rbs of Rouen, and calling in the Duke of Lancaster's English
troops. It was in resisting this allied attack that the French King
was beaten and taken prisoner at Poitiers. As soon as Charles le
Mauvais got his freedom, two years later, he returned to rehabilitate
the memory of his friends in Rouen. The body of the Count of Harcourt
had been secretly removed from the public gibbet by his family. The
three other corpses were taken down and borne to the Cathedral with
great ceremony, where their innocence of treason was solemnly
proclaimed. Excited by this open defiance of authority, the populace
of the town rose against the Dauphin's men, seized the castle, and
destroyed the Priory of St. Gervais with which they had a private
quarrel of their own on the burning question of taxes. The commune
only secured amnesty for its offences, and reconciliation with the
Regent, by paying 3000 florins as a fine.

No doubt the revolt had had some obscure connection with the horrible
excesses of the Jacquerie which at the same moment had been desolating
Paris. The disorderly bands of ruffians who had been discharged from
the French army were, at any rate, a direct source of annoyance to
Rouen later on, as indeed they were to almost every town in France in
that unhappy time, and Bertrand du Guesclin himself had to come to
Rouen in 1364 to organise the army that finally crushed these
licentious freebooters, and their ally, the King of Navarre, at
Cocherel.

Ever since the middle of the thirteenth century, frequent references
occur in the records of the town to the various trades that, in spite
of every drawback, continued slowly to progress towards riches and
consolidation. Though the early commerce with England now died down,
home industries flourished, and of them all, the making of woollen
draperies soon became the pre-eminent commerce of the town, which in
1362 signalised the fact by placing the lamb or sheep upon its civic
seal, which henceforth appears upon the arms of the town, and is also
placed so prominently on the archway of the Grosse Horloge. Rabelais
will tell you of the prosperous merchants who bought flocks of sheep
from farmers like Dindenault, to make the "bons fins draps de Rouen,"
for Pantagruel and Panurge journeyed with Epistemon, Eusthenes, and
Carpalim to Rouen from Paris, on their way to take ship at Honnefleur,
and they will explain to you (for I cannot) why the towns that grow so
thickly round the capital becom