The Story of Rouen

by Theodore Andrea Cook

The commercial privileges which I have already mentioned (see [p. 85]) were fully confirmed by Philip Augustus, especially with regard to exports to Ireland, while Louis IX. continued the gradual consolidation of the river trade in the hands of the Rouen merchants. What this involved, may be seen from the case which was brought before the Parliament of Paris in 1272, when the Mayor of Rouen had seized six barrels of wine which a landowner was bringing (as he asserted) from his vineyards to his own house by river. Every quay along the bank was rapidly taken possession of by the merchants, and by 1282 the famous "Clos aux Galées," between the Rue du Vieux Palais and the Rue de Fontenelle, was built in the parish of St. Eloi as a dockyard for purposes of commerce and of war. But not long after this the space appears to have been needed for other purposes, and the real "Clos des Galées" was moved across the river to the other bank at the end of the Empress Bridge, or "Pont de Mathilde." In a charter of 1297, the change is marked by the name, "Neuves-Galées," and this occurs again in 1308. It is remarkable as the first arsenal ever used for artillery in France; for cannon, arms, and powder were all stored here in later times, and here were built the ships that fought in the Hundred Years' War by Charles VI., out of wood from the forests of Roumare. Just before the great siege by the English in 1418 the citizens destroyed it, but the name remained in the hostelry called the "Enseigne de la Galère." Then the "Grenier à sel" and the "Hôtel des Gabelles" were built on the same spot; and finally you can only imagine very vaguely where the first dockyards of Rouen were when you look now at the Caserne St. Sever.

In tracing out the changes that have come in each century to the aspect of the town, it is not often we shall find a locality so persistent in its character as the Place de la Haute et Basse Vieille Tour, when once its military strength had been changed into commercial convenience. The older castle, originally built more to the north-west by Rollo, between the Church of St. Pierre du Chastel and the Rue des Charrettes, had long ago absolutely disappeared, and its place was taken by a Franciscan convent, given to the brethren in 1248 by Archbishop Rigaud, who had been originally a monk of the Order; and the ruins of their building may be seen in the street which, as Rue des Cordeliers, still preserves their name. Another change that is still recorded in the nomenclature of the streets took place when Louis VIII. allowed the inhabitants to build gardens and almshouses in what had once been the moat of the old town walls. This you may trace in the name of the Rue des Fossés Louis VIII., formerly the Rue de l'Aumône. In the same way the Rue des Carmes preserves the fact that the Carmelite monks brought by St. Louis from the Holy Land, migrated to the street that bears their name in 1336, and remained there for a very long time.

But everything did not go smoothly in the streets of Rouen while these pacific changes were in progress. In 1213 the town was filled with the levy of counts, barons, and knights, with all their men-at-arms, whom Philip was collecting to attack the King of England; and in 1250 a far more disorderly and plebeian assembly gathered under the leadership of André de St. Léonard to express in the practical form of riot and pillage their disapprobation of the ten per cent. exacted by the Church for grinding corn in the ecclesiastical mills. Near the Pont de Robec and the Rue du Père Adam flour and wheat were forcibly stolen, but Archbishop Odo Rigaud soon asserted his authority, by fining the ringleader 100 marks of silver, equivalent to about £2000 sterling, and the dissatisfaction ceased. In the next year a rising, that had some slight degree of religious colour in it, gave a good deal of trouble, not to Rouen only, but to the rest of France. Bands of peasants, styling themselves "Pastoureaux," asserted their indignation at the captivity of King Louis IX. by chasing the archbishop out of his cathedral. From the fact that they had been joined, not merely by all the lazy ruffians of the neighbourhood, but by some burgesses, and even by certain municipal office-holders, we may infer that the privileges or prerogatives of the Church were once more the real objects of the dispute. Though the ecclesiastics were as usual strong enough to exact a public apology and absolution from the mayor and his councillors, the strange frenzy spread to the Provinces; men averred that the Holy Virgin and her angels had appeared to urge them to release St. Louis, and it was necessary for Queen Blanche herself to intervene before the trouble was stopped in Paris and many parts of France.

This widespread affection felt for St. Louis may, perhaps, be explained not only by his personality, but by the fact that he was always moving from one part of his dominions to another, in spite of the obvious inconveniences of mediæval travel. I have already noticed some of the things he did for Rouen on his various visits. But such pilgrimages as that of 1255 to Adam Bacon, the solitary abbot of St. Catherine, cannot have failed to increase his local reputation. He celebrated Christmas here in 1264, after another short visit previously on his way from Pont de l'Arche to Bec, and in 1269 he came again from Port-Audemer. On every such occasion he prayed in the churches and left offerings suitable to his rank; he ate in the refectories with the monks, he dispensed alms to the poor, and gave money or its equivalent to the hospitals. His charity was, indeed, extraordinary, for Queen Margaret's Confessor has related that he not only fed the hungry at his every meal, but went round the beds in the sick houses, smoothing the pillows of the sufferers, speaking to them, and trying to supply their wants.

It was when King Louis came with his mother, Blanche of Castile, to keep the Christmas of 1255 at Rouen, that the greater part of the choir, transept, and nave of the Cathedral as we see it now was finished. The monastical developments of previous centuries had done their work; the power of the great abbots and priors, which raised them into feudal dignitaries, with large wealth and wide possessions, had reached its limit. The rise of the communes in every town, and the passion for civic liberty which accompanied them and gave them birth, as we have traced it in Rouen, was taken advantage of by the archbishops in those fruitful years which lay between 1180 and 1240. The royal power, personified here by Philip Augustus, was as much concerned as the burgesses in the diminution of feudality. Even the great secular nobles were not averse to encouraging a movement that appeared to counteract the importance of their most dangerous ecclesiastical rivals. So that religious and political motives came together, just at this one momentous period, to produce an enthusiasm for building which has never been equalled before or since. The gradual development of the sacred edifice from the crypt, like that catacomb of St. Gervais, through the form of the Roman basilica, with its simple nave and round apse, to the new developments of choir and chapels, introduced by Suger, had not proceeded without leaving on the finished product—which has been called Gothic—the traces of its growth. And this is one reason why, until the fourteenth century at least, the Cathedral retained the mingled characteristics of a building that was both civil and ecclesiastical, that was used both for the divine offices and for political, even military assemblies.

In what I shall have to say of the architecture called Gothic,[26] I would not have it thought that I exclude the praise of beauty from every other form of building, for there are Renaissance buildings, for instance, in Rouen alone that would contradict such barren dogmatism at the outset. The reserve and the harmonious proportion of the Cour des Comptes have a value of their own quite independent of the Gothic unrestraint and revelry of carving in the Portail des Libraires. But I cannot conceal my preference for one form of beauty over another, my delight in the most organic form of art the world has ever seen, the true "master art" of Gothic, as opposed to that "looking backward" which was the Renaissance, to that defiance of the rule of progress which bade men advance to different developments of organic living forms in every single branch of life, except in the greatest art of all. The Middle Ages had inherited a direct succession of harmonious forms, one rising out of another until the perfection was attained. Then came the Black Death, and the no less fatal scourges of Commercialism and Bureaucracy. Men's thoughts apparently became so riveted upon the grave that they must go back to the art of the dead Romans and the formalism of classical examples to keep breath in their bones at all. And even so, they informed the skeleton with a new life. In such new creations of the aged spirit as the French Renaissance Châteaux of Touraine, or Rouen's Hôtel Bourgtheroulde, they showed what vigour there was left, if only it had been permitted to remain original. Nor is there any hope of betterment in architecture, or any art, to-day, until something of the spirit has come back to us which made each citizen proud of the house he lived in, or of the House of God he helped to build, until the love of workmanship that built the old cathedrals has returned.

Through those doors, which were shut sternly in the face of princes under the Church's ban, the poor man gladly passed from the hovel that was his home. Out of the dark twisting streets whose crowded houses pressed even against the walls of the Cathedral, the humblest citizen might turn towards the beauty of a building greater and more wonderful than any that his feudal lord could boast. He found there not merely the sanctuary, not merely the shrine of all that was holiest in history or in creed, but the epitome of his own life, the handicrafts of his various guilds, as at Rouen, the tale of all his humblest occupations, the mockery of his neighbours' foibles, the lessons of the horror of sin. For before the end of the thirteenth century, the handicraftsmen, associated into such guilds as we have seen in Rouen, had not only won their freedom from arbitrary oppression, but had secured so large a share in the government of the towns, that within the next fifty years, the heads of the communes were nearly always the delegates from the craft-guilds. The zenith of Gothic architecture coincided with this period of their triumph; its bright, and glittering, and joyful art spread all over the intelligent world, and more especially in France; it was not contented with merely architectural forms in colourless cathedrals, but decorated them with carvings painted in gay colours, used every space for pictures, drew upon all literature for its materials. In Dante, Chaucer, and Petrarch, in the German Niebelungenlied, in the French romances, in the Icelandic Sagas, in Froissart and the chroniclers, you may find the same spirit; and each town smote its own epic into stone upon the walls of its cathedral. Every village, even, had its painter, its carvers, its actors; the cathedrals that have remained are but the standard from which we may imagine the loving perfection to which every form of craftsman's art was carried. And their work gives us such pleasure now because they had such intense pleasure in doing the work themselves.

For the masons had gone to their new task with a will. Freed from the thick and shadowy archways piled upon heavy piers, which had obscured the old priestly and dogmatic Romanesque, the builders of the new cathedral revelled in the new found Gothic of the people, and raised their soaring arches to the sky, and crowned their pinnacles with wreaths that flamed into the clouds. And upon every inch of wall they wrote and wrought upon the living stone, "magistri de vivis lapidibus," until every detail of the world of worshippers was gathered up and sanctified by this expression of its new found meaning, as a part of the mystery and the beauty of holiness.

It is significant of the democratic nature of this architectural outburst, that the first communes signalised their liberty by the earliest cathedrals, at Noyon, Soissons, Laon, Reims, Amiens, in the capital of France, and in the capital of Normandy. It was early in this same century (1203) that Normandy became part of the crown domain together with Maine, Anjou, Touraine, Poitou, and Limousin. Before the century was done, Languedoc, the County of Toulouse, part of Auvergne, and Champagne were also included in the royal domain. More than this, the Head of the Church himself had come in 1309 to live in Avignon, and this movement had, no doubt, its effect upon religious sentiment in the nation to whose charge St. Peter's representative committed himself; for religion had of course the greatest part in a movement that could never have been so widespread and so creative without its powerful motives; but, even in spite of the immense impulse given by the crusades, religion would never have got its opportunity at all, if "politics" had not at the very moment been ripe for contemporaneous expansion, if the people and the King had not simultaneously been ready to give expression to a movement in which liberty and unity were the greatest factors. Thus it is that the cathedrals are the first visible basis of that French nationality into which the scattered provinces of Gaul had expanded, the first germ of that creative genius of French art which has not yet lost its right of place in Europe, the first clear record of the national intellect. And the people were not slow to recognise the meaning of the carvings that were placed where all who ran might read, placed there by men of like passions with themselves, copied often so directly from themselves, that the cathedrals may be regarded as the great record of the ancestry of the common people. The emblazoned tomb, or the herald's parchment, might fitly chronicle the proud descent of the solitary feudal lord; but the brothers and kinsmen of his dependents were carved in their habits as they lived upon the church's walls, and there they work at their appointed tasks, and laugh at their superiors, unto this day. So the people filled their church with throngs of worshippers, with merry-making crowds, with vast audiences of the great mediæval Mystery Plays, with riotous assemblages sometimes not too decent, whose rough humour has been preserved for us in the thousand grotesque carvings of the time.