Rouen (France) -- Description and travel; Rouen (France) -- History
But everything did not go smoothly in the streets of Rouen while these
pacific changes were in progress. In 1213 the town was filled with the
levy of counts, barons, and knights, with all their men-at-arms, whom
Philip was collecting to attack the King of England; and in 1250 a far
more disorderly and plebeian assembly gathered under the leadership of
Andre de St. Leonard to express in the practical form of riot and
pillage their disapprobation of the ten per cent. exacted by the
Church for grinding corn in the ecclesiastical mills. Near the Pont de
Robec and the Rue du Pere Adam flour and wheat were forcibly stolen,
but Archbishop Odo Rigaud soon asserted his authority, by fining the
ringleader 100 marks of silver, equivalent to about L2000 sterling,
and the dissatisfaction ceased. In the next year a rising, that had
some slight degree of religious colour in it, gave a good deal of
trouble, not to Rouen only, but to the rest of France. Bands of
peasants, styling themselves "Pastoureaux," asserted their indignation
at the captivity of King Louis IX. by chasing the archbishop out of
his cathedral. From the fact that they had been joined, not merely by
all the lazy ruffians of the neighbourhood, but by some burgesses, and
even by certain municipal office-holders, we may infer that the
privileges or prerogatives of the Church were once more the real
objects of the dispute. Though the ecclesiastics were as usual strong
enough to exact a public apology and absolution from the mayor and his
councillors, the strange frenzy spread to the Provinces; men averred
that the Holy Virgin and her angels had appeared to urge them to
release St. Louis, and it was necessary for Queen Blanche herself to
intervene before the trouble was stopped in Paris and many parts of
France.
This widespread affection felt for St. Louis may, perhaps, be
explained not only by his personality, but by the fact that he was
always moving from one part of his dominions to another, in spite of
the obvious inconveniences of mediaeval travel. I have already noticed
some of the things he did for Rouen on his various visits. But such
pilgrimages as that of 1255 to Adam Bacon, the solitary abbot of St.
Catherine, cannot have failed to increase his local reputation. He
celebrated Christmas here in 1264, after another short visit
previously on his way from Pont de l'Arche to Bec, and in 1269 he came
again from Port-Audemer. On every such occasion he prayed in the
churches and left offerings suitable to his rank; he ate in the
refectories with the monks, he dispensed alms to the poor, and gave
money or its equivalent to the hospitals. His charity was, indeed,
extraordinary, for Queen Margaret's Confessor has related that he not
only fed the hungry at his every meal, but went round the beds in the
sick houses, smoothing the pillows of the sufferers, speaking to them,
and trying to supply their wants.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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