Saint Georges de Basly Church
The church of Basly offers only its Romanesque tower placed at the western end of the nave. The door of this tower, the main entrance of the church, has no transoms; it is decorated with tores extending continuously from the base to the summit. Above the first order, the tower is decorated with two rows superimposed by arcatures; one short and without columns, the other elongated with columns with Romanesque capitals. The four-sided pyramid that crowns the whole was rebuilt later in large part; the centre only can be ancient.
The vestibule that exists under the tower is vaulted; the vault is fortified by cross arches with semicircular arches.
The nave and the choir have been taken up as a sub-work; moreover, they offer so few characters that it would be difficult to indicate their age.
The epitaph of a parish priest named Vrard, who died on January 24, 1815, aged 74, who had been parish priest for 39 years, is read externally on the bedside wall.
The church of Basly is under the invocation of St. George; the Hôtel-Dieu of Caen had its patronage; the parish priest received half the tithe; the other half belonged to the chapter of the cathedral and to the abbey of Saint Wandrille since the year 1024, by a gift from Duke Richard II.
Summary of Protestant history in Basly
The authorization to build a temple at Basly was granted only on February 8, 1652. Until then the right to exercise had always been contested. Until 1672, the temple of Basly was provided with two pastors. Pierre Bayeux (deceased in 1675) and Benjamin Binet, who kept scrupulously the registers of the Censures of the Consistory and of the Civil Status. These registers made it possible to sketch the organization of the church of Basly - Bernières. Deprived of any official assistance since 1631, the pastors had only two sources of income, the contributions of the faithful and the annuities bequeathed to the Consistory. By a will lodged before a notary in Caen on 15 May 1638, Pierre Poulain, sieur de Calix, gave «a hundred pounds of rent to support a pastor in the church of Bernières»; the testator provided that this church could be transferred to Basly, ordered that, in this case, the annuity would continue to be paid to him; but if the church of Basly were itself to disappear, the annuity would then be vested in the church of Caen and used for the maintenance of a young man destined for the pastoral ministry. The pastors of Basly and Bernières received four hundred pounds and took no tax on marriages and baptisms. Many were faithful who frequented the temple of Basly. If we note the number of baptisms recorded each year, we can see that from 1655 to 1664, about thirty baptisms were celebrated on average each year; this represented about a thousand faithful. As soon as Louis XIV decided to reign by himself, persecutions and vexations resumed; some Reformed yielded to fear or promises and abjured. The average number of baptisms decreased slowly to about twenty per year. After the peace of Nijmegen, the persecution intensified. The abjurations of Catholics were forbidden by an Edict of June 1680; abjurations had taken place at Basly. On December 11, 1679, a decree ordered the destruction of the temple of Basly. As soon as they knew the news, the faithful, led by Binet, undertook the demolition of their church themselves on 23 January 1680; they thus avoided that the demolition materials fell into the hands of the Catholics.