179 Veules les Roses, France, St Martin’s

Perhaps you remember: Saint Martin was the one  who cut his cloak in half with a sword in the fourth century to give half of it to a needy poor man (this was in the days before you could fill in a direct debit for Oxfam). Inside this church, there is an impressive  and very old statue of him doing this. St Martin was the son of a Roman military officer, and was also responsible for the first orders of monks in the Loire valley, where this church isn’t (it’s in Normandy). In 371 AD he was actually kidnapped by his congregation and forced to become a bishop, it seems.

There is also in the building a seventeenth century laying-of-Christ-in-the-tomb, as well as a painting of “Christ among the doctors”, which I neglected to photograph. The painting illustrates one of the few stories from the new testament  which happened before Jesus turned thirty. Luke tells it to us - when Jesus was twelve his parents lost him and found him in the temple with the old and learned, explaining stuff to them. Caravaggio and Da Vinci both painted the scene, but the one in this church is by some anonymous Northerner.

This is a sixteenth-century church, the third on the site. There is a beautiful holy water basin and baptismal font.