ormans! Hats off to the Charter! God bless the
good King Louis! God save the Charter!" From the inmost shrine of the
Cathedral, where it was kept beside the relics of St. Romain, the
famous charter had been brought by four burgesses, bareheaded, upon a
stand with golden feet. For seven and sixty years it had remained in
holy keeping, with the great green seal of Louis X. hanging from its
yellow parchment, and now the dean followed it into the streets with
all his trembling canons behind him. There was business to be done
with them too, and they knew it only too well. "The Chapter will
forthwith renounce," says Jehan le Gras, "that rent of 300 livres on
the market-halls of Rouen; you will sign the deed or take the
consequences." So they signed, and the crowd passed on breathlessly to
the next entertainment; for on a scaffold hastily erected, there stood
the King's Bailli, Thomas Poignant, reading (much against his will)
the provisions of the sacred charter, while the crowd waited with
pickaxes and hammers ready to rush and pull down his house at the
least sign of hesitation.

So in a silence that was filled with possibilities, and broken only by
the sound of the indefatigable "Rouvel," who continued tolling
feverishly night and day, the sentences of the charter of Normandy
echoed over the square before St. Ouen, and when it was ended all the
company swore upon the sacred cross to keep it faithfully, the royal
draper first, then what few remnants of civic magistracy were present,
then the canons and the whole clergy of the town, then the men of law,
and lastly every citizen in sight. Before night ended all the bloody
doings of the day, the gibbet of St. Ouen (called the "fourches
Patibulaires") had been torn down and burnt at Bihorel, and a solemn
oath of amnesty for all acts of violence was exacted from every one
who had suffered from the outrages of the mob, and at last poor Jehan
le Gras was allowed to go home to his shop, without the faintest
notion of what all the uproar had been about, and very thankful to
give up his royalty and be an ordinary draper as before.

Unfortunately the crowd, drunk with success, did not cease their riot
with the deposition of their King. The next morning they attacked the
castle Philip Augustus had set up in the Place Bouvreuil. But the
garrison repulsed them; Jean de Vienne, High Admiral of France,
brought troops into the town; the King's Commissioners were sent down
in haste with rei