_The Siege of Rouen by Henry V._
"War's ragged pupils; many a wavering line
Torn from the dear fat soil of champaigns hopefully tilled,
Torn from the motherly bowl, the homely spoon,
To jest at famine....
Over an empty platter affect the merrily filled;
Die, if the multiple hazards around said die."
The Mystery Plays which I have just mentioned in the last chapter were
undertakings at once so solemn and so popular that I can give no
better idea of coming trouble than is contained in the fact of the
postponement of the Mystery arranged by the Confrèrie de la Passion
for 1410. On the 28th of March that year the sheriffs decided that,
owing to the heavy obligations pressing on the town by reason of the
quarrel with the Duke of Burgundy, and of the severe war-taxes
depleting both private purses and public revenue, these entertainments
must be given up. We find that this Confrèrie was not to be put off in
1415, and even repeated its play at Pentecost thirty years later; but
in 1410 their disappointment was only one of many signs of that
disorder and poverty which finally laid Rouen open and defenceless
before the English army.
Already, in 1383, commerce and industry had suffered cruelly from the
municipal anarchy which followed the suppression of the commune, and
from the heavy fines for its rebellion imposed by the King. It was not
for more than three centuries that the famous mayor reappeared; and
this is no solitary instance of such an obliteration in the country,
for though French Communes actually began before the Free Boroughs of
England, they had not any of the qualities of permanence they showed
in the nation where antiquity is more traceable in institutions than
in such buildings as are still scattered in profusion over France.
Another quaint little episode that shows the uneasiness of the town
occurred in 1405, and is to be found in the deliberations of the Hôtel
de Ville for the 27th of September. Before Guillaume de Bellengues,
Captain of Rouen, and his council, the question was discussed of the
arrival of a certain Spanish captain, Pedro Niño, Count of Buelna,
from Harfleur. Seventeen days afterwards he came, and it is
interesting to observe that, in spite of relations with Spain which
had begun long previously, lasted until after Corneille's day, and are
still recorded in the name of the Rue des Espagnols, the good citizens
of Rouen were very much upon their guard when Pedro Niño sailed up the
Seine, and only allowed him to stay in their port and revictual on
very hard conditions, one of which was the entire surrender of all
offensive and defensive weapons. They also insisted on mooring his
three galleys in a certain spot, keeping a strict guard over them, and
not allowing any of his men in Rouen during the night.
It happens that the personality of Don Pedro is not unknown to us,
from other sources, and the bombastic account[38] written by his
faithful squire, Gutierre de Gamez, has so many interesting points in
it about Rouen at this date that I must refer to it, if only to bring
out of its obscurity a book that is hardly known, and almost deserves
to rank near the more famous and extended chronicle of the "Loyal
Servitor" of Bayard. Without going at any length into a life which
does not concern us, I may say briefly that after his education at the
Court of Castile, which he is said to have owed to his descent from
the royal house of France, Don Pedro was commissioned at twenty-five
years of age to attack the Barbary Corsairs in the Western
Mediterranean. Ever since Du Guesclin had deposed Pedro the Cruel, and
placed Henry of Trastamare upon the throne of Castille, the alliance
between that power and France remained a political tradition; and at
about this time Charles VI. being at war with England, asked for help,
with which Don Pedro was sent. He actually took a town in Cornwall,
laid Portland under contribution, and burnt the town of Poole.
Returning to Harfleur, he was prevented by contrary winds from again
crossing the Channel, and therefore decided to sail up the Seine and
winter at Rouen. The luxury of the French nobles was only one of the
many reasons of the weakness and disaster of the nation, and Don
Pedro's voyage up the river seems to have been made pleasant to him by
every châtelaine upon its banks, until he reached the Clos des Galées
(which is rightly described in the "Victorial"), and met the somewhat
gruff demands of the authorities of Rouen.
[Footnote 38: The "Cronica" begins as follows:--"Este libro ha nombre
el Victorial, é fabla en él de los quatros Principes que fueron
mayores en el mundo...." It was published in Madrid in 1880, 236 pp.
4to, and was translated from the original Spanish by MM. Circourt and
Puymaigre. (Paris, Victor Palmé, 1867, 590 pp. 8vo).]
They must have very soon changed their opinions, however; indeed, from
the fact that in July of that same year the welcome and the gifts
offered to Louis, Duke of Orléans, by the sheriffs were entirely
contrary to the wishes of the population, who had just rebelled
against his taxes, we may infer that a friend of that Duke, as Don
Pedro showed himself to be on visiting Paris a little later, was not
likely to have long been treated with hostility or even indifference
by the civic officials.
It is, therefore, hardly surprising that we soon hear of a love-affair
in Rouen, and that too with the daughter of M. de Bellengues, the
captain of the town himself. This lady had but just become a widow,
after her marriage with Renaud de Trie, Admiral of France, which took
place from the Hôtel du Bec, before a large assembly of her father's
friends in their parish church of St. Lô, with sixteen "Farceurs"
dancing before the procession to amuse the people. "She is too
good-looking," said the Captain, "for me to prevent anyone from seeing
her;" and by this brilliant ceremony he gave a decisive check to the
prevailing custom of secret weddings in a private chapel.[39] The
description of the Château of Sérifontaine, near Rouen, where the
gallant Don first met the old and sickly admiral and his pretty wife,
is as complete as almost any other I have seen, as a picture of a
great French nobleman's house at the beginning of the fifteenth
century.
[Footnote 39: M. de Bellengues lived in Michel Leconte's house, called
the Manoir de la Fontaine, which was disputed by the parishes of St.
Lô and St. Herbland. In it was a little chapel very fashionable for
private weddings, and a mysterious apartment which could be hired for
honeymoons. The Manor was bought in 1429, for the convenience of monks
visiting Rouen, by the Abbaye du Bec, from which the street took its
name.]
I have no space to quote the "Victorial" unfortunately, and from its
pages I can only hint at the abundance you may gather of the ordered
beauty and quiet of the place; of the chapel with its band of
wind-instruments and minstrels; of the gracious orchards and gardens
by the stream; of the lake that could be drained at will, to choose
the best fishes for the Admiral's table; of the five and forty
sporting dogs and the men who cleaned the kennels; of the long rows of
stalls, each with its horse, in the spacious stables; of the falcons
and their perches and their keepers; of the separate lodgings of my
lady, joined to the main building by a drawbridge, and filled with
dainty furniture. There, too, may be read how Madame went forth so
soon as she had risen from her bed, with her ten maids-in-waiting, to
a shrubbery where each sat in silence, with her rosary and her Book of
Hours; how they then set to picking flowers till it was time for Mass;
how breakfast followed, with chickens and roasted game upon a silver
dish, and wine; how they all rode out together of an early afternoon,
taking what gentlemen were there, and singing blithely till the fields
echoed as with the songs of Paradise. Into this delightful abode the
old Admiral had invited the sea-captain, who was a guest of Rouen. The
Spaniard was welcomed with a banquet on his arrival, at which his
host, too feeble now to ride or hunt, did the honours of his house
right courteously, providing sweet music during all the dinner, and a
ball afterwards, at which his wife danced for an hour with the gay Don
Pedro. After a ride round the castle grounds the visitor went off to
Paris, and can hardly have been surprised, when he returned to Rouen
and found the Admiral had died, to receive a message from the pretty
widow to come up and hear the news.
But the lovers were unlucky, for she might not wed again so soon after
her widowhood, and he was under orders for the war, and had no
permission for such dalliance from his master, the King of Castille.
So he sailed away towards Harfleur, after many protestations of
affection on each side, during an eclipse of the sun which came on as
he left Rouen harbour, and much terrified his sailors. And the end of
his little story is that he married Doña Beatrix of Portugal, and died
in 1453; while Jeanne de Bellengues espoused as her second husband
Louis Mallet de Graville, Sieur de Montagu, Grand-Master of the
Arbalétriers of France, and died still in her youth, in 1419. She was
buried in the chapel of the Trinity in Rouen Cathedral, and all her
husband's lands were confiscated by the English King. The intimate
connection that existed at this time with Spain is exemplified again
by the marriage of Robert de Bracquemont, who surrendered Pont de
l'Arche to King Henry during the English advance on Rouen, with Inez
de Mendoza, daughter of a high functionary at the Court of Castille,
where he had been the French ambassador, and owned estates in
Fuentesol and Pennarenda.
I have mentioned the irritation of the populace when Louis d'Orléans
was received so well by the sheriffs. But their disgust at "the six
barrels of wine, and the bales of royal scarlet" then presented may
not have been merely political; for many must have remembered how in
1390 the Hôtel de Ville had actually been seized for debt owing to the
extravagant gifts of silver plate presented to Isabeau of Bavaria. The
family of Mustel in fact had "fait mettre en criées et subhastations
le manoir de la ville." And in times of such distress the citizens may
well have objected to any useless ostentation on the part of their
officials.
Disturbances continued rife in Rouen through these terrible years of
the weakness of the King. Chains had to be fastened permanently across
many squares and streets in the town, which had become absolutely
depopulated owing to the misery of such riots as that of 1411, or the
still more serious outbreak of 1417, when the perpetual quarrels of
the Armagnac and Burgundian parties were reflected in the factions of
the town. The burgesses declared for them of Burgundy, who posed as
the "Progressives," or defenders of the people's rights, and therefore
objected to the Bailli and the Château, as being the representatives
of the Conservative and aristocratic Armagnacs, the gatherers of those
hateful taxes, which had been doubled that year, and had thus made
still more difficult a commerce already crippled by constant changes
in the currency. Perpetual imposts and extraordinary war-subventions
had drained the town of its resources for some time. Every religious
community had been forced to forego all privileges and contribute
like the rest. And after Bernard, Count of Armagnac, had assumed
official direction of the Government, his excessive exactions made it
easy to add the loss of Harfleur and the defeat of Agincourt, to the
many sins of his party. The brigandage and violence of an Armagnac,
Jean Raoulet, all along the Seine, brought home to the people of Rouen
with an even more startling clearness the necessity for trying what
the other side could do for them.
So John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, had an easy part to play as
the champion of the downtrodden people. On the 24th of April he sent a
political manifesto into the town (very much of the kind to which
modern France has become accustomed) promising relief from taxation.
Before swallowing the bait entirely the burgesses submitted the seals
to examination in Paris, but the drapers of Rouen scarcely waited for
confirmation before they attacked the royal tax-gatherers with cries
of "Long live Burgundy!" Thereupon d'Armagnac sent three commissioners
with a troop of Bretons and Genoese cross-bowmen from Paris. But the
townsfolk would not let the mercenaries enter, seizing the keys of the
town from the officials and mounting their own guard at every gate.
The three commissioners, powerless without their escort, took refuge
in the Château. The King's bailli, Raoul de Gancourt, refused to leave
his post. He seems to have been a man brave enough to make his mark
upon the stricken field of Agincourt, and intellectual enough to win a
local reputation as a poet, a nature in fact somewhat akin to Charles
d'Orléans. But though he could make no head against the rioters he
would not leave his honour behind him in the Rue Beauvoisine, and
gathered round his hospitable hearth a few of the choice spirits of
the town who joined him in deploring the excesses of the populace.
Outside in the market-place Burgundian orators were rousing the
passions of the mob, and chief among the leaders of the people were
Alain Blanchart and De Livet, a canon of the Cathedral, then in charge
of the diocese during the absence of Louis d'Harcourt, who much
preferred the amusements of a courtier to the pious seclusion of an
archbishop. As soon as the news of all this reached Paris, the Dauphin
himself, with a brilliant suite, set out for Rouen, and encamped in
the fortress on St. Catherine's Hill, to the south-east of the town,
between the Aubette and the Seine. A message sent him by De Gancourt,
intercepted by the citizens, put the finishing touch to their
resentment. Three men were picked out to rid them of the bailli. One
of them was Guillot Leclerc (afterwards beheaded for his crime), but
Alain Blanchart had no share in the assassination, whatever you may
imagine to be the meaning of Monstrelet's remarks. At midnight on the
23rd of July (the day of the Dauphin's arrival on St. Catherine) some
masked men went to De Gancourt's door, begging him to receive a
malefactor they had arrested. The moment the bailli appeared they fell
upon him and left him dead in the gutter. Directly afterwards they
rushed on to the house of his lieutenant-general, Jean Legier, seized
him and his nephew, and threw them into the Seine, together with other
prominent members of the Armagnac faction.
The only result was a short blockade of the town by the Dauphin's
troops and a military demonstration from the Château, which could be
reinforced from outside through a postern to the west of the Porte
Bouvreuil.[40] The citizens then surrendered, the Sire de Gamaches was
made bailli, and Jean d'Harcourt (a relation of the absentee
archbishop) was made captain of the town, with command of the castle;
but the Dauphin's party was not strong enough to punish as they
wished, and Rouen was left in a state of ill-suppressed disloyalty.
This broke out once more into rebellion at the beginning of the new
year. Robert de Bracquemont, made Admiral of France in April 1417
(whose Spanish alliances I have mentioned on p. 174), was sent down
with troops as lieutenant-general of the King in Rouen, Gisors, Caux,
and Honfleur. But he could not get into the town, and had to wait in
the fortress of St. Catherine. During his short tenure of office the
negotiations (preserved in the archives of Dieppe) which he was
obliged to attempt, in order to secure some sort of coalition between
the hostile factions against the English army, are a lamentable
revelation of the dissensions of the time. When the supremacy of the
Burgundians became inevitable, he went away, as we have seen, to
Spain, leaving his opponent, Guy le Bouteiller, to take command of the
castle of Rouen, and bring back with him Alain Blanchart with other
democratic exiles; and these two are prominent names in the siege that
is to come, for Blanchart was made captain of the picked burgess-troop
of the Arbalétriers of Rouen, Guillaume d'Hondetot was made bailli,
and Laghen, the Bastard of Arly, was made lieutenant.[41] The Royalist
Armagnacs were definitely abandoned, but, as we shall see, the unhappy
town gained little in the crisis of her fate from her Burgundian
sympathies.
[Footnote 40: For the whole of this chapter see Map B.]
[Footnote 41: During the same changes, Pierre Poolin was given the
office of Procureur-Général of Rouen, and Jean Segneult exercised the
functions of the Mayoralty, though without the actual name.]
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.
[Illustration: 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.
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 Quilleboeuf. 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.
The citizens made one more attempt to break through that inflexible
ring of death. Ten thousand of the strongest men who could still carry
arms were picked out from the garrison, and every atom of eatable
substance in the town was swept and scraped together to give them such
a pittance as was grimly supposed to sustain them for two days. Two
thousand of them dashed out of the Porte St. Hilaire and feverishly
made for the headquarters of the King. Their very desperation sent
them momentary victory, but their movement was only intended as a
blind to the main attack arranged from the castle gate, behind which
eight thousand undaunted skeletons rattled in their armour and
prepared to deliver their last blow for freedom. Their front ranks
were already past the moat, and the weight of their main column was
upon the bridge, when suddenly the massive timbers groaned beneath
them, and some thousand men-at-arms fell down into the ditch beneath.
Cut off from their own men, those who had already passed were shot
down at leisure by the English, while the ditch was filled with maimed
and dead. Those who had not had time to cross were obliged to make a
circuit and try to give assistance to their isolated friends outside
by way of the Porte Bouvreuil further to the north and east. The
miserable heroes who had attacked the royal camp were only got back
into the town with fearful loss. To the discouragement of the failure
was added the bitter suspicion of treason, for the great beams of the
bridge were found to have been half sawn through. Their despair was
accentuated by the death of the brave Laghen, who had at last
succumbed to the fatigues of fighting without proper food.
At the imminent peril of their lives, but preferring death in the open
to the starvation of rats in a hole, four nobles and four burgesses
got through the English lines once more, with a last appeal to the
Duke of Burgundy and the King, roundly denying all allegiance to them
if no attempt to help were made. The Duke himself was base enough to
answer that on the fourth day after Christmas help would come, and
this though he must have known that there was no real chance of
succour. But with a pitiable confidence in their leaders the envoys
dragged themselves back to Rouen and bade the garrison hold out only
for another fifteen days, and then they should be rescued. To men
already starving we can scarce imagine what the delay of another
fortnight meant. It was drawing near to Christmas. From the English
camp two priests were seen advancing towards those phantoms of still
visible humanity that stretched their fleshless arms to heaven from
the city moat. The King was sending food and drink to them for the
love of Him whose birth was celebrated on the morrow. The miserable
creatures ate and drank with hideous cries that brought the starving
garrison to the walls to watch them; but they only gained the strength
to suffer pain a little longer, for the next day the English lines
closed up again and no more food was to be had.
One more bitter disappointment the citizens were destined to suffer
before the end came. From the right bank of the Seine two Norman
nobles, Jacques d'Harcourt and the Sire de Moreuil attempted to draw
the English into an ambuscade. They had only two thousand men, but
they might well have created sufficient diversion to render a
victorious sally possible from the city, for the English imagined it
was the royal army of rescue come at last. But the eager watchers from
the walls of Rouen had the mortification of seeing their compatriots
put to flight by a far smaller body of the enemy, and their last hope
faded like dew before the sun. Then the fateful twenty-ninth of
December came, and went, without a sign of royal or Burgundian help.
For two more miserable days the citizens waited in vain, and not till
fifty thousand persons had died of famine did they think of surrender.
Their walls were still intact, their hearts as stout as ever, but
starvation began to make irreparable breaches where the enemy's
artillery had been of no avail. So on the eve of New Year's Day, the
envoys chosen by the meeting in the Hôtel de Ville, went out to parley
with the English.
They wandered in vain from one camp to another, until they were
obliged to cross over to St. Sever, and there they found Sir Gilbert
d'Umfreville, whose Norman lineage perhaps made him kinder than the
rest. He was at last prevailed upon to take them on the second day of
the year, a Monday, into the presence of the King. Though every hour
meant a prolonging of their torture, the ambassadors fought foot by
foot the conditions of surrender and calmly argued every sentence of
the treaty with that Norman love of litigation which now rose to its
highest and most impassioned point. In the great hall of the
Chartreuse de la Rose, they saw the cold, impassive, handsome
countenance of the young English King, with that touch of sadness on
it that foretold his early death,[42] and the detached nobility of
manner which fitted a King who had exhausted every pleasure before he
took, and worthily wielded, the responsibilities of power.
[Footnote 42: The prophetic word "Jamais" was in the device upon the
tapestry above him.]
The first request of the ambassadors was for the succour of the poor
outcasts in the moat all round the town. But Henry only announced his
firm resolve to take Rouen and all its citizens and to make those who
had opposed his will "remember me until the Day of Judgment." At last
an armistice of two or three days was granted, and on the third of
January a solemn meeting of the picked ambassadors of either side took
place between the Chartreuse and the Porte St. Hilaire, where all the
splendour of the English noblemen's caparisons and furniture was
displayed, and the starving commissioners from Rouen made the bravest
show they could beneath the Fleurs de Lys of France. Close to all this
magnificence was the yet living horror of the moat, which was now
almost filled up with dead. From time to time the heap of rags and
withered anatomies heaved slowly, and the little spectre of a child
crawled out, imploring food. And all day long the solemn arguments
went on beneath the sumptuous pavilions of the English, until, after
three days of discussion, the ambassadors of Rouen went back,
unsatisfied, into their city.
"We askid mykille," says the poet, "they proferid smal,
That is yuelle to accorde with alle.
Tho thay tretid an xiiij nyzt
And zit accorde they ne myzt."
[Illustration: THE APSE OF ST. OUEN, SHOWING THE TOUR AUX CLERCS ON
THE RIGHT, SEEN FROM THE GARDENS OF THE HÔTEL DE VILLE]
Both sides were indeed so resolute, that they "might have argued for a
fortnight without coming to an agreement." But the people of the city
had starved long enough, and they drove back their emissaries to the
Porte St. Hilaire, after one proposal, born of madness, had been
made, to set fire to the town and then by every gate at once to pour
out upon the English camp with the whole population in a flood, and so
win through or die at least with weapons in their hands. Some news of
this despairing possibility may have suggested to King Henry that the
representations of the Archbishop of Canterbury were not without their
value. At any rate he yielded to solicitation, granted another truce,
and on the ninth of January opened negotiations once again.
This time the pressure of famine was so hard upon the ambassadors
themselves that they went on with discussions night and day, burning
torches and candles when the sun set. At last a definite instrument
was signed and sealed that guaranteed life and a free pass to the
garrison, their goods to the citizens, and great portion of its
privileges to the town. But the terms were hard enough. Three hundred
thousand crowns of gold[43] was fixed as the ransom of the city; the
chains were to be taken down from every street; ground sufficient for
an English palace was to be given up, which was eventually chosen at
the south-west corner of the town near the river; nine persons, among
whom were the Canon Robert de Livet and Alain Blanchart, were exempted
from the capitulation and "reserved to the mercy of the King," which
in one case at least meant death.
[Footnote 43: Eighteen million francs would represent the relative
value of this sum nowadays. It was not fully paid eleven years later.]
Upon a throne, and dressed in cloth of gold, Henry V. received the
keys of Rouen from Guy le Bouteiller, in the Chartreuse de la Rose.
Then the Duke of Exeter, as captain of the town, set up the English
standard over all her gates and above the donjon of the castle; and at
daylight on the twentieth of January the French garrison filed out of
Rouen across the Seine towards the Bridge of St. George on the left
bank, and were stripped of everything, save one suit of clothes, by
the English soldiers, as they went. Only two thousand men survived out
of the six thousand who had so gallantly come into Rouen to help
resist the enemy. While they escaped sadly into desolated Normandy,
King Henry V. was advancing from the Chartreuse; he moved slowly round
the city to the Porte Cauchoise, and behind him was borne a fox's
brush swinging upon a lance.[44] The bells rang and the cannon roared
salute as he entered Rouen, but of the inhabitants scarcely one had
strength to stand upright, not one had voice to cheer, and all
besought for bread. Alone of the nine prisoners, Alain Blanchart was
beheaded. But thirty-three burgesses were picked out to pay a special
tax in ready money and imprisoned till it was delivered.[45] The main
sum of the ransom was disputed with the true Norman delight in legal
quibbling, and not fully paid (or at least "arranged for") till 1430.
[Footnote 44: No one has ever explained this to my satisfaction. But
visitors to Heidelberg will remember the connection of a fox's brush
with the Court Fool Perkeo, and various other legends of Renard which
give the symbol, I fear, anything but a courteous significance for a
foe beaten but not disgraced.]
[Footnote 45: The Englishmen recorded that some of their prisoners
were put in the "Ostel de la Cloche dont avoit la garde Jehan
Lemorgue." By this changed name is meant the humbled Hôtel de Ville,
where prisons had been managed in the lower storeys early in the
fifteenth century.]
The imposition of this huge sum on a community already at the end of
its resources had a lasting and terrible effect upon the town. The
Chapterhouse were obliged to remit half their rents from the farmers
ruined by the war. All debts had to receive special postponement, and
commerce suffered almost as fatally as agriculture. All over Rouen
houses were continually being put up to auction for public or private
defalcations, to be bought by those Englishmen who had not been
already given estates as a reward for their services. The buildings
of the Abbey of St. Ouen were entirely occupied by the men of the Duke
of Suffolk, so that the archbishop of 1423 was unable to pass the
night before his entry in the abbey, as of immemorial custom, because
the English filled up every inch of it. Of the exquisite east end we
can see now, not much more than the beautiful little "Tour aux Clercs"
of the older abbey was standing in 1419. But it may be put down as one
of the few things creditable to the English occupation that part of
the nave was certainly finished under their encouragement (see Chap.
X.). Meanwhile the King took care to strengthen the castle at the
Porte Bouvreuil, and the barbacan at the bridge; and his own palace
began to rise near the Tour Malsifrotte and the Porte du Pré de la
Bataille. Nothing now remains of it save the name of "Rue du Vieux
Palais" in the Quartier St. Eloi (see map D). But it served in the
first years as a residence for the Duke of Bedford, and for the young
King Henry VI.
[Illustration: LA TOUR DU COLOMBIER, FROM THE BOULEVARD GAMBETTA]
After the conquest of Rouen, one town after another fell into the
English hands. On September 23 in 1419, the last resistance in
Normandy was quelled at Château Gaillard. Mont St. Michael alone
remained free until the English domination ceased and France joined
her in her freedom. The King who took the city of Rouen was seen there
twice again. In 1421, with Catherine of France, his wife, he opened
the Estates of Normandy. In 1422 he was borne through Rouen on his
funeral bier; two months before the crown of France would have been
his.
The Rouen besieged by King Henry V. can be almost exactly traced along
the lines of the modern boulevards shown in map B. The extension
eastwards, which is given in map E. with this chapter, took place
chiefly during the fourteenth century when Rouen was rapidly growing
to be the second town in the kingdom. In making the circuit of the
walls you will remember passing the Tour du Colombier between the
Porte Martainville and the Porte St. Hilaire. It is represented now by
a picturesque old house standing four-square upon a buttressed wall
above the stream, at the extreme eastern verge of the great enclosure
of the hospital. It is still called the Maison des Célestins, and aged
men over sixty are preserved there to live out in peace the autumn of
their days. Both the name and the present occupiers are an appropriate
reminder of one who is connected with some of the better memories of
the English occupation, the Duke of Bedford who founded the Couvent
des Célestins, that was ruined by the Huguenots in 1562, upon the land
formerly occupied by his Château de Chantereine, called "Joyeux
Repos."
This convent, which was also known as the "Val Notre Dame," is not the
only trace which the Duke of Bedford's benefactions left in Rouen. He
also took the Carmelite brethren under his especial protection, being
no doubt supported in this charitable action by the English Carmelite
confessor of Henry V., Thomas de Valde, who died at Rouen in 1430. But
his most intimate connection with ecclesiastical Rouen is recorded in
the archives of the Cathedral, where we are told that he left the
chapterhouse in his will a beautiful golden chalice garnished with
gems, a pair of golden censers and a silver-gilt crucifix, in memory
of his being made a canon at his own request. And there is some irony
in the thought that at the moment he was giving these proofs of his
affection for the town, his councillors were, with his consent,
pursuing Jeanne d'Arc with every subtlest form of legal and religious
torture.
Scarcely a year after Jeanne had been burnt in the Vieux Marché, the
Duke's wife, Anne of Burgundy, died at the early age of 28, and in
addition to this private loss he had to submit to the consequences of
a grave error of judgment in his second marriage to Jacqueline,
daughter of Pierre de Luxembourg, Count of St. Pol, an alliance which
gravely offended the whole house of Burgundy. In 1435 he died himself
on the 14th of September, "die exaltacionis Sancte Crucis" as the
chapterhouse entries record, in the same Château of Rouen where Jeanne
d'Arc had suffered her last imprisonment. His body was embalmed and
buried in a leaden coffin in the choir of Rouen Cathedral by the side
of the dukes of Normandy and the English kings his ancestors, beneath
a magnificently sculptured tomb.
He left the Célestins of "Joyeux Repos," near the Tour du
Colombier,[46] a small legacy, and benefactions to many other abbeys
and churches in the town. Though the canons did not get their golden
treasure by any means intact, or indeed get any part of it without
protracted struggles, they always took good care of his tomb, which
was certainly in excellent preservation before the Calvinists of 1562
began a destruction which was completed by the Revolution. An
inscription, however, was left on an adjacent pillar, and this was
copied by Dugdale. The ostrich feathers and the order of the garter
were shown upon the brass besides the epitaph. In 1866 his coffin was
found still in its original position on the right side of the altar,
and nothing more is now left of him in Rouen.
[Footnote 46: After the Duke of Bedford had given the Célestins their
Monastery, Charles VII. further assisted them by taking off all taxes
on their wine. In recognition of this a monk used to dance and sing in
front of the Monastic barrels as they were rolled past the Governor's
house. Occasionally the combination of good claret and freedom from
taxation overcame the monk's discretion, and the old proverb "Voilà un
plaisant Célestin" preserves the memory of some such amiably festive
ecclesiastic. The "Oison bridé" of the monks of St. Ouen was another
instance of the way in which feudal privileges were commemorated by
queer ceremonials which long outlived the society that gave them
birth.]
[Illustration]