November, 1090. The month of November of this year saw stirring scenes alike in the streets of Rouen and beneath the walls of Conches. But, while Conches was openly aided by the King’s troops, no force from England or from the parts of Normandy which William had already won had as yet drawn near to Rouen. Rufus knew other means to gain over the burghers of a great city as well as the lords of castles and smaller towns. State of things in Rouen. The glimpse which we now get of the internal state of the Norman metropolis tells us, like so many other glimpses which are given us in the history of these times, just enough to make us wish to be told more. A state of things is revealed to us which we are not used to in the history of Normandy. Rouen appears for a moment as something like an independent commonwealth, though an enemy might call it a commonwealth which seemed to be singularly bent on its own destruction. The municipal spirit. The same municipal spirit which we have seen so strong at Exeter and at Le Mans[683] shows itself now for a moment at Rouen. We may be sure that under the rule of William the Great no man had dreamed of a commune in the capital of Normandy. His arm, we may be sure, had protected the men of Rouen, like all his other subjects, in the enjoyment of all rights and privileges which were not inconsistent with his own dominion. But in his day Rouen could have seen no demagogues, no tyrants, no armies in civic pay, no dealings of its citizens with any prince other than their own sovereign. But the rule of William the Great was over; in Robert’s days it may well have seemed that the citizens of so great a city were better able to rule themselves, or at all events that they were entitled to choose their own ruler. When the arts of Rufus, his gifts and his promises, began to work at Rouen in the same way in which they had worked on the castles of the eastern border, his agents had to deal, not with a prince or a lord, but with a body of citizens under the leadership of one of whom one doubts whether he should be called a demagogue or a tyrant. We seem to be carried over two hundred and forty years to the dealings of Edward the Third with the mighty brewer of Ghent. Conan demagogue or tyrant. The Artevelde of Rouen was Conan—the name suggests a Breton origin—the son of Gilbert surnamed Pilatus. He was the richest man in the city; his craft is not told us; but we must always remember that a citizen was not necessarily a trader.[684] His wealth was such that it enabled him to feed troops of mercenaries and to take armed knights into his pay.[685] Another leading citizen, next in wealth to Conan, was William the son of Ansgar,[686] whose name seems to imply the purest Norman blood. Conan’s treaty with William. Conan had entered into a treaty with William, the object of which, we are told, was to betray the metropolis of Normandy and the Duke of the Normans—the sleepy Duke, as our guide calls him—into the power of the island King.[687] The citizens favour William. Nor was this merely the scheme of Conan and William; public feeling in the city went heartily with them. A party still clave to the Duke; but the mass of the men of Rouen threw in their lot with Conan, and were, like him, ready to receive William as their sovereign instead of Robert.[688] They may well have thought that, in the present state of things, any change would be for the better; the utter lawlessness of the time, which might have its charms for turbulent nobles, would have no charms for the burghers of a great city. Or the men of Rouen may have argued then, much as the men of Bourdeaux argued ages later, that they were likely to enjoy a greater measure of municipal freedom, under a King of the English, dwelling apart from them in his own island, than they would ever win from a Duke of the Normans, holding his court and castle in Rouen itself. Yet the friends of Robert might have their arguments too. A party for Robert. The party of mere conservatism, the party of order, would naturally cleave to him. But other motives might well come in. True friends of the commune might doubt whether William the Red was likely to be a very safe protector of civic freedom. They might argue that, if they must needs have a master, their liberties were less likely to be meddled with under such a master as Robert. But the party of the Duke’s friends, on whatever grounds it stood by him, was the weaker party. A majority of the citizens was zealous for William. A day fixed for the surrender to William. A day was fixed by Conan with the general consent, on which the city was to be given up,[689] and the King’s forces were invited to come from Gournay and other points in his obedience. Robert sends for help. Robert seems to have stayed in the capital which was passing from him; but he felt that, if he was to have supporters, he must seek for them beyond its walls. He sent to tell his plight to those of the nobles of Normandy in whom he still put any trust.[690] And he also hastened to seek help in a reconciliation with some neighbours and subjects with whom he was at variance.
Henry and Robert of Bellême come to the Duke’s help. It is certainly a little startling, after the history of the past year, to find at the head of the list of Duke Robert’s new allies the names of the Ætheling Henry and of Robert of Bellême. We may well fancy that they took up arms, not so much to support the rights of the Duke against the King as to check the dangerous example of a great city taking upon itself to choose among the claims of kings, dukes, and counts. Danger of the example of Rouen. Robert of Bellême may indeed have simply hastened to any quarter from which the scent of coming slaughter greeted him. But Henry the Clerk could always have given a reason for anything that he did. Popular movements at Rouen might supply dangerous precedents at Coutances. The Count of Coutances too might have better hopes of becoming Duke of Rouen, if Rouen were still held for a while by such a prince as Robert, than he could have if the city became either the seat of a powerful commonwealth or the stronghold of a powerful king. But, from whatever motive, Henry came, and he was the first to come.[691] Others to whom the Duke’s messengers set forth his desolate state[692] came also. Others who help Robert. Robert of Bellême, so lately his prisoner, Count William of Evreux and his nephew William of Breteuil, all hastened, if not to the deliverance of Duke Robert, at least to the overthrow of Conan. And with them came Reginald of Warren, the younger son of William and Gundrada,[693] and Gilbert of Laigle, fresh from his victory over his mightiest comrade.[694] November 3, 1090. At the beginning of November Duke Robert was still in the castle of Rouen; but his brother Henry was now with him within its walls, and the captains Henry at Rouen. who had come to his help were thundering at the gates of the rebellious city.
E. Weller
For the Delegates of the Clarendon Press.
ROUEN
Rouen in the eleventh century. The Rouen of those days, like the Le Mans, the York, and the Lincoln, of those days, was still the Roman city, the old Rothomagus. As in those and in countless other cases, large and populous suburbs had spread themselves over the neighbouring country; at Rouen, as at York, those suburbs had passed the river; but the city itself, the walled space to be attacked and defended in wartime, was still of the same extent as it had been in the days before Rolf and before Chlodwig. The rectangular space marking the Roman camp stretched on its southern side nearly to the Seine, whose stream, not yet fenced in by quays, reached further inland on that side than it now does. Position of the city. Rouen is essentially a river city, not a hill city. The metropolitan church does indeed stand on sensibly higher ground than the buildings close to the river; but to one fresh from Le Mans or Chartres the rise which has to be mastered seems trifling indeed. For a hill city the obvious site would have been on the natural akropolis supplied by the height of Saint Katharine to the south-east. Yet Rouen is a city of the mainland; the islands which divide the waters of the Seine must have been tempting points for Rolf in his Wiking days; but even the largest of them, the Isle of the Cross, was hardly large enough for a town to grow upon it. Of the walls of Rothomagus not a fragment is left; yet the impress of a Roman chester is hard to wipe out; it is still easy to trace its lines among the streets and buildings of the greatly enlarged mediæval and modern city. Frightful as has been the havoc which the metropolis of Normandy has undergone in our own time, mercilessly as the besom of destruction has swept over its ancient streets, churches, and houses, the dæmon of modern improvement has spared enough to enable us, if not to tell the towers, yet in idea to mark well the bulwarks, of the city where the Conqueror reigned. The ducal castles. Near the south-west corner of the parallelogram, not far from the river-side, had stood the earlier castle of the Dukes. Its site in after times became the friary of the Cordeliers, a small fragment of whose church, as well as another desecrated church within the castle precinct, does in some faint way preserve the memory of the dwelling-place of Rolf.[695] But by the days of Robert, the dukes had moved their dwelling to the south-eastern corner, also near the river, where the site of the castle is marked by the vast halles, and by the graceful Renaissance porch, where the chapter of our Lady of Rouen yearly, on the feast of the Ascension, exercised the prerogative of mercy by saving one prisoner condemned to die. Here the memory of the castle, though only its memory, lives in the names of the Haute and the Basse Vieille Tour, one of which is soon to be famous in our story. The eastern side of the city. On the eastern side the wall was washed by a small tributary of the Seine, the Rebecq, a stream whose course has withdrawn from sight almost as thoroughly as the Fleet of London or the Frome of Bristol.[696] On this side of the city lay a large swampy tract, whose name of Mala palus still lives in a Rue Malpalu[697], though a more distant part of it has taken the more ambitious name of the Field of Mars. The archbishopric. Within the wall lay the metropolitan church of our Lady and the palace of the Primate of Normandy. If this last reached to anything like its present extent to the east, the Archbishops of Rouen, like the Counts of Maine,[698] must have been reckoned among the men who sat on the wall. Abbey of Saint Ouen. Outside the city, but close under the wall, near its north-eastern corner, stood the great abbey of Saint Ouen, the arch-monastery,[699] still ruled by its Abbot Nicolas, though his long reign was now drawing to an end.[700] At the opposite north-western angle, but much further from the walls, where the higher ground begins to rise above the city, stood the priory of Saint Gervase, the scene of the Conqueror’s death.[701] Priory of Saint Gervase. Saint Gervase indeed stood, not only far beyond the Roman walls, but beyond those fortifications of later times which took Saint Ouen’s within the city. For Rouen grew as Le Mans grew. Castle of Bouvreil. On the higher ground like Saint Gervase, but more to the east, rose the castle of Bouvreil, which Philip of Paris, after the loss of Norman independence, reared to hold down the conquered city. Walls of Saint Lewis. Between his grandfather’s castle and the ancient wall Saint Lewis traced out the newer line of fortification which is marked by the modern boulevards. His walls are gone, as well as the walls of Rothomagus; but of the house of bondage of Philip Augustus one tower still stands, while of the dwelling-place of her own princes even mediæval Rouen had preserved nothing.
The gates. The four sides of the Roman enclosure were of course pierced by the four chief gates of the city, of three of which we hear in our story. Of these the western, the gate of Caux, is in some sort represented by the Renaissance gate of the Great Clock[702] with its adjoining tower. The northern gate bore the name of Saint Apollonius. The river was spanned by at least one bridge, which crossed it by way of the island of the Cross, near the second ducal castle. Suburbs beyond the Seine. Beyond the stream lay the suburb of Hermentrudeville, now Saint Sever, where Anselm had waited during the sickness of the Conqueror.[703] There too the Duchess Matilda, soon to be Queen, had begun the monastery of the meadow, the monastery of our Lady of Good News, the house of Pratum or Pré, whose church still stood unfinished, awaiting the perfecting hand of her youngest son.[704]
Fright of Duke Robert. Meanwhile the elder and best-beloved son of Matilda was trembling within the city on the right bank of the broad river. Luckily he had the presence of his youngest brother, the English Ætheling, the Count of the Côtentin, to strengthen him. Personal courage Duke Robert never lacked at any time; but something more than personal courage was now needed. Robert was perhaps not frightened, but he was puzzled; at such a moment he seemed to the calm judgement of Henry to be simply in the way; it was for wiser heads to take counsel without him. But deliverance was at hand. Both sides of the Seine sent their helpers. Approach of Gilbert and Reginald. Gilbert of Laigle crossed the bridge by the island close under the ducal tower, and turned to the left to the attack of the southern gate. Reginald of Warren at the head of three hundred knights drew near to the gate of Caux.[705] Efforts of Conan. Against this twofold attack Conan strove hard to keep up the hearts of his partisans. He made speeches exhorting to a valiant defence. Division among the citizens. Many obeyed; but the city was already divided; while one party hastened to the southern gate to withstand the assault of Gilbert, another party sped to open the western gate and to let in the forces of Reginald. Utter confusion. Soldiers of the King of the English, the advanced guard doubtless of a greater host to come, were already in the city, stirring up the party of Conan to swifter and fiercer action.[706] Soldiers and citizens were huddled together in wild confusion; shouts passed to and fro for King and Duke; men at either gate smote down neighbours and kinsmen to the sound of either war-cry.[707] The strength of the city was turned against itself. The hopes of the commonwealth of Rouen, either as a free city or as a favoured ally of the island King, were quenched in the blood of its citizens. Le Mans and Exeter had fallen; but they had fallen more worthily than this.
Henry sends Duke Robert away. Meanwhile Henry and those who were with him in the castle deemed that the time had come for the defenders of the ducal stronghold to join their friends within and without the city. But there was one inhabitant of the castle whose presence was deemed an encumbrance at such a moment. Men were shouting for the Duke of the Normans; but the wiser heads of his friends deemed that the Duke of the Normans was just then best out of the way. Robert came down from the tower, eager to join in the fray and to give help to the citizens of his own party.[708] But all was wild tumult; it needed a cooler head than Robert’s to distinguish friend from foe. He might easily rush on destruction in some ignoble form, and bring dishonour on the Norman name itself.[709] He was persuaded by his friends to forego his warlike purposes, and to suffer himself to be led out of harm’s way. While every other man in the metropolis of Normandy was giving and taking blows, the lord of Normandy, in mere personal prowess one of the foremost soldiers in his duchy, was smuggled out of his capital as one who could not be trusted to let his blows fall in the right place. With a few comrades he passed through the eastern gate into the suburb of the Evil Swamp, just below the castle walls. No attacks from the east. It is to be noticed that no fighting on this side of the city is mentioned. The King’s troops were specially looked for to approach from Gournay, and the east gate was the natural path by which an army from Gournay would seek to enter Rouen. One would have expected that one at least of the relieving parties would have hastened to make sure of this most important point. Yet one division takes its post by the southern gate, another by the western, none by the eastern. Were operations on that side made needless, either by the neighbourhood of the castle, by any difficulties of the marshy ground, or by the disposition of the inhabitants of the suburb? Certain it is that Duke Robert’s nearest neighbours outside his capital were loyal to him. The men of the Evil Swamp received the Duke gladly as their special lord.[710] He allowed himself to be put into a boat, and ferried across to the suburb on the left bank. There he was received by one of his special counsellors, William of Arques, a monk of Molesme, and was kept safely in his mother’s monastery till all danger was over.[711]