William the Conqueror’s Invincible Thigh

I woke up on a boat this morning. That happened. Originally I was inclined to arrive later today and save on the expense of booking a cabin on the overnight ferry, but how often do you get to sleep on a boat? I’m glad I did – the long faces on most of the other foot passengers spoke volumes of a long, sleepless night on deck. I just caught the sunrise as I went up on deck, by which point we had almost arrived. No dolphins or whales on this journey – maybe next time!

Attention, mes amis! The ferry serves Caen, but it docks in at Ouistreham, a small village some 17km north of Caen. The shuttle bus into Caen was a little deceptive, since despite saying CAEN in block capitals it only went as far as passport control. The real bus stop for Caen (Ouistreham Port) is a few minutes’ walk into Ouistreham from the port. Easy enough to find but worth knowing. The price is (at the time of writing) 1.80€ for a one-way trip. It’s also completely incompatible with the early ferry, arriving some twenty minutes after it departs, so I guess I’ll have to shell out for a taxi on Friday.

Check-in at my hostel in Bayeux wasn’t open until 4 in the afternoon, so with that early start I had quite a few hours to kill – on what was gearing up to be the hottest day, not just of the year, but in living memory. It was already pushing thirty by 10 o’clock. I took refuge in the shadow of Caen’s Abbaye aux Hommes, where William the Conqueror was laid to rest a little under nine hundred years ago. I thought I’d picked a good spot, and I pretty much had the shade to myself for the best part of an hour until a window cleaner turned up in a monstrous contraption spitting and whirring and grinding and clunking. It took him and his two companions all of five minutes to calibrate the machine into the right spot so he could start cleaning, by which point all the office workers within had long since pulled down the blinds. Why a ladder couldn’t get the job done beats me.

William wasn’t in the Abbaye itself. The 5€ entry fee through the Hotel de Ville revealed a beautiful cloister and an interesting exhibition on the Allied liberation of Caen (after nearly levelling the place first), but no William. A mini-map within showed he was in the adjacent cathedral (go figure), which is free to enter.

But, as it turns out, he wasn’t there either. Well – not all of him. During the French Wars of Religion in the 1560s, the abbey was sacked and William’s bones were exhumed and scattered. Only his thigh bone remains, and that in itself a miracle: less than two hundred years after his tomb was restored, it was sacked again by the unscrupulous revolutionaries. Napoleon’s generation certainly didn’t seem to hold heritage in high regard: you may have heard of Bonaparte’s foiled attempt to blow up the Pyramids, but he also ordered the demolition of various ancient wonders in Spain, including the Alhambra. Even the mighty CID’s tomb was ransacked by Napoleon’s men, and though more of his bones ultimately came home than poor William, some of them traveled a very long way. One apparently ended up in Russia, where it must have been carried as a trophy of war by a soldier with an eye for relics…!

William’s tombstone reads ‘here lies the Invincible William the Conqueror’. Somewhere under that slab is an invincible thigh bone. It’s definitely more invincible than my thighs, which are feeling very vincible in this heat… if that’s even a word.

Outside, it’s sweltering. It felt like walking into a wall of heat. By the time I reached Bayeux around midday I didn’t have the energy to anything beyond finding a shaded spot and collapsing. Fortunately Bayeux was spared the inferno enveloping most of Europe, and a nearby nature reserve afforded both shade, a cooling river and a bird-hide to lay down in relative comfort. I must have passed out several times, I think.