Читать книгу The Story of Rouen - Theodore Andrea Cook - Страница 19

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"En Normandie a gent molt fiere

Jo ne sai gent de tel maniere;

Chevaliers sont proz é vaillanz

Par totes terres conquéranz. …

… Orguillos sunt Normant è fier.

E vanteor è bombancier;

Toz tems les devreit l'en plaisier

Kar mult sunt fort à justisier."

Robert Wace.

IT is time to look more closely at the personality of the greatest Duke of Rouen. William the Bastard has been described[16] as tall and very stout, fierce of visage, with a high, bald forehead, and, in FIGURE FROM THE BORDER OF THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY spite of his great corpulence, of extreme dignity, whether on his throne or in the field. The strength of his arms, for which he was famous, was proved very early, when the chivalry of France went down before his boyish lance at Val-ès-Dunes. He evidently possessed all the true Viking attributes of physical power derived from Rollo, his great ancestor. In mental type he reproduced much of that Norman cunning which we have noticed as a characteristic of the race. Both Maine and England he conquered by fraud as much as force. If he was a great soldier, he was a consummate statesman too. For as he used France to conquer Normandy, so he used Normandy to conquer France, and both to conquer England. Kindly to submissive foes, he was pitiless to stubborn opposition, and very dangerous to taunt. The town which hung tanners' hides upon its walls was answered by the sight of bleeding hands, and feet, and eyes, which had been torn from its prisoners and hurled across the battlements. The king who jested of the candles for a woman's churching, was answered by the blaze of a whole town. A comet flamed across the sky of Europe in the year of the great Duke's conquest. Amid fire and tumult he was crowned at Westminster. Upon the glowing ashes of Mantes he met his death-wound. Through burning streets he was borne to his burial. He was not only the strongest of the dukes of Normandy, he was also one of the world's greatest men, whose work was not only thorough at the moment, but effective for all time; whose purpose was fixed, and whose iron will none could gainsay. He rose above the coarse, laughter-loving, brutal, treacherous, Norman barons of his time, by the force of his own personal genius, and the acuteness of his own strong intellect. If it had necessitated a web of the subtlest intrigue to get together the vast host that was to conquer England, it needed a vigorous and dauntless personality no less amazing to keep together the fleet and army while they waited wearily for the wind, until Harold's own fleet (the one safety of England then, as ever) had dispersed, until the right moment came, and all his barons and their men-at-arms rushed eagerly on board, carrying their barrels of wine, their coats of mail, and helmets, and lines of spears, and spits of meat, and stacks of swords, as is recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry. With him went twenty ships and a hundred knights sent by the Abbot of St. Ouen. Another ship that must have carried especial prayers with her from Rouen was the "Mora," given by his wife Matilda, with a boy carved upon her stern-post, blowing his horn towards the cliffs of Pevensey.[17] By the lantern on her mast the seven hundred transport galleys sailed at night, and early in the next dawn they landed, archers first, then knights and horses, and marched on to Hastings.

HORSES FOR THE ARMY OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR

CROSSING THE CHANNEL (BAYEUX TAPESTRY)

How the Duke of Rouen conquered England, and how he wrote it in his Domesday Book, is no immediate concern of ours. By March in the next year he was back in his own capital, bringing with him, through the cheering streets, the Prince Edgar, Stigand the Primate, and three of his greatest earls. There his beloved wife met him, and gave account of the Duchy she had guarded with Roger of Beaumont in his absence. There he at once dealt out rewards to the regular and secular clergy of the city, among which were the lordships of Ottery and of Rovrige in Devonshire. Meanwhile the Normans were crowding to admire the trophies of victory. The banners from the battlefield, embroidered with the Raven of Ragnar, or the Fighting-Man of the dead Harold, and booty that brought wonder to the eyes even of citizens who had seen the spoils of Sicily. Nor did the Duke forget in the hour of triumph to be politic. He sent Lanfranc to the Pope at once, no doubt with news that Stigand would shortly be supplanted, and that England had been brought into the fold of Rome. For the warriors that Normandy had sent to the lands of the south, she was richly repaid in the learned doctors sent by Italy to the northern countries. Calabria and Sicily were counterbalanced by the archbishoprics of Lanfranc and of Anselm. At a synod held in Rouen some six years after his great conquest, William insisted upon reform in the morals of the Church, upon strict rules of marriage, on an exact profession of the orthodox faith. He was not behindhand in performing his part of the profitable bargain that had been made with Rome.

In 1073 Maine started into revolt under Fulk Rechin,[18] nephew of Geoffrey of Anjou, and William punished it by reducing Le Mans from a sovereign commonwealth to a mere privileged municipality. After this the King of England was constantly in his Duchy, where Robert "Short Hose," his unruly son, was giving perpetual trouble in Rouen and elsewhere, as Regent. So imperious were his demands for independence and immediate provision, that his father's stern refusal roused an attempt at open rebellion in which Robert attacked the Castle of Rouen, with the help of a few turbulent young nobles of his own unquiet persuasion. But the Conqueror grimly took their revenues and with them paid the mercenaries that warred them down. His son was compelled to fly, but came back again unwisely to the quarrel, with help from the French King behind him. At Gerberoi he actually wounded his father, without recognising him, and the Conqueror was only saved by the swiftness of a Wallingford man who sprang to his assistance.

The truce that followed did not last. About this time occurred the marriage of William's daughter, Adela, to Stephen of Blois and Chartres, who became the mother of Stephen of England. The Conqueror's second son had died in the fatal New Forest, and in 1083 died his faithful wife, Matilda, and was buried at Caen. The next years were very heavy in both parts of King William's dominions, and by 1087 the strain seems to have told even upon his iron frame. For in that year he stayed for treatment at Rouen, just as he had done before in Abingdon, and while he lay in bed King Philip jested at the candles that should be lighted when this bulky invalid arose from child-bed. Then William swore one of those terrific oaths which came naturally to his strong temperament—"Per resurrectionem et splendorem Dei pronuntians"—that he would indeed light a hundred thousand candles, and at the expense of Philip, too.[19] In August he devastated the Vexin with fire and sword, and as he rode across the hot embers of the burning city of Mantes, his horse stumbled, and he was wounded mortally by the high, iron pommel of the saddle.

He came back dying to his castle of Rouen, and was there borne from the noisy streets of the city to the Priory of St. Gervais, where we have already visited the ancient crypt of St. Mellon. Here for some days he lay in pain, though without losing speech or consciousness, and sent for Anselm from Bec. But the prior himself was too ill to get further than St. Sever on his journey to his master. So the Conqueror disposed himself to death, giving much treasure to the rebuilding of churches both in France and England, bequeathing Normandy and Maine to Robert, and with a last strange movement of apparent compunction, leaving the throne of England in the hands of God:

"Non enim tantum decus hereditario jure possedi."

As to the crowning of his son William, he gave the final decision to Lanfranc. His youngest son, Henri Beauclerc, the truest Norman of them all, was given five thousand pounds in silver and the prophecy of future greatness. After releasing all the prisoners in his dungeons, the Conqueror lay on his couch in St. Gervais and heard the great bell of the Cathedral of Rouen ringing for prime on the morning of Thursday the ninth of September 1087. Upon the sound he offered up a prayer and died.

Within an hour his death-chamber was desolate and bare, and the corpse lay well-nigh naked. But the citizens of Rouen were sore troubled. "Malignus quippe spiritus oppido tripudiavit." The news travelled from Normandy to Sicily in the same day. The archbishop ordered that the body should be taken to Caen, and by the care of Herlwin this was done, and the dead Conqueror was floated down the Seine to burial. As the funeral procession passed through the town the streets burst into flame, and through the fire and smoke the monks walked with the bier, chanting the office of the dead. When the corpse reached the abbey, a knight objected to the burial, because the land had forcibly been taken from him. So the seven feet of the Conqueror's grave was bought, and, not without more hideous mishaps, the body of Rouen's greatest duke was at last laid to rest. In 1793 both the tomb and its contents were utterly destroyed.

Among the prisoners who were released at William's death was that half-brother, Odo of Bayeux,[20] to whose skill and knowledge is due the marvellous pictorial record of the Bayeux Tapestry. Its inscriptions are in the Latin letters of the time, and its eleventh-century costumes, the short clothes easy to ride or run or fight, the arms depicted, the clean-shaved faces, are all very different to those which Orderic Vital describes as usual in the twelfth century. Neither Matilda the Queen, nor Matilda the Empress, could have embroidered the details on the border, and neither could have known so many facts as the Odo who was on the Council that advised invasion, who rallied the troops at Senlac when William was supposed to have been dead, who was made Regent of England, Count of Kent, and Bishop of Bayeux. It was to the advice of this rich, powerful, and intelligent prelate, that the new and feeble Duke Robert had to trust in the first year of his reign in Rouen. With all the vices of the Conqueror, Robert had neither his virtues nor his strength. The difficulties which met him first came from a cause too deep-seated for him to recognise either its value or its far-reaching issues.

I have already described how the first attempts of Norman peasants to found a "commune" had been crushed with horrible brutality. The movement now began again. It is perhaps possible that the very pre-eminence of the Conqueror over all his barons helped to emphasise the fact that the feudality which he employed for his own uses only, and threw away when he had done with, was not to be an order of things fixed by any eternal providence. When the King rose at one end of the social framework the people naturally came into greater prominence at the other.

The truce of God, insisted upon by William himself, had helped to the same end. For every male of twelve years old swore to help the Bishop to keep that truce, and by degrees his parishioners combined to organise the safety of their town, "ex consensu parochianorum." They used the resources for which all subscribed, and placed them under the control of a "gardien de la Confrèrie," or "fraternarum rerum custos." While these associations preserved the peace of the towns, the King was responsible for the peace of France. But the feeling of independence and the strength of union grew steadily among the citizens year by year. The rise of commerce, which has been already noticed in Rouen, also contributed to this. As cities grew in wealth, they became more and more desirous of escaping from feudal rapacity and of regulating their own affairs by magistrates chosen by themselves. In 1066 Le Mans had already done this. Ten years afterwards Cambrai followed the example. Noyon, Beauvais, Laon, Soissons, and many more clamoured for the charter of their liberty. In the absence of so many overlords at the Crusades the towns beneath the shadow of their castles seized the opportunity of strengthening their position. The same spirit of revolt began to work in Rouen as soon as the strong hand of the Conqueror was taken from the helm of government. But Rouen did not win her civic liberty until she had changed her own Norman dukes for the kings of France. The descendants of Duke William, feeble as they were, were still too near the feudal overlord to admit of rapid change. Yet the leaven was working already, and the disputes of the Conqueror's children fostered the unruly elements in the town.

Scarcely three years after Robert had attained the Duchy he quarrelled openly with his brother, the Red King of England; and Rouen was instantly in an uproar under Conan, a rich bourgeois, who probably sided with William Rufus, because he saw more chance of a commune under a distant king than in the presence of a duke at Rouen. In the days of the Conqueror there had been no tyrants or demagogues in the city, no armies in civic pay, no dealings of the citizens with other princes. But now the chance for an independent commonwealth seemed really to have come. However, the youngest brother, Henri Beauclerc, came from Côtentin to assist Robert in his difficulty, but not before the debauched and treacherous duke had been obliged to fly by the eastern gate of Robec into the faubourg of Malpalu, where he was cordially welcomed, and passed on to safety in St. Sever. Then Henri Beauclerc, "The Lion of Justice," took up the fighting for himself, swiftly beat back the soldiers of the Red King, threw Conan, the leader of the revolt, into the Tower of the Dukes by the Seine, and finally cast him down headlong from the battlements to die upon the stones beneath. The place preserved the name of "Saut de Conan" for many years, in the south-east corner of the Halles. So this first Artevelde of Rouen came to an untimely end. Henri Beauclerc, helped by Robert of Bellesme, one of the de Warrens (whose tomb is in the church of Wantage), and by the Count of Evreux, proved far too strong for him and for his companion in revolt, William, the son of Ansgar, who had to pay a vast ransom as the price of disobedience, while many of the rebellious citizens were massacred, and this immature attempt to form a commune ended.

The three brothers continued to quarrel, and to make it up again for some years. First, Robert and Rufus combine against Henry. Then Robert sends over troops to help the barons who were rebelling against his brother in England. Finally he went off with his Uncle Odo on the first crusade in 1096, pledging the Duchy in his absence to his brother the Red King, who, of course, seized it, and the real quarrel between England and France began. For when Normandy had been independent, Rouen blocked the road from Winchester to Paris. But as soon as it belonged outright either to one or to the other, the ancestral strife of French against English was certain to begin, and to go on. The revolt of Elias, Count of Maine, against the English King was repressed by his imprisonment—by Robert of Bellesme again—in the same Tour de Rouen that had seen the death of Conan. But Rufus never used his great gifts and power of ruling for anything but evil, and his brother Henry followed him, the husband of that descendant of Edmund and of Alfred who called herself Matilda at his coronation.

When the weak and incompetent Robert Short Hose returned from his crusading, he had the temerity to lay claim not merely to his Duchy but to the throne of England with it. He naturally lost both, at the battle of Tinchebray, where Henri Beauclerc won Normandy, and beat the Normans with his English soldiers. For many years Robert languished in English prisons until he died at Gloucester. And the Duchy he had lost throve infinitely under his brother's wise and prosperous rule, which gradually repressed more and more of the remnants of feudal anarchy and misrule. In 1114, his daughter Matilda gained her title of Empress by marriage with Henry V., but won her greatest fame by her second match—after this first husband's death with Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, in 1125, from which Henry II. of England was to be born. But Henri Beauclerc was unfortunate in his other children. For in 1119 his sons, William and Richard, were drowned in the White Ship on their way to England. The occurrence caused a very painful and widespread sensation, for besides the brilliant young nobles of the suite, eighteen high-born ladies, many of them of royal blood, perished in the wreck. In Orderic Vital, in William of Malmesbury, in Henry of Huntingdon, the story is fully set forth. The captain was the son of that pilot who had steered William the Conqueror to Pevensey in the good ship "Mora" built at Rouen. The weather was calm and bright with moonlight, and as the young princes urged their captain to row harder after their father's ship, he took a short cut along the treacherous coast, and the boat split open on a rock on the night of the 25th of November. The only survivor was a butcher of Rouen, called Bérold, or Gueroult as Robert Wace gives the name,

"Cil Gueroult de Roem esteit

Machecrier ert, la char vendeit". …

and he was only preserved because of the thick clothes he wore through the frost of the night, to be rescued by some fishermen next morning.

"Un peliçon avit vestu

Ki del grant freit l'ont defendu;

Iver esteit, grant freit faiseit,"

says the "Roman de Rou" (15,319), so that in the Rue Massacre (close to the Rue Grosse Horloge) at Rouen, one home was gladdened with good news after a catastrophe that threw at least three courts into mourning, and gave the succession of the English throne to the great house of the Plantagenets of Maine.

Rouen had not remained entirely submissive to the Lion of Justice. In 1109 the King of France encouraged yet another rising of the citizens in Rouen and elsewhere against feudal power. And after the wreck of the White Ship, Fulk of Anjou took the opportunity to push the claims of Duke Robert's son both in England and Normandy, but the rebels were badly beaten at Bourgtheroulde (between Seine and Rille), and the Lion of Justice held a court in Rouen to judge them. Some were imprisoned in his Tower by the Seine, and some in Gloucester, while a satiric poet, named Luke of Barre, paid the penalty of being a pioneer in scoffing politics by having his eyes put out. At Henry's death in 1135, Matilda's infant heir was still very young at Le Mans, and the usual anarchy followed both in England and in Normandy that was inevitable when the direct male line of Norman Dukes died out. Of the two countries Normandy had perhaps the fate that was hardest to bear, for it was better to be ruled by any one than a Count of that Maine, with whom, as with an equal, so many centuries of battles had been fought. But the strong stock of Anjou and Maine soon took advantage of the weakness of the Northern Duchy, and in 1144 Geoffrey Plantagenet entered Rouen in triumph.

"Ceu fulmen ab alto,"

sings the poet,

"Neustria concutitur fulgure tacta novo."

To an inheritance so rich already, the boy Henry Plantagenet added all the dominions of Eleanor of Poitou by marriage, and after the anarchy of Stephen's reign in England had passed over, the Angevin Empire began from the Pyrenees to the Firth of Forth. At ten years old the second Henry had been recognised by Rouen as her duke, and it can be easily understood that the citizens used every advantage it was possible to win from the years of his minority, and from the days of uncertain authority before it. Already under Henri Beauclerc the municipality of Rouen had obtained ampler recognition than before. Its population increased accordingly, and was augmented by the extension of freedom to a considerable number of serfs. The bounds of the city itself were enlarged, and from the fact that a fire is recorded (in November 1131) to have destroyed the Hôtel de Ville, near the Porte Massacre, in the Rue de la Grosse Horloge, we may gather that the municipality, whose rights in property were recognised, had been able to secure a common meeting-place for the discussion of its civic business. By 1150 these meetings had resulted in a league, definitely made by the burgesses, to defend their rights against all feudal encroachments, a league which very nearly deserves that name of "Commune" at last, which was apparently first given in Normandy to Eu and to St. Quentin. Geoffrey Plantagenet, during his government of the Duchy for his son, had recognised the strength of this civic movement, by confirming the privileges of the citizens, and favouring the growth of this industrial corporation. In May of that same year the first law court of the town, as opposed to feudal or ecclesiastical justice, was also established, and called the Vicomté de l'Eau. It had the charge of all civil and criminal cases by river and by land, and kept the standard of the weights and measures. Its importance may be judged from the fact that in the hands of the merchants of Rouen was the monopoly of all wines sent by Seine or sea towards the north. The Confrèrie of these "Marchands de l'eau" had been accorded a special port, known as Dunegate, at Thames' mouth, by Edward the Confessor, and their monopoly extended also to the whole trade between Normandy and Ireland, a trade they kept until the reign of Philip Augustus.