p.11.
84
‘Normandy –Architecture of the Middle Ages’, Quarterly Review 25 (April 1821), pp.112-147, p.117.
85
Sir Edward Coke (1552-1634) The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England concerning the
jurisdiction of courts, London, 1648.
86
‘Normandy –Architecture of the Middle Ages’, Quarterly Review 25 (April 1821), pp.112-147, p.113. Unsigned
article identified in Shine and Shine, The Quarterly Review under Gifford, p.268.
126