assembly, he was severely reproved for his sins and admonished to give thanks to God, to St. Romain, and to the canons for the pardon he had received in virtue of the privilege. [Sidenote: History and meaning of the privilege of the _Fierte_ or shrine of St. Romain at Rouen.] What was the origin and meaning of this remarkable privilege of the _Fierte_, as the shrine of St. Romain was called? Its history has been carefully investigated by A. Floquet, Chief Registrar of the Royal Court of Rouen, with the aid of all the documentary evidence, including the archives both at Rouen and Paris. He appears to have shewn conclusively that the association of St. Romain with the custom is comparatively late. We possess a life of the saint in Latin verse, dating from the eighth century, in which the miracles said to have been wrought by him are set forth in a strain of pompous eulogy. Yet neither in it nor in any of the other early lives of St. Romain and St. Ouen, nor in any of the older chronicles and martyrologies, is a single word said about the destruction of the dragon and the deliverance of the prisoner. It is not till 1394 that we meet for the first time with a mention of the miracle. Moreover, the deliverance of the prisoner can hardly have been instituted in honour of St. Romain, else it would have taken place on the twenty-third of October, the day on which the Church of Rouen celebrates the translation of the saint’s bones to the cathedral. St. Romain died in 638, and his bones were transferred to the cathedral of Rouen at the end of the eleventh or the beginning of the twelfth century. Further, Floquet has adduced strong grounds for believing that the privilege claimed by the chapter of Rouen of annually pardoning a condemned criminal on Ascension Day was unknown in the early years of the twelfth century, and that it originated in the reign of Henry I. or Stephen, if not in that of Henry II. He supposes the ceremony to have been in its origin a scenic representation of the triumph of Christ over sin and death, the deliverance of the condemned prisoner symbolising the deliverance of man from the yoke of corruption, and bringing home to the people in a visible form the great mystery which the festival of the Ascension was instituted to commemorate. Such dramatic expositions of Christian doctrine, he points out, were common in the Middle Ages.