North of the King's camp, Sir William Porter had at first held the ground before the Porte St. Hilaire, but the Duke of Gloucester was given the position as soon as he came up from Cherbourg, placing his two lieutenants on each side of the stream, the Earl of Suffolk to the south, the Marquis of Abergavenny northwards.
Leaving the side on which the King's camp was so well guarded, if you passed west and northwards round the battlements of Rouen, you would have seen Thomas Beaufort, Duke of Exeter, guarding the Porte Beauvoisine, having as his lieutenants Lord Willoughby de Eresby and the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Fitz-Hugh, to the east, and John Lord Ross westwards. The Castle of Rouen and the Porte Bouvreuil were besieged by Lord John Mowbray, second son of the Duke of Norfolk, whose lieutenants were first Sir William Hanington, and later on Sir Gilbert Talbot, the father of the famous Earl of Shrewsbury. The last gate, the Porte Cauchoise at the lowest western angle of the town, was beleaguered by Thomas Plantagenet the Duke of Clarence whose camp was in the ruined abbey of St. Gervais; above him was the Earl of Cornwall; and James Butler, Earl of Ormond, closed the investing lines towards the river. A glance at [map B] will make all this clear.
Across the Seine, the whole of the ruined faubourg of St. Sever was under the command of John Holland, Earl of Huntingdon, whose business it was to guard the barbacan, or fortress at the south end of the bridge, and to keep up the English communications with the south of Normandy. To do this he had a numerous staff of lieutenants, Sir Gilbert d'Umfreville, Lord John Nevill, eldest son of the Earl of Westmoreland, Sir Richard Arundel, and Lord Edmund Ferrers. Finally, Thomas, Lord Carew, was given a roving commission to scout and forage with his light Irish troops and a body of hardy Welshmen under Jenico of Artois who is mentioned both by the English anonymous poet and by Holinshed.
Within the walls of Rouen the roll of the defenders has but very modest names to contrast to the flower of English chivalry opposed to them. Of Guy le Bouteiller, captain of the castle at the Porte Bouvreuil, I have already spoken. One of his lieutenants, Jean Noblet, held St. Catherine, and the other, Laghen, the Bastard of Arly, kept the Porte Cauchoise with the goodwill of all the citizens who firmly trusted him. One of his subordinates is called "Mowne-sir de Termagowne" by the English poet. The names of all those who kept the walls are chronicled either by this authority or by Monstrelet. But the most famous of them were Alain Blanchart, captain of the Arbalétriers, who seems to have taken command of the whole militia and was the life and soul of the town's resistance, and Canon Robert de Livet whose devotion and ardour inspired every non-combatant to assist the soldiers in their weary task and to bear their sufferings with a fortitude he was himself the first to show. I have mentioned 2000 refugee-warriors from other places. They seem to have been led by the men of Caen under a Lombard condottiere called Le Grand Jacques, or as the English poem has it:—
"Guaunte Jakys a werryour wyse."
The real operations of the siege began with a desperate sortie of the citizens from every gate at once, which was repulsed with slaughter. The following days were filled with spirited attacks on every English captain who had not had time to fortify his post, attacks which only ceased when a huge ditch had been dug all round the town, with regular posts and covered ways, the whole under the guidance of Sir Robert Bapthorp, who was afterwards rewarded with the "Maison à l'enseigne de l'Ours" in the Rue de la Vicomté. Meanwhile the English continued to make sure of their communications with Harfleur down the Seine, and to cut off the same route to the French. The Portuguese fleet helped them to blockade the mouth of the river, and even advanced upstream as far as Quillebœuf. Most important of all, they built the Bridge of St. George of solid timbers sunk into the stream between Lescure and Sotteville, four miles higher up than Rouen, and guarded it thoroughly from all attack. Finally, Jean Noblet, cut off from all provisions in St. Catherine, had to surrender on the thirtieth of August, and a few days afterwards, Caudebec, the last hope of the city down the stream was forced to swear complete neutrality and to abide by the same terms which were eventually won by Rouen, an instance of heroic partisanship which proves the solidarity of Normandy and the loyalty of every outlying town to the capital.
The results of all this were very soon visible, for the Seine was now completely in the power of the English, and the only problem that remained for the King to solve was to get his war-galleys high enough up the Seine to protect St. George's Bridge. He could not think of sailing past the town itself. He finally determined to drag the vessels across the narrow neck of land that lies at the southern angles of the great curve on which Rouen herself is set. The space at this point between the villages of Moulineaux and Orival is scarcely five miles, as may be seen on [map A]. The galleys were hauled across under full sail with a favouring wind on huge greased rollers, and then indeed the men of Rouen were face to face with the reality of a blockade which held them fast by land and water; so they burnt their own last warships and set fire to the famous Clos des Galées.
Henry V. had before this written to London for provisions, in a letter to the Lord Mayor which is still preserved in the archives of the City, and took nine days to get to him. "And pray you effectuelly," writes the King, "that in al the haste that ye may, ye wille do arme as manie smale vessels as ye may goodly with vitaille and namly with drinke for to come Harfleu and fro thennes, as fer as they may, up ye river of Seyne to Roan ward, vith the said vitaille for the refresching of us and our said hoost." The royal request was cheerfully welcomed, and the city of London hasted to send "Tritty botes of swete wyne, ten of Tyre, ten of Romency, ten of Malvesey, and a thousand pipes of ale and bere, with three thousand and five hundred coppes for your hoost to drinke"—a "bote" being about 126 gallons. At the very moment when all this good cheer reached the thirsty Englishmen, the first pinch of hunger came upon the men of Rouen, as, one by one, their last communications were cut off. Their attacks upon the enemy became more frequent and more desperate every day. With artillery, with every weapon they could scrape together, obsolete or not, they kept a continual hail of missiles on the English camp, especially harassing the quarters of the Duke of Gloucester, absolutely preventing the King's soldiers from ever approaching near enough to mine their walls, and giving not an hour of rest to the English army.
But Henry V. was too wise to waste a man. After he had cut off every avenue of help or hope, he sat quite still and waited, for he knew that death and disease were on his side, and that against inevitable starvation no city in the world could stand for long. The horror of this long-drawn agony was now and then relieved by such single combats between the lines as that when Laghen beat the Englishman who had challenged him before the gate of Caux, or by the hanging of a new French prisoner in the English lines and the retaliation of an execution on the walls of Rouen. But rations were growing pitifully small now, and another effort was made to get help from the King and the Duke of Burgundy. A messenger got through the lines and brought the stern warning of the citizens to those who had abandoned them. For Rouen cried "Haro!" before the throne, and gave notice to the princes that if she was compelled to surrender to the English, there would be no bitterer enemy of the Crown than the capital of Normandy. They got the usual promises, and every bell in Rouen (save the captive "Rouvel") rang to welcome the good tidings of the messenger on his return. But nothing happened, and both at Alençon and at Pont de l'Arche the English King was easily able to put off the negotiations which were the only sign of help that Rouen got from Paris.
And now famine itself began to grip the citizens by the throat. The Register of the Cathedral Chapterhouse shows signs of scarcity of food only three weeks after the siege began, for fines are then imposed in loaves of bread. Then the bread usually distributed was given up, and money substituted. The last entry stops short in the middle of a pathetic sentence ... "parce que, dans le nécessité du présent siège, le pain ..." and it was not until the gates were opened that a clerk was found strong enough to go on writing. By the end of September all the meat had disappeared, every horse and every donkey had been eaten, and wheaten bread was sold at a sovereign a loaf. The horrors of starvation need not any further be revealed; but by the first days of December they had a peculiarly terrible result. To save their own lives, and keep enough miserable fodder for the soldiers to stand upright behind the walls, the burgesses of Rouen had to turn out of the town all the refugees who had fled for safety to her walls from other cities taken by the English. Some fifteen thousand of them, men, women and children, tottered out of the gates and made feebly for the English lines. The chronicler himself was moved to pity: "Have ye pitee hem upone" he cries to the English King, "and yeve hem leve thens to gone"; but when they tried to pass through they found a row of pikes as pitiless as the shut gates of Rouen behind. Beneath the chill December sky these famishing spectres had to take refuge in the open ditch below the ramparts of the town. Without any shelter, ragged, defenceless, and feeding only on roots and bitter grass, grubbed from the war-scarred ground, they perished in hundreds every night, they died by the chance missiles of one side or the other, they went mad and hurled themselves into the watch-fires of the English. From the walls above, a priest sometimes would lean down with a blessing, or draw up an infant newly born into all this misery, baptise it, and lower it again to die; but never a crumb of bread came out of starving Rouen. The Canon de Livet, whose stout heart no horror of the siege could break, was almost overcome at this last infamy of fate; and standing high upon the ramparts he cursed the English army, and pronounced the anathema of excommunication against its king.