From an old print owned by the City of Paris.
FRAGMENT OF THE WALL OF PHILIP AUGUSTUS AS IT LOOKS TO-DAY.
Not far away is the rue des Anglais, which was laid out before Philip Augustus’s reign and took its name from the English students who frequented it. A little farther west, creeping in the dark between tilted houses, is the street, called since the fourteenth century, “of the Parchment Workers,” and in the thirteenth century rue des Escrivains. Two of the tiny dwellings, numbers 6 and 7, belonged in the thirteenth century to the English cathedral of Norwich, which used them as dormitories for the scholars which it supported at the French seat of learning.
These houses are built around a microscopic courtyard, a plan persistent in France through many hundred years. It is a plan seen to-day in many modern dwellings, in the Banque de France, a seventeenth century building, in the eastern end of the Louvre and in its pavement record of the earliest quadrangular Louvre. It is a plan making for light and air and it often permits the planting of a small garden within. The idea sprang from the necessity of a fortification’s preserving a stolid and impenetrable exterior while the life of its tenants, carried on within the shelter of its walls, had something of pleasant environment.
So closely does Paris cling to her ancient traditions that even in the twentieth century the schools and their students are removed but a few yards from their medieval location. The students of to-day, too, have their own traditions of dress and behavior which mark them as inhabitants of the “Latin Quarter” even if they are kodaked at Versailles on a holiday afternoon. They assume for themselves now privileges which Philip Augustus encouraged them to take by making them free from the regulations which the other citizens obeyed and subject only to the ecclesiastical tribunal. This difference of attitude caused many riots in the thirteenth century and they break out afresh in the twentieth with a frequency which helps to occupy any idle moments of the city police.
So great were the attractions of Paris offered not only to students but to merchants that the population of the city grew to one hundred and twenty thousand under Philip’s rule. The populous section on the south or left bank of the river was matched by another on the north, chiefly inhabited by merchants and artisans, and both of them were larger than the original Cité on the island. The Cité was the administrative and ecclesiastical center, for the king’s palace was not his only residence but also a palace of justice, and crowded into the limits set by the Seine were so many churches that one of them served a parish of only twenty houses.
The northward growth of the city encroached upon the Halles as it had upon the cemetery of the Innocents, and Philip recognized the necessity of enclosing and roofing the markets. Such utilities as public ovens, too, which had been a monopoly of some of the religious houses, he opened to the citizens at large. He also instituted a water supply, which, though far from ample, since it allowed only two quarts a day for each inhabitant, was an earnest of good intentions.