ned them. For
Rouen cried "Haro!" before the throne, and gave notice to the princes
that if she was compelled to surrender to the English, there would be
no bitterer enemy of the Crown than the capital of Normandy. They got
the usual promises, and every bell in Rouen (save the captive
"Rouvel") rang to welcome the good tidings of the messenger on his
return. But nothing happened, and both at Alencon and at Pont de
l'Arche the English King was easily able to put off the negotiations
which were the only sign of help that Rouen got from Paris.

And now famine itself began to grip the citizens by the throat. The
Register of the Cathedral Chapterhouse shows signs of scarcity of food
only three weeks after the siege began, for fines are then imposed in
loaves of bread. Then the bread usually distributed was given up, and
money substituted. The last entry stops short in the middle of a
pathetic sentence ... "parce que, dans le necessite du present siege,
le pain ..." and it was not until the gates were opened that a clerk
was found strong enough to go on writing. By the end of September all
the meat had disappeared, every horse and every donkey had been eaten,
and wheaten bread was sold at a sovereign a loaf. The horrors of
starvation need not any further be revealed; but by the first days of
December they had a peculiarly terrible result. To save their own
lives, and keep enough miserable fodder for the soldiers to stand
upright behind the walls, the burgesses of Rouen had to turn out of
the town all the refugees who had fled for safety to her walls from
other cities taken by the English. Some fifteen thousand of them, men,
women and children, tottered out of the gates and made feebly for the
English lines. The chronicler himself was moved to pity: "Have ye
pitee hem upone" he cries to the English King, "and yeve hem leve
thens to gone"; but when they tried to pass through they found a row
of pikes as pitiless as the shut gates of Rouen behind. Beneath the
chill December sky these famishing spectres had to take refuge in the
open ditch below the ramparts of the town. Without any shelter,
ragged, defenceless, and feeding only on roots and bitter grass,
grubbed from the war-scarred ground, they perished in hundreds every
night, they died by the chance missiles of one side or the other, they
went mad and hurled themselves into the watch-fires of the English.
From the walls above, a priest sometimes would lean down with a
blessi