The Story of Rouen

by Theodore Andrea Cook

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 Côtentin, 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 le Bouteiller had brought 1500 more with him into the castle. The town itself could provide 15,000 militia, 100 arbalétriers, 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 trébuchet (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 CHARTREUSE DE LA ROSE

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 "Archæologia 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 Darnétal. 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 Darnétal; 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 Darnétal, 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 mediæval 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.