La Rue de la Grosse Horloge

Une rue délicieuse où lé monde se pourmene, où tousiours il y ha du vent, de l’umbre et du soleil, de la pluye et de l’amour. Ha! Ha! riez doncques, allez-y doncques! c’est une rue tousiours neufve, tousiours royale, tousiours impériale, une rue patrioticque, une rue a deux trottoirs, une rue ouverte des deux bouts ... brief, c’est la royne des rues, tousiours entre la terre et lé ciel, une rue a fontaine, une rue a laquelle rien ne manque pour estre celebree parmi les rues.

The cluster of old buildings which are beneath the shadow of the belfry are perhaps better known to strangers than any other piece of architecture in the town. It is the focal point of Rouen, the centre of its civic life, and if you are fortunate enough to live quite close to it, as I did, you will find yourself in the best place for starting on nearly every expedition that your fancy may dictate. The Rue de la Grosse Horloge itself is one of those memorable thoroughfares of which nearly every old French town possesses at least one fascinating example, the kind of street that, in his “Contes Drolatiques,” Balzac has so admirably described in making mention of the Rue Royale at Tours. A glance at even the few streets marked upon Map B will show its structural importance in the economy of the town. For the Cathedral has stood in different forms upon the same spot since the fifth century, and this street starts from immediately opposite its western gate. In the earliest days it was stopped at the other end by the gate through which the Roman road passed, across the Vieux Marche, towards Caletum (Lillebonne). In later times the Porte Massacre was built there, which takes its name, not from the wholesale murder of the Jews in the adjoining quarter, but from the butchers who congregated close by in the Rue Massacre, or Rue des Machecriers (Wace’s word for a butcher), which is called the Rue de la Boucherie-de-Massacre in a title-deed of 1454.

The Place du Vieux Marche is a spot almost as historic in its way as the Parvis of the Cathedral, so that there is interest at both ends of the Rue de la Grosse Horloge. Its most terrible memory is the burning of Jeanne d’Arc, which (as I shall show from Lelieur’s plan in a later chapter) took place at the angle of the modern halls, and close to the cemetery of the vanished church of St. Sauveur, on the same spot in the Vieux Marche used since the earliest history of Rouen as one of the many places of public execution. The Rue de la Grosse Horloge has also been called the Grande Rue, and several other names which need not be recorded here; for both by geographical position and in its own right it has always claimed a large share in the interest of the citizens of Rouen. Much of its once beautiful architecture has vanished altogether. The church of St. Herbland, for instance, once stood at its eastern extremity, opposite the Cathedral. But of the Gothic work of 1483 not a stone is to be seen. The stained glass windows were bought by a traveller in 1802, and by him taken to England, after the Revolution had suppressed the Church.

A somewhat better fate has awaited the exquisite example of French Renaissance architecture which used to be at N. Of this very remarkable house, known for uncertain reasons as the Maison de Diane de Poitiers, and certainly worthy of any court beauty of the time, the façade has been carefully preserved in the little square behind the Tour St. Andre in the Rue Jeanne d’Arc. As the upper storeys project over the road, it must have been built before 1520, the date after which such overhanging constructions were forbidden. Every inch of the wooden surface is covered with delicate arabesques and figures. The proportions of the various storeys are admirably indicated, and the wall-openings grow smaller as they rise, until the whole is crowned with an equilateral triangle, in which a round-headed arch on square pilasters fills the central space. A round medallion with a bust is placed on each side of the second storey windows, and the floors are boldly indicated by deep lines of shadowed carving. The house, of which nothing but this marvellous façade remains, was originally called by the sign of the Cock, and is known to have belonged on the 30th May 1525, to Jean Le Roy, who appears in the parish lists of 1471 as a draper. His son Noel married another of the bourgeoisie, one Marion Ribault; and from her possession until the town bought it from the Hospital, which held it last, the line of title-deeds is unbroken; the important point to notice being that it was built not by a noble, but by a tradesman.

But it is the Grosse Horloge itself that is the jewel of the street. As you look at it from the west you can see constructions built in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in the reign of Henri Quatre, and in the days of Louis Quinze. The Belfry Tower, or Campanile, is, as is fitting to its ancient history, the oldest building of them all. There was a tower here from the earliest days when Rouen had a civic history at all, a “Ban-cloque” to call her citizens together, which is mentioned in the city charters as a symbol of her freedom. First hung here in 1150, the old bell first saved the town in 1174 during the siege by Louis VII. In the next century the bell was recast with the following inscription: IE SUIS NOMME ROUVEL ROGIER LE FERON ME FIST FERE JEHAN DAMIENS ME FIST. This is not without significance, for though the King had given the ground for the new Hotel de Ville, it was only the Mayor, Le Feron, who in 1258 had a right to order the communal bell which called the citizens to their orderly municipal meetings, or summoned them to revolt against oppression. On the larger bell, originally used as the curfew, are the words: IE SUIS NOMME CACHE RIBAUT MARTIN PIGACHE ME FIST FERE NICOLE FESSART ME FIST AMENDER JEHAN DAMIENS ME FIST. Pigache was Mayor in 1254, and Fessart in 1261.

In February 1381 Rouvel rang for the famous revolt of the “Harelle,” and went on ringing the whole time the town was “up.” So when young Charles VI. entered angrily by a breach in the Porte Martainville, its treasonable clamour was silenced for some time. For this most blatant of the privileges of the commune was actually taken away altogether. Nor when he pardoned rebellious Rouen could the King be persuaded to give back the bell or allow the belfry he had ruined to be set up. So the citizens humbly besought him that they might “faire une auloge et la fere asseoir où estoit lé Beffroi de la dicte ville,” and when King and Bailli had agreed, they craftily built a tower for their “horloge” just like the lost and beloved belfry on the old foundations, and you may read on the bronze plate upon the southern side how this was done when Guillaume de Bellengues was captain of the town, and Jehan la Thuille was bailli for the King. Jehan lé Bayeux took nine years to build it as it is shown in Jacques Lelieur’s manuscript of 1525.

Begun by Jourdain Delestre, the clock was finished by Jehan de Felanis, began to go in September 1389 with two small bells to mark the quarters, and was mounted on its proper platform in 1396. The King’s charter of 1389 had made special and approving mention of the virtuous Cache-Ribaut, so he was set to ring the hours. But the wicked Rouvel had been given to two of the King’s household; and the town would not rest content without him, until, after many emphatic reminders of his royal pardon, the King was prevailed upon to give him back again, and he rings the curfew to this day. But he was not hung up until October 1449, when, after Talbot had left the Vieux Palais, the Council joyfully gave orders to Laurent des Loges, “pour pendre et asseoir certaine cloche nommee Rouve estant en la tour du beffroy”; and in the town accounts stands the cheery item of “Sept sous six deniers pour vin donne aux ouvriers,” when it was hung on the very Saturday on which the Duke of Somerset was handing to Charles VII. the articles of capitulation. So when a French king at last came through the famous street again, Rouvel, who had remained in the dignified silence of the conquered for sixty-seven years, made his joyful note heard again above all the clamour of the citizens, and rang a welcome to the freedom of the city, to deliverance from the English, to the return of the King who confirmed the ancient privileges of the Charte aux Normands, maintained the Échiquier de Normandie, and did, in fact, everything that was expected of him except re-establish the Mayor. For the revolt of the Harelle had entirely deposed the Mayor from office. In 1389 his councillors were reduced to six, and it was only three centuries later that, in 1695, the King once more appointed a real mayor out of the usual three candidates presented by the town.

Then the bell “Cache Ribaut” came down, as was but right of him, from his high place within the campanile, and Rouvel swung again on his home-beam, “a la seconde croisee en ogive,” and proceeded on his old business of proclaiming elections, festivals, and fires and curfews, and does so still. Affectionate flattery once called him a “cloche d’argent,” from his peculiar tone; but the most open-minded foreigner can hardly, I think, now take any other interest in his voice than that aroused by his long history, for he has grown somewhat hoarse from ringing no less than 650 strokes at nine each evening for so many years.

The old clock shares with that of the Palais de Justice in Paris the honour of being the first in France. Guillaume Thibault and Guillaume Quesnel painted with fine gold and azure the face towards the Vieux Marche, which Olivier had made when he decorated both sides of the old Porte Massacre, and they set upon it the figures of the lamb and of the four evangelists. Its face was carved as it is now in the days of Francois Premier, and on its one hand is still seen the lamb of Rouen pointing to the hours. You must by no means omit to mount the tower and see the guardian wind it up, for the swing of its pendulum and the simplicity of its internal arrangements will be of the greatest interest. The astronomical part, showing the phases of the moon, is quite modern, and is set in a separate place just behind the clock-face. As you turn into the belfry out of the arch or arcade you are actually walking on the old ramparts of the city; and on the wall you may read the number of strokes rung to mark disaster in each portion of the town, two for St. Sever, six for St. Gervais, one for Mont Riboudet, and so forth. From the topmost gallery look out at the many towers and spires which even now rise in such profusion above the roofs of Rouen St. Pierre du Chastel, St. Eloi, the front of the Palais de Justice with the Tour St. Laurent beyond, St. Ouen looking (to my mind) far finer from that point of vantage than the Cathedral, which almost hides the delicate beauties of St. Maclou. Just below you is the Hotel de Ville, and the courtyard which M. Detancourt filled with queer mythology in various stages of undress, “pour son agrément,” says the guide. To east and west runs the great arm of the river, with that amphitheatre of hills which holds the town pressed against the outside of the bow like an arrow-head ready to be launched, and on the left of Mont St. Catherine you see the Darnetal valley where every siege of Rouen had its natural beginning. If you are fortunate enough to find one still alive who saw the seventeenth summer of this century, Le Pere Pepin will show you too the “tinterelles” presented by the Sieur de Mon in 1713, which hang round Cache Ribaut to strike the hours; and the sun and moon, which are set in their old place again above the pavilion.

I have already mentioned the name of Jacques Lelieur. His chief fame rests on the admirable plan he made in 1525 of the water-supply of Rouen, and incidentally of many of her streets. In Lelieur’s map, which is a fascinating mixture of plan and elevation, the Porte Massacre (in the Rue de la Grosse Horloge), is shown to be separated from the Hotel de Ville by a few shops. Two years after his drawing was made the great gate (which had shown signs of weakness a century before) was taken down and the present vaulted archway begun, which was finished in 1529. Miss James has made for me a careful drawing of the central panel of the entrados, which is now just above the street, and shows the Good Shepherd (which was, no doubt, suggested by the lamb in the arms of Rouen), copied from the seal of the Drapers’ Company. “Pastor bonus,” says the legend, “animam suam ponit pro ovibus suis.” Within the semicircular panel on each side are more sheep pasturing in a landscape, and on all the strapwork, or “bandeaux,” are carved delicate arabesques. The “pavilion,” with its high roof above it, holds the famous clock of Jehan de Felanis.

Besides the belfry and the archway of the clock, there was a public fountain set on this same spot ever since Charles VII. turned out the English. The oldest of these fountains in Rouen, drawn from the famous spring of Gaalor, had been in the Priory of St. Lo. The next was that set up by the Franciscans on the site of Rollo’s castle, and for two centuries the pipe of this “Fontaine des Cordeliers” passed close by the belfry, before it struck the Town Council that it might be well to provide water supply for citizens near the Vieux Marche, both in case of fire, and for other obvious reasons. So by 1458, the Cordeliers having been duly “approached” on the subject, the “Fontaine de Massacre” was established at the foot of the belfry, and is drawn by Lelieur as a Gothic pyramid with five sides, as tall as the arcade. It showed signs of extreme dilapidation by the eighteenth century, and the wags wrote squibs about the broken statues of the Virgin and bishops by Pol Mansellement (or Mosselmen, see Chap. X.), in elegiacs as imperfect as their subject. So the Duke of Montmorency-Luxemburg, the Governor of Rouen and Normandy in 1728, magnanimously offered for the restoration of the fountains all those three thousand livres which the échevins had presented to him in a purse of cloth of gold. The affair progressed thenceforward with due solemnity. M. de Boze, “Intendant des devises et Inscriptions des edifices royaux,” wrote from Paris that the authorities of Rouen were to decorate their new fountain with the loves of Alpheus and Arethusa, because, said he, “the Seine (which is Alpheus) comes from Burgundy and Champagne to your fountain in Rouen (which is Arethusa), to bear their mingled waters to the sea, by which is typified your fidelity to the King to whom the monument is to be dedicated.” So the name of “Ludovicus XV.” duly appears with that of “Franciscus Fredericus Montmorencius”; and mention is made of the allegory of Arethusa and Alpheus as aforesaid: “Quorum fluctus amor dat esse pérennes.” The first sketch was made by the King’s painter, and being much approved of by the worthy Mayor Coquerel, was executed in stone by Jean Pierre de France, “architect, sculpteur et entrepreneur,” for the sum of 5700 livres, as agreed upon in August 1733. In 1794 the whole was considerably mutilated; but in 1846 M. Cheruel put all in order as you see it to this day, and completed the strange harmonious mixture of buildings dating from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century.

As I have already noted, the first “Hotel Commune de la Ville” was set near the Porte Massacre, close by the Town Belfry, with the vanished church of Notre Dame de la Ronde as its first municipal chapel. It probably stood just where the Hotel du Nord is now, when Henry Plantagenet granted the citizens of Rouen their earliest charter of municipal independence. The second “Town-hall” was that fief of the Count of Leicester on the opposite side of the street, which Philip Augustus gave to the burgesses in 1220 at an annual rental of forty livres, and it remained in a state of primitive simplicity for more than two centuries.

In 1525 Jacques Lelieur, tracing the course of the spring Gaalor shows three large buildings on the old fief of Leicester, bigger than anything near them, with a Rez de chaussee, two stories above, and a third in the roof, the ground floor being arranged for open shops, with the principal entrance at one side. Lelieur himself is shown (as may be seen in his small view of Rouen which I have reproduced) offering his manuscript to four municipal officers seated round their council-table, with a clerk at a side-desk. The walls at the right and at the back are panelled, and decorated on the left with fleurs de lys.

The third Hotel de Ville was built when the old shops of the Rue de la Grosse Horloge began to tumble down. In June 1607 the first stone was laid according to the plans of Jacques Gabriel. By 1658 Gomboust’s map of Rouen shows that the façade on the street was finished. It was in the Italian style with “rusticated” blocks of stone, and had round arcades on the ground floor for shops. The building originally formed a square, and the retreating angle may still be seen northwards from the Rue de la Grosse Horloge. In the centre of the courtyard was a statue of Louis XIV.; a chapel stood at the north-east with a pyramidal steeple of wood covered with lead. A fountain was placed at the east end (no doubt supplied by the old “puits"). In 1705 the entry upon the Grosse Horloge was opened by Jacques Monthieu, just where the Passage de l’Hotel de Ville is to-day. In 1796 the whole building was sold to various proprietors for 72,000 livres.

Though it is very degraded in its present state, you can still see the Doric and Ionic pilasters in couples, and the heavy circular tops alternating with triangles above the windows; and though all those parts of the decoration which jutted out have been destroyed, there is still a massive dignity about the building that would have thoroughly justified its better preservation. In any case the municipal authorities might have had some memory of the traditions of the old centre of their civic life, before they moved to the commonplace erections on the north side of the Abbey Church of St. Ouen.

So, though little but the foundations remain of the original Hotel de Ville in the Rue de la Grosse Horloge, yet the stones of its successor are still there, and the belfry that rang out its messages is much more than a name; so I have thought it convenient to attach to them a few memories of the people of Rouen as they lived in the days before the great changes of the sixteenth century. In my next two chapters I shall have to pause for a moment over the English siege, and the death of Jeanne d’Arc, but the tenth chapter will deal with a few of the numberless churches of the town, and the eleventh with that Palais de Justice which is the triumphant signal that the sixteenth century had begun. If I am to give you, then, a glimpse, however short, of the people themselves in earlier years before they are overshadowed by the great names of prelates and of princes, this will be my last opportunity.

If any Norman were asked what was the most valuable of the privileges which he possessed by right of citizenship in the earliest times, I suppose he would answer without hesitation that it was the Charte aux Normands, that confirmation, granted by Louis X. in 1315, of the old “Custom of Normandy” ascribed by tradition to Rollo and traced by record to William the Conqueror. It was also called the “clameur de haro,” and affectionate antiquarians derive the word from the “Ha Rou!” with which a suppliant cried to the first pirate duke that “wrong was being done.” It is no mere artifice of fiction that this same consecrated phrase might have been heard among the Englishmen of the Channel Islands early in the nineteenth century, and even to this hour, that cry of “Haro! Haro! a l’aide mon prince, on me fait tort!” preserves the custom of Normandy, and of Rollo the Dane, in Jersey, so that the sound of it “makes the workman drop his tools, the woman her knitting, the militiaman his musket, the fisherman his net, the schoolmaster his birch, and the écrivain his babble, to await the judgment of the Royal Court.”

It was soon after this confirmation of their ancient rights of justice, that the citizens lost for a time the privileges of their mayoralty owing to a financial dispute in 1320, which necessitated the intervention of the King. The second epoch in the history of the commune began, and penalties were adjudged for all cases of misdemeanour or of shirking office. The equal, in Court-precedence, to a Count, the Mayor of Rouen was not merely the head of the Town Council, but sovereign-judge in matters of goods or of inheritance, with his own court and guards and prisons. On Christmas Day, to the sound of “Rouvel’s” welcome, he marched in state to the Hotel de Ville, surrounded by his peers and counsellors and sergeants, all in livery with wands of office. But the Mayor was not allowed to collect his rates from the citizens unfairly, and the dispute which followed Thomas du Bosc’s attempt to levy the Gabelle, or tax upon salt, led once more to Royal intervention the King “put the communes under his hand” as the phrase went, until the quarrel had been settled. The importance of the salt trade in Rouen has been already noticed, and the little salt-porter carved upon the Church of St. Vincent, and now looking out from the south-east angle over the Rue Jeanne d’Arc, is a sign that the same trade lasted for some centuries later in the development of Rouen’s commerce.

It was not merely in peaceful ways that the expansion of the civic power may be traced at this time. For the long-drawn misery of the Hundred Years’ War began in 1337, and nine years afterwards the King had to hurry to Rouen to oppose the advance of Edward III., who was already at Caen and threatened the capital of Normandy. All the woods of Bihorel, says the chronicler sadly, had to be cut down to make “hedges and palisades” around the menaced city. After the defeat of Cressy, the men of Rouen had a still sharper taste of the realities of war, for the militia of the town, who had been hurried forward to reinforce the broken army of the King, while their comrades at home were strengthening the defences of Rouen, came up with an English regiment near Abbeville, and contributed a heavy share to that loss of “six thousand men of the communes” which Froissart chronicles.

That the town stood in grave need of all these warlike preparations, as well against internal disorders as against enemies from without, may be imagined from the disquieting scenes of 1356, when King John came to the castle with a hundred men-at-arms, and arrested with his own hands Charles lé Mauvais, King of Navarre, and four of his suite who were falsely accused of treason. The Count of Harcourt, the Sire de Graville, Maubue de Mainnemare, and Colinet Doublet, were all beheaded on the Champ du Pardon that night in April, while the King looked on. The resistance of the citizens to this high-handed act of injustice was only quelled by the spreading of the news of the King’s presence. But Philip, the brother of the King of Navarre (who had been sent to prison near Cambrai), took instant vengeance by ravaging the suburbs of Rouen, and calling in the Duke of Lancaster’s English troops. It was in resisting this allied attack that the French King was beaten and taken prisoner at Poitiers. As soon as Charles lé Mauvais got his freedom, two years later, he returned to rehabilitate the memory of his friends in Rouen. The body of the Count of Harcourt had been secretly removed from the public gibbet by his family. The three other corpses were taken down and borne to the Cathedral with great ceremony, where their innocence of treason was solemnly proclaimed. Excited by this open defiance of authority, the populace of the town rose against the Dauphin’s men, seized the castle, and destroyed the Priory of St. Gervais with which they had a private quarrel of their own on the burning question of taxes. The commune only secured amnesty for its offences, and reconciliation with the Regent, by paying 3000 florins as a fine.

No doubt the revolt had had some obscure connection with the horrible excesses of the Jacquerie which at the same moment had been desolating Paris. The disorderly bands of ruffians who had been discharged from the French army were, at any rate, a direct source of annoyance to Rouen later on, as indeed they were to almost every town in France in that unhappy time, and Bertrand du Guesclin himself had to come to Rouen in 1364 to organise the army that finally crushed these licentious freebooters, and their ally, the King of Navarre, at Cocherel.

Ever since the middle of the thirteenth century, frequent references occur in the records of the town to the various trades that, in spite of every drawback, continued slowly to progress towards riches and consolidation. Though the early commerce with England now died down, home industries flourished, and of them all, the making of woollen draperies soon became the pre-eminent commerce of the town, which in 1362 signalised the fact by placing the lamb or sheep upon its civic seal, which henceforth appears upon the arms of the town, and is also placed so prominently on the archway of the Grosse Horloge. Rabelais will tell you of the prosperous merchants who bought flocks of sheep from farmers like Dindenault, to make the “bons fins draps de Rouen,” for Pantagruel and Panurge journeyed with Epistemon, Eusthenes, and Carpalim to Rouen from Paris, on their way to take ship at Honnefleur, and they will explain to you (for I cannot) why the towns that grow so thickly round the capital become more sparsely scattered towards the sea, and in their excellent company you may appreciate the gallantry of Eusthenes towards the Norman ladies, and even savour faintly, as from afar, the bouquet of that Vin blanc d’Anjou which Pantagruel bought in some old hostelry beside the Eau de Robec. “Mouton de Rouen,” says the old proverb, “qui a toujours la patte levee,” and her sons were ever ready from the earliest years to go their ways, “gaaignant,” through all the trade-routes of Europe, where French and Spanish wines were to be bought and sold. And beyond them too; for in 1364 they had joined the mariners of Dieppe in an expedition to the far Canaries, and even helped towards a little settlement upon the coast of Africa, from which the good ship “Notre Dame de Bon Voyage” brought home a cargo of pepper, ivory, and gold-dust that caused much speculation on the quays of Rouen. In 1380 a few actual forts were set upon the Guinea Coast, under the command of that brave Norman admiral, Jean de Bethencourt, the chamberlain of Charles VI., who styled himself the King of the Canaries (most fascinating of titles!) before he died in 1425.

But even commercial enterprise could not save the city from the ravages of the Black Death. In 1379 it swept over the town, and carried off an enormous number of the bread-winners, for the extent of Rouen had now almost widened to the lines of the modern boulevards, and its population had steadily increased from the 50,000 of a century before. The plague had left a famine in its tracks, and as a “rich city,” Rouen had been severely taxed for the necessities of war, so that when the regents of the young King ground down the citizens with more oppression and ill-considered taxes, there is small wonder that their patience came suddenly to an end, and they burst into open revolt in February 1381. These exactions came upon the citizens with a double sting. For not only were they exhausted by previous misery, but the good King Charles had upon his death-bed remitted these excessive imports, and left his heart to the Cathedral in token of his eternal goodwill to the town of Rouen, where he had so often sojourned. So the explosion of popular indignation was instantaneous and terrible. While “Rouvel” clanged wildly from the belfry of the town, the citizens attacked the tax-gatherers, upset their offices, tore in pieces their tax-rolls, and then closed the city-gates and put up the chains across the end of every street.

In a tumultuous and cheering crowd, the citizens poured towards the centre of their civic life, in the Rue de la Grosse Horloge; Robert Deschamps, the Mayor, was put to instant flight for daring to give halting counsels, and his private prisons were broken open. “No King can make the people,” cried the mob, “but we are going to make a King,” and forthwith they seized on poor honest Jehan lé Gras, a quiet, seemly draper; they robed him in a cloak that had just served its turn in the last Mystery Play, and they bore him in raucous triumph to the open square before St. Ouen. “I forthwith abolish the taxes!” stuttered the royal phantom in high dismay, while his subjects cheered vociferously, and every market-place roared approbation. “I deliver up the tax-gatherers to justice!” and in a trice every tax-gatherer, and Jew, and usurer, and fiscal agent was haled towards the bridge and there beheaded, till the Seine ran red beneath. “I deliver up your cruel Mayors to justice!” went on the quavering monarch, and forthwith five miserable men who had once been mayors of Rouen, fled from the Rue du Grand Pont, from the Rue Damiette, and from the Rue aux Gantiers, and took shelter in the nearest cemeteries, while their burning houses lighted up the town. “I deliver up the proud monks of St. Ouen to justice!” continued poor Jehan lé Gras, seeing that the mob had already begun to batter in the monastery gates, and in a moment more the archives and the ancient charters of the privileges of St. Ouen were in tatters on the ground, or burning among the desecrated walls they had protected for so many centuries. In his death-agony the trembling abbot signed the renunciation of his powers, while the crowd screamed at him till he was borne back to die.

And now the mob was parted here and there by a procession of strong men who bore something with great pride and mystery, and held it, enveloped from all harm, above their heads. A whisper went round that grew at last into a shout of welcome and drowned all other sounds. “The Charter of the Normans! Hats off to the Charter! God bless the good King Louis! God save the Charter!” From the inmost shrine of the Cathedral, where it was kept beside the relics of St. Romain, the famous charter had been brought by four burgesses, bareheaded, upon a stand with golden feet. For seven and sixty years it had remained in holy keeping, with the great green seal of Louis X. hanging from its yellow parchment, and now the dean followed it into the streets with all his trembling canons behind him. There was business to be done with them too, and they knew it only too well. “The Chapter will forthwith renounce,” says Jehan lé Gras, “that rent of 300 livres on the market-halls of Rouen; you will sign the deed or take the consequences.” So they signed, and the crowd passed on breathlessly to the next entertainment; for on a scaffold hastily erected, there stood the King’s Bailli, Thomas Poignant, reading (much against his will) the provisions of the sacred charter, while the crowd waited with pickaxes and hammers ready to rush and pull down his house at the least sign of hesitation.

So in a silence that was filled with possibilities, and broken only by the sound of the indefatigable “Rouvel,” who continued tolling feverishly night and day, the sentences of the charter of Normandy echoed over the square before St. Ouen, and when it was ended all the company swore upon the sacred cross to keep it faithfully, the royal draper first, then what few remnants of civic magistracy were present, then the canons and the whole clergy of the town, then the men of law, and lastly every citizen in sight. Before night ended all the bloody doings of the day, the gibbet of St. Ouen (called the “fourches Patibulaires”) had been torn down and burnt at Bihorel, and a solemn oath of amnesty for all acts of violence was exacted from every one who had suffered from the outrages of the mob, and at last poor Jehan lé Gras was allowed to go home to his shop, without the faintest notion of what all the uproar had been about, and very thankful to give up his royalty and be an ordinary draper as before.

Unfortunately the crowd, drunk with success, did not cease their riot with the deposition of their King. The next morning they attacked the castle Philip Augustus had set up in the Place Bouvreuil. But the garrison repulsed them; Jean de Vienne, High Admiral of France, brought troops into the town; the King’s Commissioners were sent down in haste with reinforcements, and heads began to fall with startling rapidity on the scaffold in the Vieux Marche, for the town prisons were choked with the rebels who had been arrested. To all demands for pardon, the quieter sort of the inhabitants were ruthlessly told, “Go to your own King, Jehan lé Gras, and let him save you.” But the worthy draper had taken care to fly from Rouen as soon as he could get out of his house, for he found the pains of royalty far outweighed its privileges. At last when Easter Eve dawned on a most unhappy town, news came that the young King with his uncles the Regents was waiting at Pont de l’Arche and would only enter armed and by a breach, into the town which had rebelled against him.

So they battered down the walls by the Porte Martainville, and the wives and mothers and sisters of the men condemned to death in prison helped the work, weeping at their task; and as they wrought, it was sure some woman’s heart that had the sweet imagination to deck the town with joyous emblems, that so, by the mercy of God this young monarch of only thirteen years might perchance be moved to compassion, and bethink him of their former loyalty. So when the King came in, his eyes lighted only upon banners, and tapestries, and evergreens; and flowers fell upon him from the windows, and the leaves of the forest strewed the roads beneath him, and from every corner came the cry of “Noel, Noel, long live the King!” The welcome had at first been the desperate cry of people in sore straits; but at the sight of the boy himself, it turned into a genuine shout of admiration, for, says the chronicle, “he was of sovereign beauty both in face and body, and full of loving-kindness, and sweet charity, insomuch that all men who saw him were in great joy and love of him.”

But the Duke of Anjou would not allow the young King’s feelings to be moved; and it was the Duke who as they passed the belfry bade “Rouvel” to be taken down, because he had rung out the signal for revolt. Yet the cries of “Noel, Noel!” continued every step of the progress through the town, until they gave way to a silence that had an even greater effect upon the impressionable boy. For he was welcomed at the great western gate of the Cathedral by the Archbishop Guillaume de Lestrange, and by him was led before the sepulchre in which the heart of Charles V. lay buried, bearing testimony for ever to his love for Rouen. Then the King remembered how his father, each holy week, had signed many pardons, in memory of the God who had pardoned in those days the sins of the whole world. So he spoke the words of deliverance to Lestrange beside him, while the population crowded, still terror-stricken and uncertain of their fate, into the Cathedral, and filled its aisles with anxious faces, and climbed upon the pillars to try and get some view of the little King near the altar, upon whose will so many lives depended. Then at last appeared the Archbishop, standing high where all might see him, and as he read the words of pardon which had just received the royal signature, you may imagine how the roof rang with a greater “Noel,” a louder “Vive lé Roi” than ever had sounded in the Cathedral before.

From every prison and jail in the city the prisoners were hurried to the Mother-church; with their fetters still upon them they fell on their knees and thanked God and the King for their deliverance, while their families hung round their necks and sobbed for joy to see them again alive. It was that moment on the eve of the great festival when all the bells of Rouen began to herald the coming of Easter. The great paschal candle had been lit in the Cathedral, and as the Archbishop turned from the joyful throng before him to the King still standing by the altar-steps, he welcomed the beginning of a reign that was blessed by the giving of such happiness. And as the people crowded noisily out into the Parvis, and each wife took her husband home again, few thought of the misery, and the madness worse than death, that was coming upon the young King who had set the prisoners free.

There is one more tale, a very different one, that I must tell of this same life of the people round the belfry of the Grosse Horloge, if only to give you the contrast of the dealings of Louis XI. with the good citizens of Rouen, and to emphasise the moral of their sturdy independence. For though the commune was practically suppressed, in spite of the King’s pardon, and though the results of this famous “Revoke de la Harelle” were felt until the society in which it had occurred had almost ceased to be, yet the character of the burgesses remained the same under whatever laws they lived, and their freedom of opinion continued under every rule. So that when every door in the Rue de la Grosse Horloge flew open on a morning in 1490, when every shop was filled with gossips eager for the news, and even “Rouvel” himself was tingling faintly with suppressed excitement, you might be sure that another royal attempt was being made upon the liberty of these touchy subjects. And indeed a most astonishing thing had happened. For a horseman of the King had suddenly spurred hot-foot through the town, and alighted at the shop of Maitre Jehan lé Tellier, with the stupefying request for the hand of his only daughter Alice in marriage, by virtue of the King’s command signed and sealed in his pocket. The belfry-fountain was humming like a swarm of bees as all the chambermaids and goodwives in the street rushed up to fill their pitchers at the very moment when Le Tellier’s housemaid happened to be filling hers.

But the loudest in outcry of them all was a young merchant whose shop happened to be opposite, and whose complaints against these outrages on civic independence and unwarrantable extensions of the royal prerogative would have warmed the heart of the most crabbed constitutional lawyer. His appeals to the sacred charter of Normandy were far louder than the rest, his invocations of the sanctity of the paternal tie far shriller. “What right,” he cried, “had this Louis XI. to reward the ruffians of his Court with pretty girls and dowries when his royal purse was empty? What had made him choose Rouen, of all towns, for so unjustifiable a caprice?” As a matter of fact, it was about the worst choice he could have made, and Madame Estiennotte about the most unlikely mother he could have picked out for the prosperity of his experiment. She began by putting off the horseman until her husband should come back from market, and the moment his back was turned, she flew down the street to the Hotel de Ville, with half her neighbours at her heels, and laid the King’s letter before the Town Councillors. Many of them were at once appalled by the royal seals and sign-manual. But fortunately, one, Roger Gouel, spoke up for the ancient privileges of the charter, loudly proclaimed that the business was not one of the public weal, but of private concern to Dame Estiennotte alone, and avowed himself her champion. It was perhaps lucky for Councillor Gouel that Tristan l’Hermite was out of the way, but the citizens were soon ready with their plan.

Desile was bidden to Le Tellier’s house, and met there, somewhat to his embarrassment, the entire regiment of the worthy merchant’s relatives, including the girl’s great uncle, Abbe Viote, one of the Cathedral dignitaries, who eyed him with a sanctimonious calm that gave him his first tremor of uncertainty. Demoiselle Alice was formally summoned into the family gathering, and announced her intention of remaining single with all the innocent and unaffected purity of a novice at a convent. After which, Madame presented the disappointed suitor with a letter for the King, wherein was duly set forth how that “she had received the royal letter asking for the hand of her daughter in marriage for the King’s squire; that as for herself and her family, both themselves and their goods were at the service of His Majesty; that unfortunately her husband had not yet returned from market, and therefore other answer was as yet impossible save that her daughter in presence of the family had declared her unwillingness to marry; that she prayed God to bless His Majesty with long and happy life, and was his humble and obedient servant, Estiennotte, wife of Jehan lé Tellier.”

The wrath of King Louis, the sarcasms of Tristan l’Hermite, the laughter of Olivier lé Daim; these things you must imagine for yourself, when that letter was read before His Majesty. But the fact remains that other and more pressing business called Desile away to foreign wars, and Demoiselle Alice consoled herself for her royally appointed suitor by giving distinct encouragement to the merchant opposite who had laid such stress upon the inviolable privileges of the “Charte aux Normands.” The story went the round of Rouen, from the Rue du Hallage to the Hotellerie des Bons Enfants and back again, and you can almost hear its echoes still in that old Rouen

“des vieux pignons aigus
comme des épines dorsales
Bombant les angles contigues
Sur les solives tranversales.
Les logis causent de tout près,
Et l’ombre leur est coutumière,
On jurerait qu’ils font exprès
De manquer d’air et lumiere.”

And you will pardon me that for a moment I have listened to that muttered gossip, to the scandal that one old roof-tree whispered to another whilst it leant across the narrow street, as some old woman mumbles secrets to her neighbour with bleared eyes winking beneath her shaggy brows. There was far more talking in the streets then than there is now, especially in such crowded little passage-ways as this old Rue du Hallage, a corruption from the Maison du Haulage where taxes on the corporations and on goods sold in the market-halls were levied. For in the fourteenth century for the 228,000 inhabitants of Paris there were only twenty-four “hotels” and eighty-six “taverns,” and the similar disproportion in Rouen was only made up for, in the case of the “genuine traveller,” by the unstinted hospitality of such monasteries and hospitals as those at St. Catherine, St. Vivien, or St. Martin.

But the taverns or wine-shops did a roaring trade. On their benches the burgesses sat every afternoon discussing business matters with their lawyers over the light “vin du pays,” or bought a few bottles of the “vin de choix,” which was the recognised offering to preachers, judges, councillors, and kings alike. It was, in fact, no bad thing to be the advocate in a case when a rich monastery was concerned, for the Abbey of St. Gervais records about this time that it gave its judges and lawyers in one very critical lawsuit, a dinner at their favourite hotel, comprising fish and pears and meat and hypocras (no less!) and ginger and sugar and a hundred oysters. Not in that order let us hope, though the bowels of men of law are traditionally tough, and the hospitality of the intention is undoubted.

Till the end of the fifteenth century mine host was called the “Seigneur” of his sign, as the “Seigneur de l’Ours, Seigneur de la Fleur de Lys;” and though by the close of the sixteenth century we still find a “Dame de la Croix Rouge” for the hostess, her husband had become (I quote from the accounts in the Archevêché) “maitre du Pilier vert,” or “maitre de l’Ecrevisse.” But even earlier than the fifteenth century it was already possible to get good lodging for the night at an hotel in Rouen, for a contract of 1395 has been preserved, made between Guillaume Blanc-bastón and Guillaume Marc to furnish forth a hostelry, much as we may imagine the Hotel des Bons Enfants was furnished in its youth. “Four casks of good wine at ten livres,” says this document; “twelve good beds with twenty-four pairs of sheets; eight cups and a goblet with a silver foot; a dozen ‘hanaps’ of pewter,” with pots and pans and pewter dishes innumerable.

In such an old courtyard as this of the “Bons Enfants,” with its overhanging balcony, and queerly managed stables, or in other old inns like N Rue des Matelas, or N Rue Étoupée with its charming “signboard,” men sat and talked of their various trades, the cobbler, for instance, who is carved on the Cathedral stalls, with the clog-maker, and the wool-comber, and the carpenter, all met and gossiped of their latest piece of profitable business, while the lawyers discussed the never-ending question of the Privilege de St. Romain with some learned clerk over their “vin blanc d’Anjou.” By the fourteenth century the list of the prisoners released by the Cathedral Chapter begins to be very full and detailed, and we can quite imagine what was talked about in every tavern of the town as Ascension-tide drew near.

In 1360, for example, the King’s Mint was already established in the Rue St. Eloi, and you may still see it at N in that street as you go up on the right hand from the river to the Place St. Eloi. The “Hotel des Monnaies” has been all whitewashed over, but there is a strong and ancient look about the windows on the street façade that warns you to go through the little passage-way, to find the soldiers of the Douane lounging about the courtyard inside. On the back of the houses that look out upon the street you will see the arms and cipher of Francois Premier, which show that in his days the Mint still remained in a house that was far older. And in 1360 the “Officer of the Mint of the parish of St. Eloi,” who quarrelled about the price of his chicken in the Parvis, “voulait avoir de la poulaille a son pris.” He must have done his bargaining in very strong language, for one of the three brothers Sautel who kept the shop, smote him that he died, and it was to these brothers that the privilege of raising the Fierté St. Romain with pardon for this crime, was in that year granted.

Only three years afterwards, Blanche, Dowager-Queen of France, had laid her hand by way of justice upon Jehan lé Bourgeois of Neufchatel in spite of the fact that his murder had been pardoned by the canons’ Privilege de St. Romain; and from this case, and the following one in 1391, it appears that the pardon given to a prisoner involved that (apart from “civil” restitutions) he was released from any “criminal” fine that might have been laid on him, and was of right to be restored to all offices and goods held by him previous to his arrest. More than this, the Bailli of Rouen was not allowed to condemn any prisoner at all during the month that intervened between the “insinuation of the privilege” and the actual ceremony of the pardon; the “insinuation” being the technical word for the annual formality by which the legal authorities were informed that the Chapter would inquire into the various prisons of the town, and proceed to make their choice before Ascension. In one case a prisoner condemned to death (Robert Auberbosc in 1299) was only just saved (though he was not finally chosen for the Fierté) at the last moment from the gallows, whither he had been taken during this sacred period, contrary to the rights of the chapter; and again in 1361 the Bailli had actually executed a man in the same interval before the canons knew, or could prevent it; and he was then and there solemnly excommunicated until full amendment had been made, for that he had been so wicked as to “violer lé previlege et libertés de l’eglise de Rouen, en vitupère de la dicte église et de Monsieur St. Romain.”

The first woman to whom the famous privilege was accorded was Guillemette Gomont in 1380, of whom nothing is recorded; but in the next year strangely enough another woman carried the Fierté, by name Jehanne Helart, the wife of Robert Cariel, who had slain Jehan Vengier; and in 1388 Estiennotte de Naples, who had been brought from Louvier to marry Guillaume Luart, of the parish of St. Vincent in Rouen, was pardoned by the Chapter in spite of having murdered her husband. In this example, as in many others, to our modern eyes, the motives which persuaded the canons to pardon the criminal they chose are scarcely intelligible, and I can only imagine that the key to the tragedy has been lost in most of such cases. But it is the women who are at the bottom of nearly all recorded crime in the long story of the Fierté, and when they are themselves chosen it is often at the end of a drama that surpasses in interest all the tales of mere masculine malefactors in the most interesting criminal record I have ever seen. I shall have occasion to speak of them later. For the present I can only take note of the cases that have been most prominent before the time of the English siege.

The ceremony of the “Levee de la Fierté” did not invariably meet with the approval of the people, as may be seen from the last case I have room to quote from this period. In 1394 Jehan Maignart, of the parish of St. Maclou, murdered Rogier lé Veautre, with the assistance of two accomplices, Pierre Robert and Jehan Marie. After the procession of the public pardon on Ascension Day was over, the members of the Confrérie of St. Romain were leading Maignart in triumph through the streets of Rouen, with a wreath of roses on his head, when suddenly a poor woman appeared at the corner of the Rue de l’Ecole, and screamed to the prisoner that he was a disloyal traitor; praying St. Romain that for his next crime he would not escape the hanging that was his due, for that now he was only screening the true criminals from punishment. The indignant Chapterhouse were only prevailed upon to overlook the crime of insulting their released prisoner by the full repentance of this woman. But “the Law” had heard her too, and it laid its hand promptly on the two accomplices. The canons instantly objected, and a valuable precedent was created by the decision of the King, before whom the final appeal of the case was laid. By the royal charter, signed in February 1395, the full privileges of the canons were upheld. The procès-verbal still exists upon a roll of parchment fairly written, nine feet in length, with the evidence of eighty-seven witnesses. The canons laid down (1) their right to the pardon; (2) its origin in the miracle of St. Romain, who “prinst et mist en subjection un grant serpent où draglon qui estoit environ Rouen”; (3) the sacredness with which this commemoration should be preserved; (4, 5, 6, 7, 8) the various details of the formality to be observed from the “insinuation,” the suspension of all capital punishment till Ascension, the visiting of the prisons, and the choice of the criminal, to the public procession; (9, and most important) the prisoner is pardoned for every crime he confesses to the canons, not only the one for which he is then in prison, but all previous ones; he is restored to his heritage and his good fame; and all his accomplices in sin are to enjoy the same full pardon (with its consequences) as himself.

It had been recognised as early as 1269 that all previous crimes were pardoned, for the act of pardon granted by the bailli to Nicole Lecordier in that year speaks of him as “délivre franc et quite de tous forfes ... quielz qil soient, del tens en arrière jusques au jor dui.” And by 1446 the charter of Charles VII., which is still preserved in the archives of the Cathedral, announces in May of that year that the prisoner who raises the Fierté “est absolz du cas pour lé quel il l’a levee et de tous crismes precedents.” So that we reach the astonishing proposition that the Chapterhouse of Rouen enjoyed a far greater power than even the royal prerogative of mercy, which only pardoned a specified crime; whereas the Chapterhouse by a kind of baptism and regeneration from sin, started their prisoner afresh on a new life without any reference to his past misdeeds. What this involved I shall show when opportunity arises; but the release of the accomplices as well as the prisoner was an even more extraordinary extension of powers. It had already taken place before this test case, in a tavern brawl in 1370, in the crime of two drapers in 1356, and in a very important example when Guillaume Yon with another man of Pavilly were released after the slaying of a butcher; and the Seigneur d’Esneval gave sworn testimony that when a friend of the dead butcher publicly called the accomplice in the crime “a murderer,” that accomplice would have been delivered up to justice if the principal had not carried the Fierté. The retrospective action of the pardon on the principal also extended to his accomplices, who began life afresh just as he did. And this extension was solemnly confirmed at the inquiry, from which I have just quoted. There is no doubt, however, that so excessive a “prolongation” of the powers of pardon cannot have been allowed throughout the whole history of the Fierté; for public opinion could scarcely have permitted a gang of ruffians every year to return to the full privileges enjoyed by their more honest comrades. So at the end of the fifteenth, and again at the end of the sixteenth century, we find it laid down that only those crimes named by the prisoner should be pardoned, if the Chapter thought fit, and that only those accomplices who appeared with him in the procession should share in his pardon.

It was only in April 1407 that this long appeal was finally decided in favour of the two accomplices of Maignart, who bore the Fierté thirteen years before. But the Chapterhouse took good care that so much tedious and costly legal work should not be thrown away, and the strength of the precedents and charters they secured at this time was never entirely lost while the “Privilege” existed in Rouen at all.

There is only one other matter much concerning the life of the people at this period for which I have space left, and that is their Mystery Plays. Two celebrated instances occur in these years before the invasions of the English and the siege of Rouen. In November 1365 the King gave two hundred crowns of gold to a troupe of “dancers and musicians” who had played before him at the castle in the Place Bouvreuil. In 1374 the Confrérie de la Passion was instituted at the Church of St. Patrice, and on Holy Thursday held a procession in which all the instruments of the Passion of Christ were carried through the streets by children in the garb of angels. The Mystery that followed was given by the direct sanction of the Church in presence of the King, and in 1476 these representations became a regular annual performance, and the Confrérie had developed by 1543 into a strong rival of that more famous Confrérie de la Conception, or Puy des Palinods, of which I have already traced the beginning, in the verses of Robert Wace.

The first of these old Mystery Plays had been merely copies of those Fêtes de l’Église, of which I have spoken in suggesting the origin of the ceremonial at the Levee de la Fierté St. Romain, and were in fact “tableaux vivants” of the religious office. Then dialogues were added, and the “Drame Liturgique” appeared within the churches themselves. But the inevitable element of caricature and buffoonery soon necessitated an “outside show.” The traces of this transition may be seen in the Chapterhouse Records of Rouen. In 1451, for example, the Christmas mystery is performed “cessantibus tamen stulticiis et insolenciis,” and in 1457 “ordinaverunt quod misterium pastorum fiat isto festo nativitatis decenter in cappis.” The “jeux de Fous” had been forbidden by the Town Council in 1445 to be held in the churches, and so was the “Procession de l’Ane” (from which the anthem “Orientis partibus adventavit asinus” has been so often quoted) with its prophets and sibyls, and the poet Virgil.

But in 1374 the Confrérie de la Passion led their procession in all solemnity on the fête day of St. Patrice from his church to the parish of their warden, and all the poor school children went before, and the last twelve wardens followed after, each leading a beggar man by the hand, whose feet they washed during the performance of their Mystery. And this continued until 1636. The last written “Mystère du Lavement des Pieds” that exists was by one Nicolle Mauger, who laboured under the disadvantage of living in the same century with Corneille.