When you go to Notre Dame in Paris, Sainte Chapelle, Sacre Coeur...  you expect these places to be big, impressive, awesome, breathtaking...  The surprise is that nearly every podunk French hamlet has one of these.  The ones that don't have one... have two.

Recall me mentioning that Rouen is a small town,  Bayeux is smaller.  It barely qualifies as a village.  It's population is only 15,000.  By comparison, St Michael's Parish where I grew up in Brooklyn is more than 20,000 families.  Surprisingly, the two churches are approximately the same size.  St Michael's is almost 100 years old; Notre Dame de Bayeux is over 900 years old.  I shudder to think what sort of economic committment such an undertaking represented in 1077; it was substantial in 1903.