While some features, especially the unity of choir aisles and chapels, are reminiscent
of French Gothic cathedrals, such as Bourges, many elements reflect traditions of
Norman architecture. Both the interior and exterior display ample linear detailing as seen
on the two-tower west façade. The dominant octagonal crossing tower is outstanding in
both its construction on pendentives and its interior and exterior articulation.
Fifteen 13th-century stained-glass windows are preserved in the transept, ambulatory,
and upper choir, including representations of SS. Thomas of Canterbury, George, and
Blaise, as well as the Last Judgment in the south transept. Sculpture from the west façade
was destroyed during the Revolution, but the tympana of the north and south transept
porches have early 13th-century sculpture of the Virgin with Angels and the Apocalyptic
Christ.
Karen Gould
Colmet-Daage, Patrice. La cathédrale de Coutances. Paris: Laurens, 1933.
Musset, André. “La cathédrale Notre-Dame de Coutances.” Congrèsarchéologique(Cotentin et
Avranchin) 124(1966): 57–69.
COUTUMES
. When rural lords, lay and ecclesiastical, levied exactions on the rest of the population
without clear legal authority, they justified them as being “customary.” These customary
dues, or coutumes (Lat. consuetudines), ranged from payments in money or in kind, such
as tolls (giving the modern English “customs”), taxes, and fines, to services, such as
demesne work or road and fortification building. In many cases, these represented forms
of payment for protection and were disputed in principle by neither side. But at the
beginning of the 11th century, the terms malae or novae consuetudines appear with
increasing regularity, designating the exactions demanded by a more aggressive
aristocracy, especially the new castellan class.
Among the burdens placed on the population, and often levied without discrimination
on free and servile peasants, perhaps the most significant were rights of justice, a
development associated with the collapse of the pagus, the basic unit of the Carolingian
judicial system. These seigneurial rights, which derived from the acquisition of the royal
ban (power to command) by the more powerful lords, characterized the French rural
world from the 11th century on; and only their conversion into monetary payments
eroded by inflation alleviated this burden. Officially, these “feudal rights” were abolished
only by the revolutionary decrees of August 4, 1789.
Coutumes may also refer to the local practices established in individual monasteries as
additions to or variations from a rule, such as the Rule of St. Benedict.
Richard Landes
[See also: SEIGNEUR/SEIGNEURIE]
Duby, Georges. The Early Growth of the European Economy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1974.
——. Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, trans. Cynthia Postan. Columbia:
South Carolina University Press, 1968.
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