The Siege of Rouen by Henry V

“War’s ragged pupils; many a wavering line
Torn from the dear fat soil of champaigns hopefully tilled,
Torn from the motherly bowl, the homely spoon,
To jest at famine....
Over an empty platter affect the merrily filled;
Die, if the multiple hazards around said die.”

The Mystery Plays which I have just mentioned in the last chapter were undertakings at once so solemn and so popular that I can give no better idea of coming trouble than is contained in the fact of the postponement of the Mystery arranged by the Confrérie de la Passion for 1410. On the 28th of March that year the sheriffs decided that, owing to the heavy obligations pressing on the town by reason of the quarrel with the Duke of Burgundy, and of the severe war-taxes depleting both private purses and public revenue, these entertainments must be given up. We find that this Confrérie was not to be put off in 1415, and even repeated its play at Pentecost thirty years later; but in 1410 their disappointment was only one of many signs of that disorder and poverty which finally laid Rouen open and defenceless before the English army.

Already, in 1383, commerce and industry had suffered cruelly from the municipal anarchy which followed the suppression of the commune, and from the heavy fines for its rebellion imposed by the King. It was not for more than three centuries that the famous mayor reappeared; and this is no solitary instance of such an obliteration in the country, for though French Communes actually began before the Free Boroughs of England, they had not any of the qualities of permanence they showed in the nation where antiquity is more traceable in institutions than in such buildings as are still scattered in profusion over France. Another quaint little episode that shows the uneasiness of the town occurred in 1405, and is to be found in the deliberations of the Hotel de Ville for the 27th of September. Before Guillaume de Bellengues, Captain of Rouen, and his council, the question was discussed of the arrival of a certain Spanish captain, Pedro Nino, Count of Buelna, from Harfleur. Seventeen days afterwards he came, and it is interesting to observe that, in spite of relations with Spain which had begun long previously, lasted until after Corneille’s day, and are still recorded in the name of the Rue des Espagnols, the good citizens of Rouen were very much upon their guard when Pedro Nino sailed up the Seine, and only allowed him to stay in their port and revictual on very hard conditions, one of which was the entire surrender of all offensive and defensive weapons. They also insisted on mooring his three galleys in a certain spot, keeping a strict guard over them, and not allowing any of his men in Rouen during the night.

It happens that the personality of Don Pedro is not unknown to us, from other sources, and the bombastic account written by his faithful squire, Gutierre de Gamez, has so many interesting points in it about Rouen at this date that I must refer to it, if only to bring out of its obscurity a book that is hardly known, and almost deserves to rank near the more famous and extended chronicle of the “Loyal Servitor” of Bayard. Without going at any length into a life which does not concern us, I may say briefly that after his education at the Court of Castile, which he is said to have owed to his descent from the royal house of France, Don Pedro was commissioned at twenty-five years of age to attack the Barbary Corsairs in the Western Mediterranean. Ever since Du Guesclin had deposed Pedro the Cruel, and placed Henry of Trastamare upon the throne of Castille, the alliance between that power and France remained a political tradition; and at about this time Charles VI. being at war with England, asked for help, with which Don Pedro was sent. He actually took a town in Cornwall, laid Portland under contribution, and burnt the town of Poole. Returning to Harfleur, he was prevented by contrary winds from again crossing the Channel, and therefore decided to sail up the Seine and winter at Rouen. The luxury of the French nobles was only one of the many reasons of the weakness and disaster of the nation, and Don Pedro’s voyage up the river seems to have been made pleasant to him by every chatelaine upon its banks, until he reached the Clos des Galées (which is rightly described in the “Victorial"), and met the somewhat gruff demands of the authorities of Rouen.

They must have very soon changed their opinions, however; indeed, from the fact that in July of that same year the welcome and the gifts offered to Louis, Duke of Orleans, by the sheriffs were entirely contrary to the wishes of the population, who had just rebelled against his taxes, we may infer that a friend of that Duke, as Don Pedro showed himself to be on visiting Paris a little later, was not likely to have long been treated with hostility or even indifference by the civic officials.

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that we soon hear of a love-affair in Rouen, and that too with the daughter of M. de Bellengues, the captain of the town himself. This lady had but just become a widow, after her marriage with Renaud de Trie, Admiral of France, which took place from the Hotel du Bec, before a large assembly of her father’s friends in their parish church of St. Lo, with sixteen “Farceurs” dancing before the procession to amuse the people. “She is too good-looking,” said the Captain, “for me to prevent anyone from seeing her;” and by this brilliant ceremony he gave a decisive check to the prevailing custom of secret weddings in a private chapel. The description of the Chateau of Serifontaine, near Rouen, where the gallant Don first met the old and sickly admiral and his pretty wife, is as complete as almost any other I have seen, as a picture of a great French nobleman’s house at the beginning of the fifteenth century.

I have no space to quote the “Victorial” unfortunately, and from its pages I can only hint at the abundance you may gather of the ordered beauty and quiet of the place; of the chapel with its band of wind-instruments and minstrels; of the gracious orchards and gardens by the stream; of the lake that could be drained at will, to choose the best fishes for the Admiral’s table; of the five and forty sporting dogs and the men who cleaned the kennels; of the long rows of stalls, each with its horse, in the spacious stables; of the falcons and their perches and their keepers; of the separate lodgings of my lady, joined to the main building by a drawbridge, and filled with dainty furniture. There, too, may be read how Madame went forth so soon as she had risen from her bed, with her ten maids-in-waiting, to a shrubbery where each sat in silence, with her rosary and her Book of Hours; how they then set to picking flowers till it was time for Mass; how breakfast followed, with chickens and roasted game upon a silver dish, and wine; how they all rode out together of an early afternoon, taking what gentlemen were there, and singing blithely till the fields echoed as with the songs of Paradise. Into this delightful abode the old Admiral had invited the sea-captain, who was a guest of Rouen. The Spaniard was welcomed with a banquet on his arrival, at which his host, too feeble now to ride or hunt, did the honours of his house right courteously, providing sweet music during all the dinner, and a ball afterwards, at which his wife danced for an hour with the gay Don Pedro. After a ride round the castle grounds the visitor went off to Paris, and can hardly have been surprised, when he returned to Rouen and found the Admiral had died, to receive a message from the pretty widow to come up and hear the news.

But the lovers were unlucky, for she might not wed again so soon after her widowhood, and he was under orders for the war, and had no permission for such dalliance from his master, the King of Castille. So he sailed away towards Harfleur, after many protestations of affection on each side, during an eclipse of the sun which came on as he left Rouen harbour, and much terrified his sailors. And the end of his little story is that he married Dona Béatrix of Portugal, and died in 1453; while Jeanne de Bellengues espoused as her second husband Louis Mallet de Graville, Sieur de Montagu, Grand-Master of the Arbaletriers of France, and died still in her youth, in 1419. She was buried in the chapel of the Trinity in Rouen Cathedral, and all her husband’s lands were confiscated by the English King. The intimate connection that existed at this time with Spain is exemplified again by the marriage of Robert de Bracquemont, who surrendered Pont de l’Arche to King Henry during the English advance on Rouen, with Inez de Mendoza, daughter of a high functionary at the Court of Castille, where he had been the French ambassador, and owned estates in Fuentesol and Pennarenda.

I have mentioned the irritation of the populace when Louis d’Orléans was received so well by the sheriffs. But their disgust at “the six barrels of wine, and the bales of royal scarlet” then presented may not have been merely political; for many must have remembered how in 1390 the Hotel de Ville had actually been seized for debt owing to the extravagant gifts of silver plate presented to Isabeau of Bavaria. The family of Mustel in fact had “fait mettre en criees et subhastations lé manoir de la ville.” And in times of such distress the citizens may well have objected to any useless ostentation on the part of their officials.

Disturbances continued rife in Rouen through these terrible years of the weakness of the King. Chains had to be fastened permanently across many squares and streets in the town, which had become absolutely depopulated owing to the misery of such riots as that of 1411, or the still more serious outbreak of 1417, when the perpetual quarrels of the Armagnac and Burgundian parties were reflected in the factions of the town. The burgesses declared for them of Burgundy, who posed as the “Progressives,” or defenders of the people’s rights, and therefore objected to the Bailli and the Chateau, as being the representatives of the Conservative and aristocratic Armagnacs, the gatherers of those hateful taxes, which had been doubled that year, and had thus made still more difficult a commerce already crippled by constant changes in the currency. Perpetual imposts and extraordinary war-subventions had drained the town of its resources for some time. Every religious community had been forced to forego all privileges and contribute like the rest. And after Bernard, Count of Armagnac, had assumed official direction of the Government, his excessive exactions made it easy to add the loss of Harfleur and the defeat of Agincourt, to the many sins of his party. The brigandage and violence of an Armagnac, Jean Raoulet, all along the Seine, brought home to the people of Rouen with an even more startling clearness the necessity for trying what the other side could do for them.

So John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, had an easy part to play as the champion of the downtrodden people. On the 24th of April he sent a political manifesto into the town (very much of the kind to which modern France has become accustomed) promising relief from taxation. Before swallowing the bait entirely the burgesses submitted the seals to examination in Paris, but the drapers of Rouen scarcely waited for confirmation before they attacked the royal tax-gatherers with cries of “Long live Burgundy!” Thereupon d’Armagnac sent three commissioners with a troop of Bretons and Genoese cross-bowmen from Paris. But the townsfolk would not let the mercenaries enter, seizing the keys of the town from the officials and mounting their own guard at every gate. The three commissioners, powerless without their escort, took refuge in the Chateau. The King’s bailli, Raoul de Gancourt, refused to leave his post. He seems to have been a man brave enough to make his mark upon the stricken field of Agincourt, and intellectual enough to win a local reputation as a poet, a nature in fact somewhat akin to Charles d’Orléans. But though he could make no head against the rioters he would not leave his honour behind him in the Rue Beauvoisine, and gathered round his hospitable hearth a few of the choice spirits of the town who joined him in deploring the excesses of the populace.

Outside in the market-place Burgundian orators were rousing the passions of the mob, and chief among the leaders of the people were Alain Blanchart and De Livet, a canon of the Cathedral, then in charge of the diocese during the absence of Louis d’Harcourt, who much preferred the amusements of a courtier to the pious seclusion of an archbishop. As soon as the news of all this reached Paris, the Dauphin himself, with a brilliant suite, set out for Rouen, and encamped in the fortress on St. Catherine’s Hill, to the south-east of the town, between the Aubette and the Seine. A message sent him by De Gancourt, intercepted by the citizens, put the finishing touch to their resentment. Three men were picked out to rid them of the bailli. One of them was Guillot Leclerc (afterwards beheaded for his crime), but Alain Blanchart had no share in the assassination, whatever you may imagine to be the meaning of Monstrelet’s remarks. At midnight on the 23rd of July (the day of the Dauphin’s arrival on St. Catherine) some masked men went to De Gancourt’s door, begging him to receive a malefactor they had arrested. The moment the bailli appeared they fell upon him and left him dead in the gutter. Directly afterwards they rushed on to the house of his lieutenant-general, Jean Legier, seized him and his nephew, and threw them into the Seine, together with other prominent members of the Armagnac faction.

The only result was a short blockade of the town by the Dauphin’s troops and a military demonstration from the Chateau, which could be reinforced from outside through a postern to the west of the Porte Bouvreuil. The citizens then surrendered, the Sire de Gamaches was made bailli, and Jean d’Harcourt (a relation of the absentee archbishop) was made captain of the town, with command of the castle; but the Dauphin’s party was not strong enough to punish as they wished, and Rouen was left in a state of ill-suppressed disloyalty. This broke out once more into rebellion at the beginning of the new year. Robert de Bracquemont, made Admiral of France in April 1417 (whose Spanish alliances I have mentioned on , was sent down with troops as lieutenant-general of the King in Rouen, Gisors, Caux, and Honfleur. But he could not get into the town, and had to wait in the fortress of St. Catherine. During his short tenure of office the negotiations (preserved in the archives of Dieppe) which he was obliged to attempt, in order to secure some sort of coalition between the hostile factions against the English army, are a lamentable revelation of the dissensions of the time. When the supremacy of the Burgundians became inevitable, he went away, as we have seen, to Spain, leaving his opponent, Guy lé Bouteiller, to take command of the castle of Rouen, and bring back with him Alain Blanchart with other democratic exiles; and these two are prominent names in the siege that is to come, for Blanchart was made captain of the picked burgess-troop of the Arbaletriers of Rouen, Guillaume d’Hondetot was made bailli, and Laghen, the Bastard of Arly, was made lieutenant. The Royalist Armagnacs were definitely abandoned, but, as we shall see, the unhappy town gained little in the crisis of her fate from her Burgundian sympathies.

During all these days of civic anarchy the English troops were steadily advancing to their goal. Though no predetermined plan is proved to have existed in the mind of Henry V., the movements of his army resulted in a very definite and successful campaign. Landing on the elbow of the coast of Normandy, where no one expected him, he cut the strength of her resistance in two by a rapid march from north to south, paralysing the warlike nobles of Cotentin, and forcing the hostile Angevins and the uncertain Bretons to remain neutral. Then, after sending out detachments to east and west, he concentrated on the Seine, crossed it above Rouen, and seized Pont de l’Arche so as to cut off her best communication with Paris, crush her between his fleet, his army, and his garrison at Honfleur, and ensure the conquest of Normandy beneath her walls.

While the toils were thus closing in upon her, while she was being slowly cut off from crippled France, from Paris, where the citizens had nothing better to do than massacre the Armagnacs, Rouen sent hurriedly for help to the Duke of Burgundy. They only got brave words from his son, the Count of Charolais, who used all the taxes of the northern towns to fight against not the English, but the Armagnacs. Paris showed a greater sympathy by instantly sending 300 archers and 300 of their own militia. At last the Duke of Burgundy gave to a selfish policy what he had refused to patriotism, and realising that when his own party was in power the English were more enemies than allies, he sent 4000 men-at-arms to help the beleaguered city. In January Guy lé Bouteiller had brought 1500 more with him into the castle. The town itself could provide 15,000 militia, 100 arbaletriers, 2000 artillerymen, and 2000 troops from the rest of Normandy, who had fled to Rouen when their own towns were destroyed, giving a total of 25,200 fighting men.

Taught by the bitter experience of Caen, the burghers began their preparations by devastating the buildings in St. Sever on the south side of the bridge, and before the invaders were close up, they practically levelled to the ground nearly every house in the faubourgs outside the fortifications. With the stone thus sacrificed, they repaired the breaches in their walls, and strengthened every tower, sowing “chausse-trappes,” or sharp three-pronged irons in the fields all round the city. Besides the cannon on the walls, each tower had three large guns pointing in different directions, and eight smaller pieces for fast firing. Antiquated weapons were pressed into the service as well, the balista, the three-mouthed trebuchet (the tappgete, or tryppgette of the English), and the sling for hurling heavy darts and arrows set up on the Porte Martainville. Besides this, they sank every boat on the Seine, above or below the town, and even burnt their two royal galleys when the progress of the siege compelled them to prevent the English from the advantage of their capture. Further taxes were raised and cheerfully paid by layman, ecclesiastic, and soldier alike, and orders were issued, by the sound of a trumpet in every public square, that every householder should get in provisions for ten months, an almost impossible feat considering the scarcity of all food in Normandy at the time. Finally, some thousands of the poorer classes were banished out of the town, and a few drifted as far as Beauvais and Paris, but the majority were swept back again into Rouen by the constantly increasing tide of fugitives driven into the city by the English, to make the task of feeding so many useless mouths more difficult. The results were hideous when the famine came.

On the English side, the King’s own men numbered 16,400 of all arms, the contingents of his various captains and barons amounted to 20,306, including knights, light cavalry, and archers on foot. In addition, 1000 carpenters and workmen followed the army, with some 6000 engineers, sappers, and miners including the men who served the artillery. This was the force that left England, and any diminutions in it, by lapse of time and service, were more than made up by the reinforcements of the Earl of March, of the Duke of Exeter, of Sir John Talbot, and the Prior of Kilmaine. So that the total of the army that besieged Rouen was, at least, 45,000 men. This large force was brought across the Seine, partly by the old bridge of Pont de l’Arche, partly by a light and ingenious pontoon bridge made of planks supported on watertight leather boats, which could be packed up and carried with the army on the march.

The first appearance of the enemy was when the Duke of Beaufort (who had been Earl of Dorset in 1415), appeared before the walls to summon Rouen to surrender on terms. The citizens answered him with an attack of cavalry. On Friday the 29th of July, Henry V. set out from Pont de l’Arche by the right bank of the river, with a cloud of scouts before his army, savage half-clad Irishmen, armed with light shields, short javelins, and long knives, who plundered all the countryside, and rode into camp at night astride of the cattle they had stolen. That same evening, “the Friday before Lammas day,” the King reached Rouen and placed his troops all round the town under cover of the darkness. The citizens awoke next morning to find Rouen girdled with English steel. The die was irrevocably cast. Abandoned by their king, by both the factions into which the rest of France was torn, the hardy burgesses resolved to stand firm for the honour of a nation which had left them to their fate. And, at first sight, the mighty walls, and moats, and towers must have made even the English hesitate before attacking a town that had prepared so stubborn a defence.

The account of the siege has very fortunately been preserved by two eye-witnesses, and we are able to check any French sympathies that may have crept into the accounts of Monstrelet, or of the Monk of St. Denys, of Juvenal des Ursins, or of the “Journal d’un Bourgeois de Paris,” by comparing them not merely with the worthless “Chronique de Normandie,” or with Pierre Cochon’s “Chronique Normande,” but with two far more important and more authoritative descriptions, one preserved in Paris, the other in the British Museum. Both were written by men in the army of Henry V., whose names are unknown. The first is called the “Chronicon Henrici Quinti,” which was brought to France by Pierre Pithou, and is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale (MS. 6239). The second is a poem in contemporary English called the “Sege of Roan,” of which 954 verses were published by Mr Conybeare in “Archaeologia Britannica” (vol. xxi.), and 676 verses by Sir Frederick Madden (Ib. vol. xxii.). Of English contemporary authorities, Otterbourne and Stow have something to say, but Walsingham is useless. Rymer’s “Foedera” has some important documents (vol. IV. iv.) and there are finally, of course, the archives of the town itself, which emphasise in many details the heroic patriotism and constancy of the citizens amidst the sufferings, as terrible as can be imagined, which preceded the fall of the town and the consequent subjugation of Normandy to England for thirty years.

There is not much that you can still see of the city that was so splendidly defended, but I can at least point you to the very spot where King Henry the Fifth had his headquarters. By going eastwards out of the city, along the Rue d’Amiens, which starts from the Place des Ponts de Robec, you reach the boulevard Gambetta, north of the streams of Aubette (along which runs the road to Nid de Chiens, the Norman dukes’ sporting kennel) and south of that branch of Robec which passes by the Tour du Colombier. Though that part of Rouen’s fortifications has disappeared, you may still see at the south-east angle of the old walls, a remnant of that Couvent des Célestins founded by the Duke of Bedford during the English occupation. A little further northwards you pass the end of the Rue Eau de Robec, “ignoble petite Venise” as Flaubert called it, with its queer bridges and overhanging gables, and finally in the Place St. Hilaire you will find the Route de Darnetal. Walk eastwards straight along it, until a small suburban road turns out of it upon your right hand, called the Rue de la Petite Chartreuse. This soon leads you to a large expanse of enclosed ground on the left of the road, surrounded by a fine bit of fifteenth-century wall; the entrance-gate is marked with the number 4. Within are several ruined buildings dotted about a quiet abbey close whose strange religious atmosphere has never changed in more than four and a half centuries. Close to the gate, there rises an ivy-covered column of dilapidated ancient masonry, which holds a much more modern seventeenth-century shrine, still commemorating “Notre Dame des Roses,” as the laundresses call her.

Far behind your right shoulder rise the spires of Rouen; away to the left is the church tower of Darnetal; in the opposite horizon the great slope of St. Catherine rises to the sky. Within this quiet square Archbishop Guillaume de l’Estrange built the Chartreuse de Notre Dame de la Rose, in 1386, rather more than a mile from the Porte St. Hilaire, in that cool valley between St. Catherine and Darnetal, which is shut in by the interlacing arms of Robec and Aubette. Some fifty yards beyond the shrine I have just mentioned, you will see a half-ruined mediaeval building, which must have been the great hall of the convent. Traces of fourteenth and fifteenth century work have been found in it by the eye of faith, though the lower floor is now a kind of granary, and the upper storey is used as a big drying-ground by the laundry girls who live close by in the pretty old house that used to form a set of lodgings for the monks. Above its walls in 1418 floated the royal flag of England, and within them the last act in the tragedy of the siege of Rouen was played out. It is my good fortune that the drawing of this historic spot, made for me by Miss James, happens to be yet another picture in this little volume of a scene that has never, to the best of my belief, been given to English readers before. The King’s headquarters, though close to Mont St. Catherine were beyond the range of the cannon of those days, and between him and the fortress Lord Salisbury’s men were placed, with Lieutenant Philip Leech on the south side, and Sir John Gray to the west. Opposite the Porte Martainville was the Earl of Warwick’s camp; and Edmund Beaufort, Count of Mortain, who became Duke of Somerset when he was made governor of Normandy, held the north side of the Aubette and completed the investment of St. Catherine’s.

North of the King’s camp, Sir William Porter had at first held the ground before the Porte St. Hilaire, but the Duke of Gloucester was given the position as soon as he came up from Cherbourg, placing his two lieutenants on each side of the stream, the Earl of Suffolk to the south, the Marquis of Abergavenny northwards.

Leaving the side on which the King’s camp was so well guarded, if you passed west and northwards round the battlements of Rouen, you would have seen Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter, guarding the Porte Beauvoisine, having as his lieutenants Lord Willoughby de Eresby and the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Fitz-Hugh, to the east, and John Lord Ross westwards. The Castle of Rouen and the Porte Bouvreuil were besieged by Lord John Mowbray, second son of the Duke of Norfolk, whose lieutenants were first Sir William Hanington, and later on Sir Gilbert Talbot, the father of the famous Earl of Shrewsbury. The last gate, the Porte Cauchoise at the lowest western angle of the town, was beleaguered by Thomas Plantagenet the Duke of Clarence whose camp was in the ruined abbey of St. Gervais; above him was the Earl of Cornwall; and James Butler, Earl of Ormond, closed the investing lines towards the river. A glance at map B will make all this clear.

Across the Seine, the whole of the ruined faubourg of St. Sever was under the command of John Holland, Earl of Huntingdon, whose business it was to guard the barbacan, or fortress at the south end of the bridge, and to keep up the English communications with the south of Normandy. To do this he had a numerous staff of lieutenants, Sir Gilbert d’Umfreville, Lord John Nevill, eldest son of the Earl of Westmoreland, Sir Richard Arundel, and Lord Edmund Ferrers. Finally, Thomas, Lord Carew, was given a roving commission to scout and forage with his light Irish troops and a body of hardy Welshmen under Jenico of Artois who is mentioned both by the English anonymous poet and by Holinshed.

Within the walls of Rouen the roll of the defenders has but very modest names to contrast to the flower of English chivalry opposed to them. Of Guy lé Bouteiller, captain of the castle at the Porte Bouvreuil, I have already spoken. One of his lieutenants, Jean Noblet, held St. Catherine, and the other, Laghen, the Bastard of Arly, kept the Porte Cauchoise with the goodwill of all the citizens who firmly trusted him. One of his subordinates is called “Mowne-sir de Termagowne” by the English poet. The names of all those who kept the walls are chronicled either by this authority or by Monstrelet. But the most famous of them were Alain Blanchart, captain of the Arbaletriers, who seems to have taken command of the whole militia and was the life and soul of the town’s resistance, and Canon Robert de Livet whose devotion and ardour inspired every non-combatant to assist the soldiers in their weary task and to bear their sufferings with a fortitude he was himself the first to show. I have mentioned 2000 refugee-warriors from other places. They seem to have been led by the men of Caen under a Lombard condottiere called Le Grand Jacques, or as the English poem has it:

“Guaunte Jakys a werryour wyse.”

The real operations of the siege began with a desperate sortie of the citizens from every gate at once, which was repulsed with slaughter. The following days were filled with spirited attacks on every English captain who had not had time to fortify his post, attacks which only ceased when a huge ditch had been dug all round the town, with regular posts and covered ways, the whole under the guidance of Sir Robert Bapthorp, who was afterwards rewarded with the “Maison a l’enseigne de l’Ours” in the Rue de la Vicomte. Meanwhile the English continued to make sure of their communications with Harfleur down the Seine, and to cut off the same route to the French. The Portuguese fleet helped them to blockade the mouth of the river, and even advanced upstream as far as Quilleboeuf. Most important of all, they built the Bridge of St. George of solid timbers sunk into the stream between Lescure and Sotteville, four miles higher up than Rouen, and guarded it thoroughly from all attack. Finally, Jean Noblet, cut off from all provisions in St. Catherine, had to surrender on the thirtieth of August, and a few days afterwards, Caudebec, the last hope of the city down the stream was forced to swear complete neutrality and to abide by the same terms which were eventually won by Rouen, an instance of heroic partisanship which proves the solidarity of Normandy and the loyalty of every outlying town to the capital.

The results of all this were very soon visible, for the Seine was now completely in the power of the English, and the only problem that remained for the King to solve was to get his war-galleys high enough up the Seine to protect St. George’s Bridge. He could not think of sailing past the town itself. He finally determined to drag the vessels across the narrow neck of land that lies at the southern angles of the great curve on which Rouen herself is set. The space at this point between the villages of Moulineaux and Orival is scarcely five miles, as may be seen on map A. The galleys were hauled across under full sail with a favouring wind on huge greased rollers, and then indeed the men of Rouen were face to face with the reality of a blockade which held them fast by land and water; so they burnt their own last warships and set fire to the famous Clos des Galées.

Henry V. had before this written to London for provisions, in a letter to the Lord Mayor which is still preserved in the archives of the City, and took nine days to get to him. “And pray you effectuelly,” writes the King, “that in al the haste that ye may, ye wille do arme as manie smale vessels as ye may goodly with vitaille and namly with drinke for to come Harfleu and fro thennes, as fer as they may, up ye river of Seyne to Roan ward, vith the said vitaille for the refresching of us and our said hoost.” The royal request was cheerfully welcomed, and the city of London hasted to send “Tritty botes of swete wyne, ten of Tyre, ten of Romency, ten of Malvesey, and a thousand pipes of ale and bere, with three thousand and five hundred coppes for your hoost to drinke” a “bote” being about 126 gallons. At the very moment when all this good cheer reached the thirsty Englishmen, the first pinch of hunger came upon the men of Rouen, as, one by one, their last communications were cut off. Their attacks upon the enemy became more frequent and more desperate every day. With artillery, with every weapon they could scrape together, obsolete or not, they kept a continual hail of missiles on the English camp, especially harassing the quarters of the Duke of Gloucester, absolutely preventing the King’s soldiers from ever approaching near enough to mine their walls, and giving not an hour of rest to the English army.

But Henry V. was too wise to waste a man. After he had cut off every avenue of help or hope, he sat quite still and waited, for he knew that death and disease were on his side, and that against inevitable starvation no city in the world could stand for long. The horror of this long-drawn agony was now and then relieved by such single combats between the lines as that when Laghen beat the Englishman who had challenged him before the gate of Caux, or by the hanging of a new French prisoner in the English lines and the retaliation of an execution on the walls of Rouen. But rations were growing pitifully small now, and another effort was made to get help from the King and the Duke of Burgundy. A messenger got through the lines and brought the stern warning of the citizens to those who had abandoned them. For Rouen cried “Haro!” before the throne, and gave notice to the princes that if she was compelled to surrender to the English, there would be no bitterer enemy of the Crown than the capital of Normandy. They got the usual promises, and every bell in Rouen (save the captive “Rouvel”) rang to welcome the good tidings of the messenger on his return. But nothing happened, and both at Alençon and at Pont de l’Arche the English King was easily able to put off the negotiations which were the only sign of help that Rouen got from Paris.

And now famine itself began to grip the citizens by the throat. The Register of the Cathedral Chapterhouse shows signs of scarcity of food only three weeks after the siege began, for fines are then imposed in loaves of bread. Then the bread usually distributed was given up, and money substituted. The last entry stops short in the middle of a pathetic sentence ... “parce que, dans lé nécessite du present siege, lé pain ...” and it was not until the gates were opened that a clerk was found strong enough to go on writing. By the end of September all the meat had disappeared, every horse and every donkey had been eaten, and wheaten bread was sold at a sovereign a loaf. The horrors of starvation need not any further be revealed; but by the first days of December they had a peculiarly terrible result. To save their own lives, and keep enough miserable fodder for the soldiers to stand upright behind the walls, the burgesses of Rouen had to turn out of the town all the refugees who had fled for safety to her walls from other cities taken by the English. Some fifteen thousand of them, men, women and children, tottered out of the gates and made feebly for the English lines. The chronicler himself was moved to pity: “Have ye pitee hem upone” he cries to the English King, “and yeve hem lève thens to gone”; but when they tried to pass through they found a row of pikes as pitiless as the shut gates of Rouen behind. Beneath the chill December sky these famishing spectres had to take refuge in the open ditch below the ramparts of the town. Without any shelter, ragged, defenceless, and feeding only on roots and bitter grass, grubbed from the war-scarred ground, they perished in hundreds every night, they died by the chance missiles of one side or the other, they went mad and hurled themselves into the watch-fires of the English. From the walls above, a priest sometimes would lean down with a blessing, or draw up an infant newly born into all this misery, baptise it, and lower it again to die; but never a crumb of bread came out of starving Rouen. The Canon de Livet, whose stout heart no horror of the siege could break, was almost overcome at this last infamy of fate; and standing high upon the ramparts he cursed the English army, and pronounced the anathema of excommunication against its king.

The citizens made one more attempt to break through that inflexible ring of death. Ten thousand of the strongest men who could still carry arms were picked out from the garrison, and every atom of eatable substance in the town was swept and scraped together to give them such a pittance as was grimly supposed to sustain them for two days. Two thousand of them dashed out of the Porte St. Hilaire and feverishly made for the headquarters of the King. Their very desperation sent them momentary victory, but their movement was only intended as a blind to the main attack arranged from the castle gate, behind which eight thousand undaunted skeletons rattled in their armour and prepared to deliver their last blow for freedom. Their front ranks were already past the moat, and the weight of their main column was upon the bridge, when suddenly the massive timbers groaned beneath them, and some thousand men-at-arms fell down into the ditch beneath. Cut off from their own men, those who had already passed were shot down at leisure by the English, while the ditch was filled with maimed and dead. Those who had not had time to cross were obliged to make a circuit and try to give assistance to their isolated friends outside by way of the Porte Bouvreuil further to the north and east. The miserable heroes who had attacked the royal camp were only got back into the town with fearful loss. To the discouragement of the failure was added the bitter suspicion of treason, for the great beams of the bridge were found to have been half sawn through. Their despair was accentuated by the death of the brave Laghen, who had at last succumbed to the fatigues of fighting without proper food.

At the imminent peril of their lives, but preferring death in the open to the starvation of rats in a hole, four nobles and four burgesses got through the English lines once more, with a last appeal to the Duke of Burgundy and the King, roundly denying all allegiance to them if no attempt to help were made. The Duke himself was base enough to answer that on the fourth day after Christmas help would come, and this though he must have known that there was no real chance of succour. But with a pitiable confidence in their leaders the envoys dragged themselves back to Rouen and bade the garrison hold out only for another fifteen days, and then they should be rescued. To men already starving we can scarce imagine what the delay of another fortnight meant. It was drawing near to Christmas. From the English camp two priests were seen advancing towards those phantoms of still visible humanity that stretched their fleshless arms to heaven from the city moat. The King was sending food and drink to them for the love of Him whose birth was celebrated on the morrow. The miserable creatures ate and drank with hideous cries that brought the starving garrison to the walls to watch them; but they only gained the strength to suffer pain a little longer, for the next day the English lines closed up again and no more food was to be had.

One more bitter disappointment the citizens were destined to suffer before the end came. From the right bank of the Seine two Norman nobles, Jacques d’Harcourt and the Sire de Moreuil attempted to draw the English into an ambuscade. They had only two thousand men, but they might well have created sufficient diversion to render a victorious sally possible from the city, for the English imagined it was the royal army of rescue come at last. But the eager watchers from the walls of Rouen had the mortification of seeing their compatriots put to flight by a far smaller body of the enemy, and their last hope faded like dew before the sun. Then the fateful twenty-ninth of December came, and went, without a sign of royal or Burgundian help. For two more miserable days the citizens waited in vain, and not till fifty thousand persons had died of famine did they think of surrender. Their walls were still intact, their hearts as stout as ever, but starvation began to make irreparable breaches where the enemy’s artillery had been of no avail. So on the eve of New Year’s Day, the envoys chosen by the meeting in the Hotel de Ville, went out to parley with the English.

They wandered in vain from one camp to another, until they were obliged to cross over to St. Sever, and there they found Sir Gilbert d’Umfreville, whose Norman lineage perhaps made him kinder than the rest. He was at last prevailed upon to take them on the second day of the year, a Monday, into the presence of the King. Though every hour meant a prolonging of their torture, the ambassadors fought foot by foot the conditions of surrender and calmly argued every sentence of the treaty with that Norman love of litigation which now rose to its highest and most impassioned point. In the great hall of the Chartreuse de la Rose, they saw the cold, impassive, handsome countenance of the young English King, with that touch of sadness on it that foretold his early death, and the detached nobility of manner which fitted a King who had exhausted every pleasure before he took, and worthily wielded, the responsibilities of power.

The first request of the ambassadors was for the succour of the poor outcasts in the moat all round the town. But Henry only announced his firm resolve to take Rouen and all its citizens and to make those who had opposed his will “remember me until the Day of Judgment.” At last an armistice of two or three days was granted, and on the third of January a solemn meeting of the picked ambassadors of either side took place between the Chartreuse and the Porte St. Hilaire, where all the splendour of the English noblemen’s caparisons and furniture was displayed, and the starving commissioners from Rouen made the bravest show they could beneath the Fleurs de Lys of France. Close to all this magnificence was the yet living horror of the moat, which was now almost filled up with dead. From time to time the heap of rags and withered anatomies heaved slowly, and the little spectre of a child crawled out, imploring food. And all day long the solemn arguments went on beneath the sumptuous pavilions of the English, until, after three days of discussion, the ambassadors of Rouen went back, unsatisfied, into their city.

“We askid mykille,” says the poet, “they proferid smal,
That is yuelle to accorde with alle.
Tho thay tretid an xiiij nyzt
And zit accorde they ne myzt.”

Both sides were indeed so resolute, that they “might have argued for a fortnight without coming to an agreement.” But the people of the city had starved long enough, and they drove back their emissaries to the Porte St. Hilaire, after one proposal, born of madness, had been made, to set fire to the town and then by every gate at once to pour out upon the English camp with the whole population in a flood, and so win through or die at least with weapons in their hands. Some news of this despairing possibility may have suggested to King Henry that the representations of the Archbishop of Canterbury were not without their value. At any rate he yielded to solicitation, granted another truce, and on the ninth of January opened negotiations once again.

This time the pressure of famine was so hard upon the ambassadors themselves that they went on with discussions night and day, burning torches and candles when the sun set. At last a definite instrument was signed and sealed that guaranteed life and a free pass to the garrison, their goods to the citizens, and great portion of its privileges to the town. But the terms were hard enough. Three hundred thousand crowns of gold was fixed as the ransom of the city; the chains were to be taken down from every street; ground sufficient for an English palace was to be given up, which was eventually chosen at the south-west corner of the town near the river; nine persons, among whom were the Canon Robert de Livet and Alain Blanchart, were exempted from the capitulation and “reserved to the mercy of the King,” which in one case at least meant death.

Upon a throne, and dressed in cloth of gold, Henry V. received the keys of Rouen from Guy lé Bouteiller, in the Chartreuse de la Rose. Then the Duke of Exeter, as captain of the town, set up the English standard over all her gates and above the donjon of the castle; and at daylight on the twentieth of January the French garrison filed out of Rouen across the Seine towards the Bridge of St. George on the left bank, and were stripped of everything, save one suit of clothes, by the English soldiers, as they went. Only two thousand men survived out of the six thousand who had so gallantly come into Rouen to help resist the enemy. While they escaped sadly into desolated Normandy, King Henry V. was advancing from the Chartreuse; he moved slowly round the city to the Porte Cauchoise, and behind him was borne a fox’s brush swinging upon a lance. The bells rang and the cannon roared salute as he entered Rouen, but of the inhabitants scarcely one had strength to stand upright, not one had voice to cheer, and all besought for bread. Alone of the nine prisoners, Alain Blanchart was beheaded. But thirty-three burgesses were picked out to pay a special tax in ready money and imprisoned till it was delivered. The main sum of the ransom was disputed with the true Norman delight in legal quibbling, and not fully paid (or at least “arranged for”) till 1430.

The imposition of this huge sum on a community already at the end of its resources had a lasting and terrible effect upon the town. The Chapterhouse were obliged to remit half their rents from the farmers ruined by the war. All debts had to receive special postponement, and commerce suffered almost as fatally as agriculture. All over Rouen houses were continually being put up to auction for public or private défalcations, to be bought by those Englishmen who had not been already given estates as a reward for their services. The buildings of the Abbey of St. Ouen were entirely occupied by the men of the Duke of Suffolk, so that the archbishop of 1423 was unable to pass the night before his entry in the abbey, as of immemorial custom, because the English filled up every inch of it. Of the exquisite east end we can see now, not much more than the beautiful little “Tour aux Clercs” of the older abbey was standing in 1419. But it may be put down as one of the few things creditable to the English occupation that part of the nave was certainly finished under their encouragement. Meanwhile the King took care to strengthen the castle at the Porte Bouvreuil, and the barbacan at the bridge; and his own palace began to rise near the Tour Malsifrotte and the Porte du Pre de la Bataille. Nothing now remains of it save the name of “Rue du Vieux Palais” in the Quartier St. Eloi. But it served in the first years as a residence for the Duke of Bedford, and for the young King Henry VI.

After the conquest of Rouen, one town after another fell into the English hands. On September 23 in 1419, the last resistance in Normandy was quelled at Chateau Gaillard. Mont St. Michael alone remained free until the English domination ceased and France joined her in her freedom. The King who took the city of Rouen was seen there twice again. In 1421, with Catherine of France, his wife, he opened the Estates of Normandy. In 1422 he was borne through Rouen on his funeral bier; two months before the crown of France would have been his.

The Rouen besieged by King Henry V. can be almost exactly traced along the lines of the modern boulevards shown in map B. The extension eastwards, which is given in map E. with this chapter, took place chiefly during the fourteenth century when Rouen was rapidly growing to be the second town in the kingdom. In making the circuit of the walls you will remember passing the Tour du Colombier between the Porte Martainville and the Porte St. Hilaire. It is represented now by a picturesque old house standing four-square upon a buttressed wall above the stream, at the extreme eastern verge of the great enclosure of the hospital. It is still called the Maison des Célestins, and aged men over sixty are preserved there to live out in peace the autumn of their days. Both the name and the present occupiers are an appropriate reminder of one who is connected with some of the better memories of the English occupation, the Duke of Bedford who founded the Couvent des Célestins, that was ruined by the Huguenots in 1562, upon the land formerly occupied by his Chateau de Chantereine, called “Joyeux Repos.”

This convent, which was also known as the “Val Notre Dame,” is not the only trace which the Duke of Bedford’s benefactions left in Rouen. He also took the Carmelite brethren under his especial protection, being no doubt supported in this charitable action by the English Carmelite confessor of Henry V., Thomas de Valde, who died at Rouen in 1430. But his most intimate connection with ecclesiastical Rouen is recorded in the archives of the Cathedral, where we are told that he left the chapterhouse in his will a beautiful golden chalice garnished with gems, a pair of golden censers and a silver-gilt crucifix, in memory of his being made a canon at his own request. And there is some irony in the thought that at the moment he was giving these proofs of his affection for the town, his councillors were, with his consent, pursuing Jeanne d’Arc with every subtlest form of legal and religious torture.

Scarcely a year after Jeanne had been burnt in the Vieux Marche, the Duke’s wife, Anne of Burgundy, died at the early age of 28, and in addition to this private loss he had to submit to the consequences of a grave error of judgment in his second marriage to Jacqueline, daughter of Pierre de Luxembourg, Count of St. Pol, an alliance which gravely offended the whole house of Burgundy. In 1435 he died himself on the 14th of September, “die exaltacionis Sancte Crucis” as the chapterhouse entries record, in the same Chateau of Rouen where Jeanne d’Arc had suffered her last imprisonment. His body was embalmed and buried in a leaden coffin in the choir of Rouen Cathedral by the side of the dukes of Normandy and the English kings his ancestors, beneath a magnificently sculptured tomb.

He left the Célestins of “Joyeux Repos,” near the Tour du Colombier, a small legacy, and benefactions to many other abbeys and churches in the town. Though the canons did not get their golden treasure by any means intact, or indeed get any part of it without protracted struggles, they always took good care of his tomb, which was certainly in excellent preservation before the Calvinists of 1562 began a destruction which was completed by the Revolution. An inscription, however, was left on an adjacent pillar, and this was copied by Dugdale. The ostrich feathers and the order of the garter were shown upon the brass besides the epitaph. In 1866 his coffin was found still in its original position on the right side of the altar, and nothing more is now left of him in Rouen.