hes and
pitchforks, with pointed staves and heavy truncheons and ironshod
clubs, they killed the miserable Germans all day long, and the line of
escape was marked along the Beauvoisine road by corpses almost to
Amiens itself.

This strange victory seems to have pulled the men of Rouen together,
and given them confidence. The Laws of Rollo had been restored to
their old strength by Harold Blacktooth, and at last Neustrians and
Scandinavians seemed in a fair way to amalgamate and produce that
nation of warriors and lawyers which they afterwards became. In 954
King Louis died after a last flicker of expiring power in retrieving
Laon. But though Lothair followed him as King of the French, Hugh
Capet was ruling in 956 as Duke of Paris, and it was to Hugh that Duke
Richard of Normandy did homage for his fief. Thirty-one years later
the last Karoling was passed over, and Hugh Capet was crowned King at
Noyon. In the starting of this new dynasty, which is the
starting-point for the true history of France, Duke Richard of
Normandy had played a most important part, for it was in no small
measure by his help that Gaul had been made French and had won a
French Lord of Paris for her King. At the coronation of Hugh Capet,
Normandy ceased to be the Land of Pirates, and became the mightiest
and noblest fief of the French crown, its most loyal and most daring
vassal. In the years of Duke Richard too, Normandy was completed
internally. Her army and her fleet were organised. Her frontiers, her
laws, her feudal system came to perfection. Her national character
crystallised. Already in the Norman Baronage we can find English names
like that of the Harcourts, descended from Bernard the Dane, on a
castle-wall we can read the name of Bruce, in a tiny village trace the
name of Percy. Among the elms and apple-orchards that still faithfully
reflect our English countryside, the square gray keeps are rising
already which were handed on by Norman builders to the cliffs of
Richmond or the banks of Thames. In 996 Duke Richard built one of
these upon the right bank of Robec near the Seine, a new
Palace-Prison, another "Tour de Rouen" to replace the fallen masonry
of Rollo's ancient keep. It was founded where the Place de la Haute
Vieille Tour preserves its memory still, with the Duke's private
chapel on the spot where the Fierte St. Romain stands to this day.

Robert Wace preserves a story that indicates the close terms on which
Duke Richard was with