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.

It was when King Louis came with his mother, Blanche of Castile, to
keep the Christmas of 1255 at Rouen, that the greater part of the
choir, transept, and nave of the Cathedral as we see it now was
finished. The monastical developments of previous centuries had done
their work; the power of the great abbots and priors, which raised
them into feudal dignitaries, with large wealth and wide possessions,
had reached its limit. The rise of the communes in every town, and the
passion for civic liberty which accompanied them and gave them birth,
as we have traced it in Rouen, was taken advantage of by the
archbishops in those fruitful years which lay between 1180 and 1240.
The royal power, personified here by Philip Augustus, was as much
concerned as the burgesses in the diminution of feudality. Even the
great secul