Rouen under her own Dukes

Normanni, si bono rigidoque dominatu reguntur, strenuissimi sunt et in arduis rebus invicti omnes excellunt et cunctis hostibus fortiores superare contendunt. Alioquin sese vicissim dilaniant atque consumunt. Rebelliones enim cupiunt, seditiones enim appetunt, et ad omne nefas prompti sunt. Rectitudinis ergo forti censura coerceantur et fraeno disciplinae per tramitem justitiae gradiri compellantur.

The unity of Charlemagne’s Empire existed in name alone. The agglomeration of essentially different races only served the purpose of emphasising the distinctions of blood and climate which were to be the eternal bars against unnatural union. But the residuum of separate nations was some time in making its appearance. Their various rulers would not accept the inevitable without a struggle; and in that struggle the only power that gained was the Church. France had no sooner thrown off the German yoke than she professed obedience to her great ecclesiastics. In Neustria the only life and strength left after the Empire died was in the Church. For the land was but a waste of untilled soil, sparsely inhabited by serfs, and divided among the overlords, and of these latter the richest were the abbots and the bishops, round whose palaces and monasteries clustered the towns for their defence. But their temporal power was soon destined to decay. The empire of the mind they might regain; their leadership of France was lost the instant that the Northmen’s ships appeared upon the Seine.

When the serfs of Neustria first heard the ivory horns of the Vikings echoing along their river’s banks, and saw the blood-red banner of the North against the sky, few men realised that the invaders were to weld them into the strongest Duchy of the West, and finally to make France herself arise as an independent nation out of Europe. They fled, these spiritless and defenceless villagers, to the nearest abbey’s walls, they hid before the altars which held the relics of their saints, but neither relics nor sanctuary availed to save, as the monks of St. Martin at Tours, of Saint Germain des Près at Paris could testify. These barbarians used the Christian rites merely to advance their own base purposes. Ever since Harold had won a province for a baptism each pirate chief in turn was the more eager to insist upon such lucrative religion. When they could not make capital out of “conversions” they took gold and provisions as the price of temporary peace. By degrees they gave up going home in winter. The climate of these southern lands was tempting. In various parts of France along the river-mouths, just as they had taken the highway of the Humber into the heart of Britain, they made their scattered settlements, even as far inland as Chartres. But only one was destined to be permanent, and this was made by Rolf, Rollo, or Rou, in Rouen, the kernel of the Northern province. In 841 Ogier the Dane had sailed up the “Route des Cygnes” to burn the shrines of St. Wandrille and Jumieges, to pillage Rouen, even to terrify Paris. After him came Bjorn Ironside and Ragnar Lodbrog. Twice they reached Paris, knocking at the gates to pass through towards the vineyards of Burgundy. In 861 they made a kind of camp upon an island between Oissel and Pont de l’Arche. At last in 876 came Rolf the Ganger, the King of the Sea, and made Rouen his headquarters.

There had been but little resistance to their advance. The fifty-three great expeditions of Charlemagne had used up the fighting men and scattered the bravest of the nobles over widely separated tracts of conquered territory. The Frenchmen had disappeared, either in war or by a voluntary submission to the lords under whose protection alone could they find safety. No wonder that the chroniclers were obliged to account for the barrenness and weakness of the land by exaggerating the already certain slaughter at Fontenai....

“La peri de France la flor
Et des baronz tuit li meillor
Ainsi troverent Haenz terre
Vuide de gent, bonne a conquerre.”

The land was left uncultivated. Forests grew thicker between Seine and Loire. Wolves ravaged Aquitaine with none to hinder them. The South was still infested by the Saracens. France seemed given up to wild beasts. Nor were the pirates unaided in their work of rapine. Necessarily few in number, for they came from far by sea, their ranks were recruited by every reckless freebooter in the country, who was quite ready to bow down to Thor and Odin, instead of to the shrines of his own land, which had proved so powerless to protect it. Fast on the heels of the first band of pirates came another, and another yet. Only by the strength of Theobald of Blois was the Loire closed against continual invasion, as the Seine was held by Rollo, who was to fix the true race of the Northmen for ever in the land.

He made his settlement in Neustria in exactly the same way as Guthrum thirty years before had taken possession of East Anglia. But while it was an easy task for the Danes to become Englishmen, it was a far harder one for the invaders of the Seine to become so completely Frenchmen, as in fact they did. In the case of both Guthrum and Rollo, the invaded sovereign had been compelled to give up part of his lands to save the whole. Both the archbishop at Rouen and the “King” at Paris saw no other way out of their difficulties; and Rollo was as ready as Guthrum had been to go through the form of baptism and the farce of a submission, requiring as a pledge the daughter of the King, whose vassal or “man” he became. The treaty in which Charles the Simple purchased peace was a close imitation of the Peace of Wedmore. These things became more serious to the pirate later on. But his way was at first made easy for him. At Rouen, Archbishop Franco, remembering perhaps the gloomy prophecies of Charlemagne, gave up his ruined and defenceless city without a blow.

Rolf found indeed very little except the “crowd without arms” described by Dudo of St. Quentin in a town where hardly a stone wall had been left upright and the population had been ruthlessly decimated by his predecessors. As Wace says of the expedition of Hastings the Dane:

“... A Roem sunt areste Tote destruitrent la cite Aveir troverent a plente Mesonz ardent, froissent celiers, Homes tuent, robent mostiers"....

so that it is almost astonishing to hear that even the church of St. Martin de la Roquette remained standing, if, indeed, that is meant by the phrase, “Portae cui innexa est ecclesia Sancti Martini naves adhaesit,” which may refer to the “Saint Morin” of Wace, or the “Portus morandi” I spoke of on page 16. The town was still, it must be remembered, in its primitive watery condition, the chapels, not only of St. Martin, but of St. Clement and of St. Eloi, were on islands that are now part of the firm soil of the river’s bank. The waters of the Robec itself formed one of the defences of the ruined city Rollo took. Just beyond the line of the old Gallo-Roman walls, rose the first rude monastery of St. Ouen; shrines were also consecrated to St. Godard, to St. Martin, to St. Vincent sur Rive; but most of the houses were still only of timber, and it was not till Rollo had closed up the wandering bed of the river between these shifting islands that the “Terres Neuves” were first formed that reached from the Rue Saint Denis to the Eau de Robec, through the Place de la Calende, down to the Rue de la Madeleine and the Rue aux Ours, and so to the Quai de la Bourse by way of the Rue des Cordeliers. What is now merely N Rue Nationale, was once the old church of St. Pierre du Chastel, and the name commemorates the spot where Rollo built his first square tower, the first of the many “Tours” that were built by the lords of Rouen, native and foreign, princes or pirates, from the river to the northern angle of the outer walls. Map B shows Rollo’s castle and the three which followed it, one on each side beneath, and one above.

It was in 912 that Rollo thus marked the beginning of the Duchy of Normandy with the strong seal of his donjon-keep at Rouen, though he and his descendants for another century were still known only as the Pirates, and the Pirates’ Duke. In that year he was baptised by the Archbishop of Rouen, and received from the Karoling King all the lands from “the river of Epte to the sea, and westwards to Brittany,” with the hand of the Princess Gisela. Robert, Duke of the Franks, came back with him to Rouen to be his godfather, and for seven days the “King of the Sea” wore the white robes of innocence, and his followers eagerly joined him in the fold of Christianity, with results whose worldwide importance were only to be seen more than a century later. For the present the wolves were quite ready to lie down with the lambs, but they kept their brutal dignity and coarse jests throughout all the solemn ceremonial. The pirate who was sent to do submission for the Duchy, embraced the royal foot so roughly that the King fell backwards off his throne, and in a roar of Norman laughter the Norman rule began that was to last for three centuries in France and spread from Palermo to the Tees. The fable of this rudely-treated monarch reflects more than the anxiety of Norman chroniclers to hide the least appearance of submission; it suggests the fact of very actual weakness in these dying Karolings. Rollo’s coming had decided for the French dynasty of Paris as against the Frankish dynasty of Laon. Both Karolings and Merovingians had been essentially of German stock. It was only late in the ninth century that Paris, the chief object of the Northerners’ attack upon the Seine, arose as the national bulwark against the invader, and became a ducal city that was to be a royal. Its Duke, Robert the Strong, the forefather of Capets, of Valois, and of Bourbons, had a son, Eudes (or Odo), whose gallant repulse of the Pirates had given him a throne that was still held by his descendants a thousand years later, and he ruled in the French speech, while the Karolings of Laon still used the Teutonic idiom. When Laon was joined to Paris in 987 by the election of Hugh, modern France really began with a French king ruling at Paris, and a German emperor as alien to the realm of the Capets as was his brother of Byzantium. But there is still much to happen before the date of 987 can be safely reached, and the last ineffectual years of Charles the Simple gave Rollo every opportunity to strengthen his new possessions in security.

The young blood, the adventurous spirit, the thirst for conquest, that his Scandinavian followers brought to Rouen, was destined to work wonders on its new soil. For these pirates took the creed, the language and the manners of the French, and kept their own vigorous characteristics as mercenaries, plunderers, conquerors, crusaders. If in peace they invented nothing, they were quick to learn and adapt, generous to disseminate. In Rouen itself they welcomed scholars, poets, theologians, and artists. Their Scandinavian vigour mated to the vivacity of Gaul was to produce a conquering race in Europe. At Bayeux, where a Saxon emigration had settled down long before the days of Rollo, the type of the original Norman can still be seen. The same type comes out in every famous Norman of to-day, in that “figure de coq,” with its high nose and clever brow that marks the bold nature tempered with the cunning, the lawyer and the soldier mixed. To these men Rollo gave land instead of booty. Of himself and his doings little accurate is known; but from the results of his rule his greatness can be fairly judged, for he held his sceptre like a battleaxe, and increased the bounds of his dominion. It was within his capital that his rule was chiefly beneficial. Here and there his Norman names have survived, as in Robec (Redbeck) Dieppedal (Deepdale) or Caudebec (Coldbeck), but in the main he proved at once the high adaptability of his race. His first assembly was of necessity aristocratic, and without ecclesiastics, for every landowner was Scandinavian, and the remnant of the aborigines were serfs whose revolts were pitilessly crushed. Twice a year his barons came to his court, as feudatory judges, the first faint beginnings of the Échiquier de Normandie. His laws were made then, and made to be respected, and it is even said that the cry of “Haro!” which was heard far later in the history of Rouen, originated in the “Ha! Rou!” with which the citizens then began their appeal to him for justice. The tale of the golden bracelets he hung in the branches of his hunting forest by the Seine, which stayed three years without being stolen, is an indication of the rigour of the laws he made. In about 930 he died, and was the first layman to be buried in the cathedral he had improved:

“En mostier Nostre Dame, el coste verz midi
Ont li cler e li lai li cors ensepulcri.”

His son, William Longsword, succeeded to his Duchy, enlarged by the additions which Rollo had known how to secure during the strife between Laon and Paris that had been going on throughout his rule. That he had paid little attention to the weak King Charles is evident from the tale that tells of the first execution recorded in what is now the Place du Marche Vieux. For Charles, with a simplicity worthy of his title, had apparently sent two gallants of his court to console his daughter Gisela for the roughness with which he heard her husband treated her, and these two were promptly hanged. But there was more material profit to be had out of the quarrels of the country, and though he lost Eu for a time, Rollo had been able to gain from the war by which he was surrounded in Maine, in Bessin, and in Brittany; which meant that his son came into possession of Caen, Cerisy, Falaise, and that Bayeux, which had been colonised from the North in the last days of the Roman Empire, and remained Teutonic long after Rouen had been “Parisianised,” where you may still see all save the tongue of England, in men and animals, even in fields and hedges. And William Longsword, though he wavered towards France and Christianity, remained at heart even more Pagan than his father, sending his son to these stubborn Northmen of Bayeux where the Danish tongue was kept in all its purity, and calling in fresh Danish colonists to occupy his own province of Cotentin from St. Michael’s Mount to Cherbourg. It was in the battle that secured his hold on this new territory that 300 knights of Rouen, under Bernard the Dane, drove out 4000 from Cotentin under their leader Count Riolf, who had disputed William’s suzerainty, upon the Pre de la Bataille that is now a cider market near the town. (Roman de Rou, .) It was at this time, too, that Prince Alan of Brittany fled for refuge to England, and the crushing of the Breton revolt resulted in the addition of the Channel Islands to the Duchy of Normandy, which remained British after John Lackland had lost the last of his continental possessions, retaining their local independence and ancient institutions under the protection of England; a far better thing for them than any enjoyment of the privileges, either of a French Department, or of a British county represented in Parliament like the ancient Norwegian Earldom of Orkney.

Few of the occurrences of this confused period are so clearly prominent or have such far-reaching results as this; and after young Louis d’Outremer had been called over from England to the throne of France, this vacillating and weak Duke William was murdered by Arnoulf of Flanders at the conference held on the island of Pecquigny in the Somme, as William of Jumieges relates (III. cap. xi. et seq.). His courtiers found upon his body the silver key of the chest that guarded the monk’s cowl he had always desired to wear. So upon a sixteenth of December 943 (in the year of the birth of Hugh Capet), the strengthless descendant of the Viking died and was buried in the Cathedral, and the Normans did homage to his young son Richard the Fearless who was fetched from his Saxon home at Bayeux and guarded by Bernard the Dane within the walls of Rouen. The boy was destined to a perilous and adventurous career, which began as soon as he had taken up his father’s power, for the King of France came straight to Rouen and would have seized the little Duke had not the citizens arisen to protect him with such menaces of violence that the attempt was postponed. But he enticed the boy to Laon and there imprisoned him until the faithful Osmond got him out concealed in a bundle of hay and bore him off on horseback to Coucy. Then Bernard the Dane called on Harold Blacktooth of Denmark to bring his men from Coutances and Bayeux and to sail up with his long ships from Cherbourg to avenge the murder of Duke William. The King hastened to the walls of Rouen to see what could be done by treaty with the invaders, but the crafty Normans pretended that among his escort they saw the murderer himself, so they fell suddenly upon the French, slew eighteen of their nobles, and threw their king into prison from which he was only rescued by Hugh, Duke of the French, at the price of the city of Laon. The interference of Germany in the quarrel produced an alliance between Normandy and Hugh of Paris that led eventually to the independence of the Duchy and the downfall of the Karolings of Laon as soon as the German help had been withdrawn. But this did not happen until an energetic attempt had been made to crush Normandy and Paris by the new allies who failed to take either Laon or Paris, but ravaged Normandy and were only repulsed from Rouen after a siege in 946 that is one of the most picturesque landmarks in the early story of the town. In the Roman de Rou, and in Dudo of St. Quentin, the details of the fighting have been carefully preserved.

The combined host of Germans under Otto, French under Louis, and Flemings under Arnoul, advanced together upon Rouen, and their scouts reported that the town showed no signs of resistance. But behind the battlements the citizens were stacking piles of stones and darts. Masses of picked men were posted at various vantage-points for sallying forth. Spies were hidden in the long reeds and grass all round the city, and sentinels unseen were guarding all the walls, from the main road at the Porte Beauvoisine, round the heavy ramparts to the north and east. Upon their south-west was the river, and there was plenty of provisions stored inside. The quiet reported to the allies was but the confident repose of thorough preparation, and this the Germans discovered as soon as they drew near the city. The young Duke Richard suddenly dashed out over the drawbridge with seven hundred full-armed Norman knights on horseback shouting “Dex Aie!” behind him. They rode straight upon the German spears, cut their way through and back again taking fifteen captives with them, and slaying their leader, the “Edeling” himself who had followed them to the very bridge. Otto fainted at the sight of the dead body of the brave Edeling whose “Flamberg” and Castilian steed are often mentioned in the story though his name does not appear. Then the braying of aurochs’ horns, of cornets and of trumpets, announced the coming vengeance of the allies. Their catapults rained missiles on the town, and their men-at-arms waited impatiently for a breach to be battered in the Porte Beauvoisine. But it remained steadfastly shut, and the Duke made another brilliant sally from a postern gate with the blood-red standard waving again above his Norman knights, and swept back once more the assailing lines of Germany until the French had to bring up their reinforcements from the rear and save the field. That evening, in Otto’s pavilion, the funeral service of the Edeling was held. All night he lay beneath the silk of his funeral pall with tapers burning at his head and feet, and the low chant of prayer sounded till the dawn. All night had Otto stayed awake in sorrow and unrest. At last, with the rising of the sun he heard a burst of minstrelsy. Rouen was silent no longer; the songs of triumph and defiance burst from every parapet and tower, while the very birds (says the chronicler) seemed to join in the chorus of happiness all round the beaten camp. Then Otto rode moodily along the city walls and watched the waggons bringing in supplies across the bridge, and noted that the bridge-head at Ermondeville (St. Sever as it is to-day), was weakly held, so he rode back determined to starve Rouen into submission.

But the council of his knights refused the plan, so he was obliged to veil his anger by asking the Normans for permission to pray at the Shrine of St. Ouen and bury his noble kinsman beyond the walls of their town. Safe conduct was immediately granted, and all the leaders except Arnoul of Flanders passed in procession to the abbey. There, after gifts of gold and precious carpets to the abbot, Otto proposed that Arnoul should be given up, but returned before the answer to these treacherous negotiations had been given. The night that followed was full of terrors and alarms. Suspecting that he would be betrayed, Arnoul took all his Flemish host as soon as darkness fell, and lumbered heavily out of the camp of the allies, his cumbrous waggons creaking noisily beneath the weight of the camp-furniture. Both French and Germans heard the sound and started to their feet imagining a night-attack from Rouen. Panic seized the camp at once. Men cut the cords of the rich tents, and scattered their spoil about the ground, rushing half clad in all directions and shouting for their arms; a fire broke out at headquarters; the camp-followers seized their opportunity, dashed upon Otto’s tent and plundered it of armour and of all its royal ornaments; the rest fled hastily all ways at once not seeing where they went, and in an unknown country.

Meanwhile the rising clamour roused the sentinels of Rouen, and all the garrison made ready for attack, hurried to their posts, and waited steadfastly under arms until the dawn. As the light shone from the east they saw the rout and disorder of their enemies’ camp, and loud jeers and laughter rose along the walls, and echo still in the rough verses of Dudo their historian. The Flemish had the advantage of an early start, and got clear away. The French had followed fast upon their heels, but the Germans had plunged in unwieldy panic into the labyrinth of the woods and fens. The Normans spread out at once and caught them. At the Place de la Rougemare they slaughtered so many that the fields were dyed red with their blood. At Bihorel more were massacred. In Maupertuis, or Maromme, hundreds were butchered. Then the peasants took up the bloody task. With sharpened scythes and pitchforks, with pointed staves and heavy truncheons and ironshod clubs, they killed the miserable Germans all day long, and the line of escape was marked along the Beauvoisine road by corpses almost to Amiens itself.

This strange victory seems to have pulled the men of Rouen together, and given them confidence. The Laws of Rollo had been restored to their old strength by Harold Blacktooth, and at last Neustrians and Scandinavians seemed in a fair way to amalgamate and produce that nation of warriors and lawyers which they afterwards became. In 954 King Louis died after a last flicker of expiring power in retrieving Laon. But though Lothair followed him as King of the French, Hugh Capet was ruling in 956 as Duke of Paris, and it was to Hugh that Duke Richard of Normandy did homage for his fief. Thirty-one years later the last Karoling was passed over, and Hugh Capet was crowned King at Noyon. In the starting of this new dynasty, which is the starting-point for the true history of France, Duke Richard of Normandy had played a most important part, for it was in no small measure by his help that Gaul had been made French and had won a French Lord of Paris for her King. At the coronation of Hugh Capet, Normandy ceased to be the Land of Pirates, and became the mightiest and noblest fief of the French crown, its most loyal and most daring vassal. In the years of Duke Richard too, Normandy was completed internally. Her army and her fleet were organised. Her frontiers, her laws, her feudal system came to perfection. Her national character crystallised. Already in the Norman Baronage we can find English names like that of the Harcourts, descended from Bernard the Dane, on a castle-wall we can read the name of Bruce, in a tiny village trace the name of Percy. Among the elms and apple-orchards that still faithfully reflect our English countryside, the square gray keeps are rising already which were handed on by Norman builders to the cliffs of Richmond or the banks of Thames. In 996 Duke Richard built one of these upon the right bank of Robec near the Seine, a new Palace-Prison, another “Tour de Rouen” to replace the fallen masonry of Rollo’s ancient keep. It was founded where the Place de la Haute Vieille Tour preserves its memory still, with the Duke’s private chapel on the spot where the Fierté St. Romain stands to this day.

Robert Wace preserves a story that indicates the close terms on which Duke Richard was with religion, and also shows that the steady growth in wealth and influence of the clergy through his reign, was not unaccompanied by an immorality which was conspicuous under Archbishop Hugh II., and became flagrant during the office of Mauger later on. It appears that the Sacristan of St. Ouen fell most uncanonically in love with a lady who dwelt on the other side of the Robec. On his way to meet her one dark night, his foot slipped from the plank that crossed the rapid little stream, and he fell into the water. Whereon a sprightly devilkin seized hurriedly upon his soul and was on the point of bearing it away to Hell, when an angel (mindful doubtless of the abbey’s piety) arrived, objecting with a nicely argued piece of logic that the sacristan had not been carried off “en male veie,” but before any sin had been committed. So the contending parties brought the case (that is the body) before the Duke for judgment. His Grace insisted that the soul should be put back into its mortal envelope, and he would then decide according to the action of the sacristan. The ardour of the resuscitated monk seems to have been sufficiently cooled by his involuntary bath in Robec, and he hurried back to his lonely bed in the Abbey of St. Ouen, and at the Duke’s command confessed his wickedness to the abbot. But his escapade remains enshrined in a proverb that lasted well into the sixteenth century, and is given by Wace in its original form:

“Sire Moine, suef alez
Al passer planche vus gardez.”

In 996, the Fearless Duke himself gave up the ghost, after having enlarged the Cathedral of Rouen, and given it new pavement. His son, another Richard, like him in name alone, succeeded, and in the first year of the new reign, we hear of a peasant revolt that shows an extraordinary foreshadowing of the changes that were to come after the fateful thousandth year had passed. The keynote of the movement is struck in the strange word used by Wace, that occurs now for the first time in history:

“Asez tost oi Richard dire
Ke vilains cumune faseient.”

These downtrodden serfs, of mixed Celtic, Roman, and Frankish parentage, had actually spoken that word of fear to every feudal baron, a “commune.” They established a regular representative Parliament with two peasants sent from each district to a general assembly whose decision should be binding on the whole. This was a considerably higher political organisation than the aristocratic household of their masters round the King. And bitterly their masters resented such forward and unscrupulous behaviour. The Duke’s uncle, Rudolf, Count of Ivry, crushed the “revolt” with hideous cruelty, and sent back the people’s representatives maimed and useless to their hovels. “Legatos cepit,” says William of Jumieges, “truncatisque manibus et pedibus inutiles suis remisit,” adding with unconscious ferocity “his rustici expertis ad sua aratra sunt reversi.” But the germs of freedom did not die, for villenage in Normandy was lighter, and ceased far sooner, than in the rest of France. These first martyrs did not suffer in vain.

If you look closely at the few carvings remaining on the churches of the tenth and eleventh centuries, you will understand the terror under which all men were crushed as the thousandth year drew nearer, which was believed to be the end of the world. Grimacing dumbly in their stiffened attitudes of fear, these thin anatomies implore with clenched uplifted hands, the death that shall save them from the misery of their life. A world so filled with ruins might well give up all hope on this side of the tomb. The revolt of the Norman peasants had been crushed in blood. The first religious persécutions had begun, in the slaying of the Manichean heretics at Orleans. The seasons in their courses seemed to fight against humanity, for famine and pestilence, storm and tempest swept down upon the land and the people died in thousands of sheer starvation. The Roman Empire had crumbled in the dust; after it fell that of Charlemagne into the abyss. The chronicles of Raoul Glaber are full of the most gruesome details of cannibalism, of diabolical appearances, of tortures that cannot be named. The only refuge seemed to be within the walls of the churches, where the shivering congregations gathered, mute in a palsied supplication like the stone figures carved upon the walls above them. At last the terrible year passed by, and the stars fell not, nor did the heaven depart as a scroll when it is rolled together, and the kings of the earth and the great men and the rich men and the chief captains and the mighty men and every bondman and every freeman came forth from their houses and from their dens and from the rocks of the mountain, and went with one accord to give thanks to Holy Church for their deliverance. The wave of religious feeling swept from one end of Europe to the other, and nowhere was it so strong as in Normandy. For the Normans saw their advantage in it, just as the first pirates had seen their gain in baptism. The laws of Rollo and his descendants were too strict for brigandage at home, so the more restless spirits started over Europe in the guise of pilgrims, “gaaignant,” as Wace says, towards Monte Cassino, to St. James of Compostella, to the Holy Sepulchre itself. It was as pilgrims that they travelled into Southern Italy, where a poor Norman knight had been rewarded for his fighting against the infidels by the County of Aversa. Tancred of Hauteville, from the Cotentin, followed there. By 1002 the citizens of Rouen were already admiring the oranges, or “Pommes d’Or” which their adventurous “Crusaders” had sent back from Salerno, as the first-fruits of that Kingdom of Calabria and Sicily which a Norman, Robert Guiscard, was to make his own.

Meanwhile within the bounds of Normandy itself, the great religious revival went on side by side with growing civic and military strength. In 1004, Olaf, King of Norway, who had come over to help the second Duke Richard, was baptised in the Cathedral of Rouen. Sweyn, King of Denmark, and Lacman, King of Sweden, were in the city at the same time, and doubtless felt the same impulse to profession of the Christian faith when visiting their Scandinavian relatives. Rouen was indeed a gathering place for all the northern royalties, for Ethelred II. who had lost the Anglo-Saxon throne, was there as well, with his wife Emma the daughter of the Duke. It seems in fact to have already become the fashion for princes of the royal house of Britain to complete their education by a little tour in France. A curious trait of the manners of the time is recorded by Wace, who describes one of the many banquets that must have been given so often during all these royal visits. He speaks of the long sleeves and white shirts of the barons, and relates the first instance of aristocratic kleptomania at a dinner-table, when a knight took a silver spoon and hid it in his sleeve (R. de . The reign of this second Richard and of his son the third passed without much incident, and then came the sixth Duke, Robert the Magnificent as his courtiers called him, Robert the Devil as his people knew him. He is chiefly famous as the father of his mighty son, and he did little in his capital of Rouen that is of interest beyond its walls, save the attempt to restore the Saxon princes Alfred and Edward to their father’s throne, which failed because his fleet was stopped by persistent headwinds and could do nothing more than thoroughly subjugate the neighbouring fief of Brittany. After this, the Duke fell in, like all around, with the dominant religious passion, took up the pilgrim’s cross, and died with his Crusaders at Nicaea.

“A Faleize ont li Dus hante,”

says Wace,

“Une meschine i ont amee,
Arlot ont nom, de burgeis nee.”

And from this love-match with a tanner’s daughter sprang William the Bastard in 1028. Though his father had insisted upon this child’s inheritance on his departure for the East, the election of a boy of seven to the Ducal throne was naturally bitterly opposed by such great baronial houses as those of Belesme and others. A period of anarchy and assassination was the obvious result. But Alan of Brittany, the Seneschal Osbern, and Count Gilbert stood staunchly by the heir. All three were murdered, and young William himself with difficulty escaped. Then Ralph of Wacey and William Fitz-Osbern attached themselves to the boy who must have shown promise of his greatness early to attract such faithful friendships through the twenty years of civil war that preceded his firm holding of the throne. He had been knighted young, and he was soon to prove the strength of his right arm. But his first actions strangely enough are connected with the Church that overshadowed so much of public life. He made the mistake of giving the See of Rouen to the profligate Mauger (though the error was sternly corrected later on) just as he gave the See of Bayeux to his half-brother Odo. Benedictine monasteries began to flourish all over Normandy, chief among which was the Abbey of Bec, which in Lanfranc and Anselm was to provide Canterbury with two prelates later on. Religion was responsible, at the same time, for at least one benefit to the land in the famous institution of the “Truce of God,” which was fully confirmed later on, and proclaimed that from Wednesday evening until Monday morning in every week the poor and weak were to be free from the oppressions of their overlords and from the tyranny of private war. And a still more valuable result of the prevalent religious enthusiasm was the gradual drawing together of Normandy and the Papal See which had its greatest outcome in the “Crusade” against England.

But William had much to do in his own Duchy before he could find time for any extension of his dominions. At Val-es-Dunes he fought his first pitched battle, crying the “Dex Aie” of the Normans as he swept the rebellious barons, under Guy of Burgundy, off the field. Then feeling more secure in his own power, after he had taken Alençon and Domfront and laid his iron hand on Maine, while Anjou and Brittany were too bent upon intestine strife to trouble him, he pacified the continual quarrels with Flanders by taking Matilda the daughter of its Count Baldwin as his wife. Descended from the stock of Wessex, of Burgundy, and of Italy, with the blood of Charlemagne in her veins, Matilda was beautiful, virtuous and accomplished, and worthy to be the mate of one who set an example of domestic purity to all the princes of his time. What had been politic at first became a marriage of affection afterwards, strengthened no doubt by the opposition that at first arose. For the Duke’s Uncle Mauger objected to the match as being within the forbidden degrees of relationship, and the Pope at the Council of Rheims actually pronounced against it. But now came the first-fruits of the policy which had already shown signs of drawing together Normandy and the Papacy. For it only needed a little pressure on the part of the Guiscards in Apulia to secure the consent of the Papal Legate to the banishment of Mauger to the Channel Islands, which he appears to have richly deserved for many other reasons, if Wace be right in his indictment; and after four years of waiting, Matilda was married to the Duke in the Cathedral of Rouen by the new Bishop Maurilius who finished the new church that was consecrated in 1063. Another objection to the marriage received very different treatment. For in Lanfranc of Bec William had recognised the clever Italian who would be useful in Council as much as in the Church, and it was through Lanfranc’s personal intercession that the Papal authority had finally been brought to William. The “penance” inflicted for his wedding was, we may well believe, cheerfully performed in the building of the hospitals at Rouen, Bayeux, Caen and Cherbourg, and the two mighty abbeys (for William and for Matilda) that remain at Caen.

Meanwhile the power of Normandy continued to wax greater. Even two centuries after this time it comprised a third part of the wealth and importance of the kingdom, and in the days of our own Fifth Henry no advice more dangerous to France could be given to an English King than to preserve by every means the independence of this Duchy. To the France of the eleventh century, it was a far greater peril still. Sullenly hostile, or actively menacing, it was only by perpetual harassing that Normandy could be kept down at all. At last in 1054 the King roused all the cities of Central Gaul, Burgundian, Gascon, Breton and Auvergnat in one combined onset, and gathered them at Mantes, the natural frontier between Normandy and France. Duke William’s strategy and daring were equal to his task. He divided the invaders into two, annihilated one division at Mortemer with very little loss, and watched the other with grim merriment as it vanished from his Duchy, afraid to strike a blow. Four years later France and Anjou came on for another attempt. Again the Duke was ready. He caught their hosts where the river Dive cut the army in twain, and fell suddenly with all his knights and clubmen and a thundershower of arrows on the division that held the lower bank. King Henry had to watch in idleness above, while his rear-guard was being helplessly cut to pieces. By the taking of Le Mans in 1063, William made still further preparation for the greater fight that was to come. Presages of the coming struggle were not long in making their appearance.

In 1064 Earl Harold on a pleasure-trip from England was wrecked upon the coast of Ponthieu. Duke William at once had him brought to Eu, where he met him and escorted him, in all good fellowship and chivalry, to Rouen. What actually happened during this important visit cannot be accurately determined. But of a few facts there seems to be no doubt. If Harold, for instance, received knighthood at William’s hands, he thereby became his “man.” More probably he swore brotherhood with the strong Duke. Certainly he took part in the expedition that crushed a Breton revolt, and chased its leader to the dangerous quicksands of St. Michael’s Mount. Certainly too, an oath of some kind was plighted between the host and his somewhat unwilling guest. In this the Duke must have made mention of the promise given by Edward the Confessor as to the English Succession. This Edward it will be remembered was one of the Saxon princes who had lived for some time in Rouen, and was always fond of his Norman mother and her friends. Mention is also made of a betrothal of William’s daughter to the Earl. In any case, we may be sure that Harold was sufficiently engaged to satisfy the politic Duke before he was allowed to return to England. Nor may we imagine that the next news which came across the Channel was wholly unexpected. For as the Duke was hunting with his courtiers and squires in his pleasaunce at Quevilly, across the Seine from Rouen, a messenger brought the tidings that Edward the Confessor was dead, and that Harold son of Godwin had seized the throne. Wace describes how Fitz-Osbern paced up and down the hunting-hall with his master as they discussed the news, and the Duke soon made his mind up as to the course to be pursued. A message was at once sent over to Harold, reminding him of the famous Oath, which had been taken, as some say, and according to the suggestions in the Bayeux Tapestry, over the sacred relics of the saints. What the Duke had expected and even hoped for, of course happened. Harold repudiated all knowledge of a binding agreement as to the Succession, and Normandy could thenceforth call upon the outraged Sanctity of Religion to help her in what was cleverly published as a Holy War.

Now the full effects of the religious trend in William’s policy were seen at last, as clearly as was the wisdom of his own carefully religious life. The champion of the poor, the fatherless and the widow, the worshipper and communicant in Rouen Cathedral, the builder of hospitals and monasteries, above all the friend of Lanfranc, was easily able to secure the voice of the Pope in favour of a claim based not on heredity, not on election, not on bequest, but made by virtue of the personal injury done to him by Harold, and made to avenge the insulted saints of Normandy by recalling pagan England into the fold of Rome. Never were the highest motives so skilfully interwoven with appeals to lower instincts in the mingled crowd whom the Duke William gathered to his standard. He had before this crushed the Norman rebels, conquered the men of Maine or Anjou or Brittany, defeated the King of France. But this was a far greater task. Yet if Normans had won the Kingdom of the Sicilies, Normans should cross the sea to England and win that as well. And all the faithful of the earth should help them. It is a mistake to think that Normans alone conquered the land of Harold. From Flanders, from the Rhine, from Burgundy, Piedmont and Aquitaine, from all the northern coasts, an army of volunteers flocked to the standard of the Duke. And their leader went swiftly on to make preparations worthy of so great a host. While all the woods of Normandy are ringing to the axe, and all the shipwrights’ yards are sounding to the hammer, we may pause and see what this mighty expedition means to Rouen.

To Normandy it brings at once the climax of her power and the beginning of her fall. For a Duchy that was but secondary to the Kingdom over seas could never claim again the full strength of the rulers who had raised her first. By degrees she fell away from the land across the channel and became absorbed in the kingdom of which she was territorially a natural part. But, as we have seen, she had already done much towards the making of that kingdom in her independence, and when she formed an integral part of it herself she was its firmest bulwark against invasion from the North. In Rouen itself the beginnings of commercial greatness had been indicated, even before the coming of Rollo, by the Mint which had been established there, as a branch of that founded by Charlemagne at Quantowitch, which was destroyed by the first Pirates. The money of Rouen was marked with the letter B to signify that it was the second in importance in the Kingdom. That the trade of the town soon justified this proud distinction on its currency is evident from the law of King Ethelred II., which exempted all Rouen merchants from taxation on their wine and “Marsouin” within the port of London. Other signs of commercial activity are to be found in bridge-building, and the numerous Fairs which arose under the Norman Dukes. In 1024 a toll upon the wooden bridge of Rouen is recorded, and when in 1030, it was destroyed by a revolt under Robert the Devil, the timbers were very shortly afterwards replaced, and remained until in 1160 the Empress Matilda built the famous “Pont de Pierre” that lasted for so many centuries. Of the great Fairs of Rouen, the first seems to be that of St. Gervais, instituted by the second Duke Richard in 1020, which was given with the church of the same name to the monks of the Abbey of Fécamp. It is still held in June in the Faubourg Cauchoise. The Foire du Pre was next founded in 1064 on the day after the Ascension by the great Duke William, under the auspices of the Priory of Notre Dame du Pre which his wife had built in the suburb of Emendreville across the river, where St. Sever now stands. The church itself took the name of Bonne-Nouvelle when the Duchess heard, as she was praying there, that the Victory of Hastings had made her Queen of England. Within its walls were buried the Empress Matilda, and the hapless Prince Arthur of Brittany. It was burnt down in 1243, and struck by lightning in 1351, destroyed during the siege by the English in 1418, and rebuilt only to be destroyed again by the Calvinists in 1562. In 1604 it was rebuilt for the last time, but the rights of jurisdiction and of the fair given it by William the Conqueror were only surrendered to the town of Rouen in 1493. In 1070 the Fête de l’Immaculee Conception, called the Fête aux Normands, was celebrated for the first time in memory of a vow after a safe voyage. The Confrérie de la Conception, sometimes called Le Puy, was founded in connection with this, with the poems that were written each year in honour of the Feasts, which gave rise to the jocund office of the Prince des Palinods, of whom we shall hear more later. Their first poem, written by Robert Wace (the author of the “Roman de Rou,” who was born in Jersey in 1100 and died at the age of 84 in England) was called “L’Establissement de la feste de la conception, dicte la Feste as Normands.”

The most famous Fair of all was founded a little later by Guillaume Bonne Âme, forty-eighth bishop of Rouen, when he transported the body of St. Romain in a new and precious shrine from the church of St. Godard to the Cathedral. At this first procession in 1079 both William the Conqueror and his wife assisted. The change had been necessitated by the great crowds of people who had come every year to receive pardons and indulgences at the shrine of the famous guardian saint of the city, and who thronged into the neighbouring field, called the Champ-du-Pardon to this day. When the saint’s body had been removed to the Cathedral, the Foire du Pardon was held in his honour in the same open space, and the whole ceremony was without doubt the beginning of that Levee de la Fierté which preserved the memory of St. Romain until the end of the eighteenth century. By William, the fair was originally fixed on two days in October, and in 1468 its duration was still further extended. In the church of St. Etienne des Tonneliers, which was put under the protection of the monks of St. Ouen at this time, we can trace further evidence of the gradual consolidation of various trades; even the institution of the curfew bell, at the assembly of Caen in 1061, shows that increasing commerce had insisted upon greater security in the public streets. The Parvis of the Cathedral, too, was at this time not merely a place of inviolable sanctuary, but an open space on which merchants could display their goods and erect booths without any interference save from the canons. These shops were built up against the crenelated wall that surrounded the Parvis until the quarrel between canons and bourgeois pulled them down in 1192. The place was a frequent scene of conflict, and also of amusement, for in spite of the presence of a cemetery which extended over the Place de la Calende and the Portail des Libraires and was only abolished in the last century, the mystery plays were often given here, using the cemetery as a “background,” as was frequently done. Till 1199 bakers sold bread here. Till 1429 the “Marche aux herbes et menues denrées” was held here, and then transferred to the Clos aux Juifs. In 1325 the working jewellers also frequented this locality, and in the name of the great north porch of the Cathedral is still preserved the memory of the booksellers of times far more modern.

The foundations of another cathedral had been laid in 990, where Robec and Aubette still defined an “Île Notre Dame de Rouen” whose inhabitants were under the jurisdiction of the chapterhouse. It was brought to a conclusion by Maurilius in 1063, and in the foundation and lower storeys of the northern tower of the west façade (known as the Tour St. Romain) are perhaps some of the few relics that remain of the architecture of these destructive years. But a far more beautiful and more authentic fragment is to be seen close to the Abbey Church of St. Ouen, in the exquisite little piece of architecture known as the Tour aux Clercs in the north-eastern corner of the apse. This is part of the apse of the second abbey, which was begun by Nicolas of Normandy in 1042, finished in 1126, and burnt to the ground in 1136. Its fate was the common one of all ecclesiastical buildings of the time. In the next chapter we shall find but two more churches that can certainly be dated as before the years when Normandy became a part of France. The School of Art which gave a name to all those English buildings of which Durham Cathedral is the type and flower, left scarcely a stone in its own capital as a memorial of its source. Nor can Rouen point to a single building now remaining which was a palace or a prison of its Norman dukes. The greatest monument of its greatest duke is the Tower of London. Even the ruined Abbey of St. Amand, which was dedicated in 1070, does not now possess a stone that can be traced with certainty to the period of its Norman foundation. For whatever ruins now remain are those of the church built in 1274, whose tower was rebuilt after 1570, and whose last abbess, Madame de Lorge, died in October 1745.