1477. Flamboyant. Tour St. Romain finished.
1485-1507. Flamboyant. Tour de Beurre built.
1508-1527. Flamboyant. West portal built.
1827. Iron spire begun.
St. Victrice was the first to put up any church on the site of the present cathedral, and the numerous Bishops who succeeded him rebuilt and enlarged the Early Christian structure until it must have been something far removed from the simple rudeness of the first building. Rouen, however, was destined to frequent disaster. A fire in 556 was followed by a plague, and the city suffered much in the disorder which followed the death of Charles the Great. Therefore, in the year 841, when the Northmen began their raids upon the north of France, they found only a lean city to plunder; and when Rollo became first Duke of Normandy, and was converted to Christianity, he had almost to refound the capital of his new dominion. It is therefore in no way surprising that the crypt of St. Gervais is the sole survival yet discovered of the buildings of the earlier city.
After the paralysis of fear which gripped Christendom at the approach of the year 1000 had passed off, with the unchanged procession of normal days and nights brought in by the new century, there came so great an enthusiasm for church building that the cathedral of Rouen was reconstructed on a larger and finer scale. The new structure was consecrated on October 1, 1063, by Archbishop Maurilius, in the presence of William the Norman.
It is quite possible that this church was of greater magnificence than those of Jumièges or St. Georges de Boscherville, and perhaps even more perfect than St. Étienne at Caen; but whatever theories one may care to form must be built upon the style of the lower portion of the north-west tower—the Tour St. Romain—for in the year 1200 a disastrous fire destroyed the great building, and all that now exists of the Norman church is this portion of a tower and some indications of Romanesque work that can be discovered in a few other places. The havoc a fire can work in a Norman church even at the present time, in spite of modern fire extinguishing appliances, has been very forcibly illustrated by the recent burning of the abbey church of Selby, in Yorkshire, in which the terrific heat burnt halfway through stone piers of enormous thickness.
The reconstruction of the cathedral appears to have been undertaken soon after the disaster, and was commenced at the east end, where one finds that the chapels of the apse and transepts were built first and the choir soon afterwards, for it was finished in the Early French style. Between 1202 and 1220 the nave, choir, transepts, and central tower would appear to have been built, and before St. Louis (IX.) visited the cathedral in 1255, the magnificent church, as it is to be seen to-day, had assumed an appearance of completeness.
The embellishment of the great pile continued right through the centuries that followed, until the influence of the Renaissance shows itself in the central porch of the west front. In the fourteenth century the Lady-chapel was built, and in the fifteenth the Tour de Beurre climbed upwards, while the money provided by the indulgences sold, giving permission to eat butter in Lent, was helping to provide the funds. This tower, therefore, together with the uppermost portion of the Tour St. Romain, the western rose-window, and a good deal of decoration on each of the porches, belong to the Flamboyant period, corresponding to the Perpendicular of English architecture.
At the base of the Tour St. Romain there still stands the lodge of the porter, whose duties from very early times right up to 1700 included the care of the fierce watch-dogs who were at night let loose in the cathedral to guard its many precious treasures from robbers. How much would we give for a glimpse of one of those porters walking through the cavernous gloom of the echoing aisles, with his lamp throwing strange shadows from the great slouching dogs!