_The First City_
"Latera aquilonis civitas regis magni
Deus in domibus eius cognoscetur cum suscipiet eam."
Follow the Rue de la République past the Abbey of St. Ouen and up the
hill to the Place Sainte Marie. On your left you will find the Musée
des Antiquités which contains the earliest traces of the inhabitants
of Rouen. There are so few of them that they are easily contained in a
few glass cases; and this Museum is itself an excellent place with
which to begin your visitation of the town. Few travellers go there,
yet it is well worth the while, for here are collected many relics of
an age that has left few traces anywhere, and here can be filled up
many gaps in that story of Rouen which you can never read completely
in what is left of the old town. In the courtyard that faces the Rue
de la République are several of the ancient gateways that have given
way before the press of modern traffic, and a few façades of carved
and timbered houses rest like empty masks against the wall, looking
forlorn enough, yet better here than lost. One of the best of these
empty shells was taken in 1842 from No. 29 Rue Damiette. Dating about
1500, its overhanging storeys are carved with statues of St. John and
of St. Romain with his Gargouille. It probably belonged to the
Professional (Pellottier or Racquettier) of the Tennis Court near it,
the Jeu de Paume St. Jacques. In this same courtyard of the Museum is
a row of ancient weather-beaten statues, and, best relic of them all,
the exquisite original of the fountain Croix de Pierre which is
represented by a more modern imitation on the spot it once adorned.[1]
[Footnote 1: Built in 1515, its name is misleading, for it was made by
Cardinal d'Amboise not to hold a cross but to carry a fountain which
happened to be placed near the stone cross erected by Archbishop
Gauthier in commemoration of the profitable exchanges made when
Richard Coeur de Lion built his Château Gaillard in 1197 on land
belonging to the Cathedral. When the Cross disappeared the Fountain
took its name.]
[Illustration: THE ORIGINAL FONTAINE "CROIX DE PIERRE" NOW IN THE
MUSÉE DES ANTIQUITÉS]
The inner quadrangle, which you reach through the rooms of the Museum,
is the best thing it has to show. Remote from the dust and bustle of
the highway the little cloistered square is gay with flowers upon the
turf, and statues from various churches are set here and there, like
pensioners in Chelsea Hospital, after their active service in
religious wars has left them mutilated and useless, but not without
honour in the days of their old age. From the walls and windows
sculptured saints and angels look down with an air of gentle
approbation on the scene, and in the very middle a little bishop
raises his hand in benediction over pious strangers from the centre
of a rosebed.
But it is in the galleries within that we must seek for those records
of primitive habitation that we have come to see. Hatchets of silex or
of bronze, rude clay vases that were found nine yards beneath the
soil, bear witness to the remotest ages of humanity in Rouen. The town
grew very slowly, for its name was unknown in any form to Cæsar, and
it is not till the second century that Ptolemy mentions Rotomagos as
the capital of the tribe of Velocasses who have left their name to the
Vexin. The unhealthy marshes in the valley between the hills and the
river were not likely to be tenanted by the first Roman conquerors who
fixed their centre at Julia Bona, and their amphitheatre may still be
seen, near the ruins of a Norman castle, in the midst of the
manufactories of Lillebonne. But as the importance of Lutetia grew
upon the upper waters of the Seine, the value of this elbow of the
stream grew greater every year; and by the days of Diocletian,
Rotomagus had become the sea-gate of the capital, and the chief town
of the province. Already Strabo speaks of its commerce with the
English ports, and it appears as the natural point of exchange between
southern civilisation and the barbarism of the north, the gate through
which goods came from Italy, travelling by Rhone, by Saône, or Seine,
to England.
Its first fortifications found a natural southern base upon the
river's bend; to east, to west, and north it was protected by hills
and by the marshes, and unhealthy as it was, the Roman colonists were
compelled, when danger came, to leave the Julia Bona they preferred in
peace, and fly for safety to the fine strategical position Nature had
marked out at Rouen. Here, too, was the home of the Provincial
Governor, and of his military captain; and of the walls they built the
eye of faith can still see traces at the Ponts de Robec, at the
Abbaye de St. Amand, near the Hôtel de France, close to the Priory St.
Lô, and in the Place Verdrel in front of the Palais de Justice. I have
marked out the limits of this earliest _castrum_ on Map C; and in the
Rouen of to-day you may see a strange confirmation of the fact that
Roman Rotomagus was a far more watery place than may be realised at
first. For if you stand anywhere about the level of the Cathedral
foundations and look in the direction of the river, you will notice
that all the streets slope upwards. Go nearer still, and at the angle
where the Rue du Bac meets the Rue des Tapissiers, the upward slope
becomes even more pronounced, for though the river is not so far away,
there is even less of it to be seen. A great embankment has been
slowly built; and upon what was once marshland and islands and the
tidal mud, has grown up nearly all that part of Rouen which lies
between the Cathedral and the river.
This gradual consolidation of the land which was reclaimed slowly from
the Seine must have gone on from the time when the Roman walls stopped
at the Rue aux Ours on one side, and at the Rue Saint Denis on the
other. Their northern boundary was very slightly farther than the Rue
aux Fossés Louis VIII. The Rue Jeanne d'Arc runs just outside them to
the west, and the stream of Robec forms their natural boundary to the
east, flowing into the _Mala Palus_ that has left its name in the Rue
Malpalu which leads from the west front of St. Maclou towards the
Seine. Robec himself is well-nigh hidden now, though once his southern
turn formed one of the defences of the town. Now he gropes underground
his way into the Seine, and even when his waters can be traced, in the
Rue Eau de Robec, their muddy waves were almost better hidden.
There is a striking likeness to all this in the early days of the
history of London. Apart from all legends of the Troy Novant, of Lud
and Lear and that King Lucius who sanctified Cornhill, legends which
have their counterpart in all the old histories of Rouen, there are
almost as few relics of the fortified barrack on the Thames, or of the
more pretentious "Augusta" which followed, as there are of Roman
Rouen. The same mud flats along the river bank remained until, in 982,
after the first great fire, Cnut made a canal for his boats round
Southwark. Into the marsh fell the Fleet river, just as Robec into
Mala Palus; the English stream like the French one, formed the first
natural line of defence on that side; and both are now little better
than built-in sewers, one flowing into Thames at Blackfriars Bridge,
the other through its smaller tunnel into Seine near the Pont de
Pierre Corneille.
In the Museum of the Place Sainte Marie are the few Roman tombs that
have survived all other relics of their occupants, and some of the
money that they brought here, coins of Posthumus, of Tetricus, of
Gordian, of Commodus. It is said, too, that when the foundations of
vanished St. Herbland were being dug, some rusty iron rings for
mooring boats and mouldering ship timbers were discovered, which were
supposed to have been traces of the Roman quay. But the word "Port
Morant" is probably not derived from _Portus Morandi_, but from
_Postis_, and refers to the far more modern "avant soliers" or jutting
balconies, which were supported on stout beams, and ran round the
Parvis when Jacques Lelieur was making his sketches of the town in
1525. With such mere conjectures we must leave all that the Roman
occupation has to tell. Their story was a short one; for the town was
outside that circle where Roman influence was chiefly felt; and it
ended with the Frankish invasions from beneath the Drachenfels. From
being the head of a Roman province, Rouen became one of the fourteen
cities of the Armorican Confederation, through the influence of the
churchmen who now begin to appear in the dim records of the
city-chronicles as the defenders of these earliest citizens.
The Romans laid foundations here, as they did in so many places in
Europe, and then passed away. But before they disappeared there had
been time for the first missionaries of the Christian faith to sow the
seeds that were to grow into the Church. The legions left the city,
but the faith of Rome stayed on. As early as the second century (and
some say earlier still) came St. Nicaise. After him arrived St. Mellon
of Cardiff, who is said to have converted the chief Pagan temple into
a Christian church. St. Sever was the third "Bishop." In 400, St.
Victrice had laid the foundations of the first church on the site of
the Cathedral, and tradition puts the beginning of what became St.
Ouen as one year earlier. Strangely enough there remains a record of
the ecclesiastical architecture of these early days that is of the
highest interest, for it is the oldest building of its kind to be
found north of the Alps.
To reach it you must pass out of the town to the north-west, going by
the Rue Cauchoise where it starts from the Place du Vieux Marché
towards the hill of St. Gervais. All Roman burials took place outside
their walls, and the tombs generally lined the great roads that led
out of the towns. There is no doubt that many such monuments stood on
either hand of the road that you must follow now, beyond the Place
Cauchoise and into the Rue Saint Gervais. Go straight on up the hill
and at the turn into the Rue Chasselièvre, upon the left, you will see
an uncompromisingly new Norman church standing alone upon some high
ground. This is a modern building on the site of the old Priory of St.
Gervais, to which William the Conqueror was carried in his last
illness, when he could no longer bear the noise and traffic of the
town. At the west end, on the outside wall of this third and newest
church, is placed a tablet that records his death. Of the second
church you can trace the apse, with its Romanesque pillars and carved
capitals of birds and leaves, beneath the choir at the east end of the
third one.
Look lower still. Beneath the second choir is a still older window
that barely rises high enough above the soil to catch the light at
all. That is the window of the oldest crypt in France. Down thirty
steps from the inner pavement of the new church you can descend with
lighted candles to see the first building in which the Church of Rouen
met. The only accurate drawing that has ever been published of it was
made for these chapters, and it is worth while taxing your patience
with rather more detail than usual in describing a subterranean
chamber that has no parallel save in the Catacombs of Rome. It was no
doubt after his visit to the Holy City in 404 that St. Victrice built
this shrine for the safe-keeping of the first relics of his church in
a pagan land. The friend of St. Martin of Tours, and of St. Ambrose at
Milan, St. Victrice had probably obtained from them the sacred
fragments which were to be so carefully preserved for the
strengthening of the faith among the infidels. But the little
community of Christians at Rouen had its own relics that needed safe
disposal too. For in this crypt on the left hand as you enter is the
tomb of St. Mellon who died in 311, to whom a church is dedicated that
still exists in Monmouthshire, and on the right lies St. Avitien who
died in 325. The saint to whose name and memory the crypt was
dedicated lies buried beneath the high altar of the Church of St.
Ambrose at Milan. The body of St. Victrice, its builder, after lying
in this same vault for nearly four centuries after his death, was
transferred elsewhere.
The cold and gloomy little pit is eleven metres forty long, by five
metres forty broad, and five metres thirty high, and in the recessed
arches above the tombs may still be traced the thin red bricks of the
Roman builders and their strong cement between. In the circular apse
opposite the tiny square-headed entrance is the high window, set in
the east, that we saw from the outside, and in the wall on each side
are two square recesses in which the sacred vessels were locked up.
The altar on its raised platform stands upon two rude upright stones,
and is marked with five small crosses incised upon its upper surface.
Behind it, on the rounded wall, are faint traces of carving and of
fresco. All round the walls, except at the altar and the entrance,
runs a low stone seat after the true type of the Christian Catacomb. A
flat projecting rib of stone divides the barrel roof of the nave from
the circular vault of the apse which slopes upwards to the rounded
summit of the tiny window. A few skulls lie in a shadowed hollow near
the altar, but the State has fortunately put a stop to any further
grubbing in the floor for corpses that should never have been
disturbed.
[Illustration: ANCIENT CRYPT BENEATH THE CHURCH OF ST. GERVAIS]
There is an absolute and elemental simplicity in this tiny crypt,
with its stone bench and tombs of stone, that appeals far more
strongly to the imagination than any bespangled ecclesiasticism above
it. This is the true service of God and of His poor. The cold
austerity of a faith that stood in no need of external attractiveness
lays hold upon the senses as the reticent syllables of that first
gospel, spelt out from its original sentences, must have gripped the
hearts of those who heard it first. The Latin phrases of a long drawn
litany, set to complicated tunes, rolled overhead with an emptiness of
barren sound, among the clouds of incense and the glitter of the
painted walls and all the service of "the clergyman for his rich."
More beautiful places of worship we shall see in many parts of Rouen.
But in all France there is nothing more sincere than the small crypt
of St. Gervais.
So the only remnant that is left of "Roman" Rouen is not Roman at all,
but a type of that strong, naïve, and sincere Christianity which
invigorated the Gothic captains who overthrew Rome. It is but fitting
that there should be so little left. For the Romans were not so much a
nation as an empire. They were not so much a people, as the embodiment
of a power. When their work of spreading law and order, of diffusing
Greek imagination through the channels of their strength was over,
they split asunder at the vigorous touch of the truth that came
against them. They left no personal traces in a town so far removed as
Rouen from the centres of their civilisation.
It was the same in London, which was still farther off. For if you
believe that any "Roman" wall was built round Augusta before 400 A.D.,
there is little left of it to point to now, save at that south-eastern
corner on which the Norman Conqueror built his tower, at the New Post
Office buildings in St. Martin's le Grand, and in the churchyard of
St. Giles's, Cripplegate. In the British Museum and at Guildhall are
some scanty relics of domestic life, some fragments of mosaic, shreds
of pavement, and the like.
At Rouen it is the same. The legions left the stamped impression of
their armoured feet, impersonal and strong, a hallmark as it were, to
guarantee the local strength and value of the first Rothomagus. But it
was the Christian worshippers who left the only building that remains
of those first centuries, to testify to what some men and women in
that early time could really feel and think and do.
It is by another priest that the story of the town is carried on from
"Roman" times to the next period of transition. St. Godard
appropriately enough, a Frank by descent himself and born of a Roman
mother, is the link between this shadowy twilight of early church
history and the stronger colouring of the Frankish story that is to
come. In 488 he was elected as the fourteenth bishop of Rouen by the
unanimous vote of clergy and people together, and eight years
afterwards he represented the diocese when Hlodowig or Clovis was
baptised at Rheims, from which we may gather that the Frankish power
had definitely embraced his town within its grasp some time before. He
died about 525 and his body, which was first buried in the crypt of
the church which bears his name, was afterwards removed to Soissons.
It was at that same Soissons that the Romans were driven out of
"France," and Hlodowig with his Franks took possession of the country
to the Loire, and then pushed on the boundaries of their kingdom to
the Pic du Midi. The profession of Christianity by Hlodowig was not a
mere matter of policy. It was another expression of that Frankish
quality of sincerity and truth, which has been already noticed, in the
Gaul that was shaking off the bonds of Rome. It was perhaps the chief
quality of that band of nations north of Tiber which stretched from
English hills, across limestone plâteaux of Northern France, through
German forests, to the vales of the Carpathians. These were the first
wave of the "barbarian" invasion after Rome had fallen. Behind them,
further to the north and east, drifted a piratical band of roaming
warriors, who for the next five centuries press and harry the
boundaries of the kingdoms, Visigoths and Ostrogoths, Saxons, Danes,
and Scandinavians, of whom we shall hear more later.
[Illustration: STATUE SUPPOSED TO REPRESENT ST. LOUIS (FROM THE
CATHEDRAL) NOW IN THE MUSÉE DES ANTIQUITÉS]
The Christian bishops were the shield after Rome fell, between the
trembling conquered races and the first wave of conquering barbarian
invasion. The strength of their faith we have seen already in the
crypt of St. Gervais. This little altar, and the tiny shrine of St.
Godard watched infant Rouen from beyond its walls. An edict in 399 had
destroyed the rural temples of the old Pagan faith. About 450 a new
law recommended the conversion of the old temples within the towns
into churches. So in these years we may suppose that the first
building had risen on the site of the Cathedral, with St. Herbland's
earliest church in front, and upon other eyots in the Seine the
shrines of St. Martin de la Roquette, St. Clément, and St. Eloi. When
Julia Bona was finally deserted, Rouen became the home of a count, who
held, under Clovis, administrative, judicial and military power. By
the next century the town must have grown to a considerable size and
importance. Yet there is absolutely nothing of Merovingian Rouen left
except the few poor ornaments in the glass cases of the Musée des
Antiquités. Here you will see some of the characteristically shaped
bronze axe-heads of the period; but by far the larger part of what is
left is woman's gear. Beside the axes there are a few lance and
arrow-heads; but the finger rings (still on the bones that wore them)
are numerous; there are necklaces too, and bracelets; nails and
buttons, styles for writing, pins, needles, combs, and pottery. By
such pitiful trifles that have survived the pride and strength of all
their owners, you may be fitly introduced to the next chapter in the
pageant of historic Rouen, the tale of Fredegond and Brunhilda.
[Illustration]