ere, too, was the home of the Provincial
Governor, and of his military captain; and of the walls they built the
eye of faith can still see traces at the Ponts de Robec, at the
Abbaye de St. Amand, near the Hotel de France, close to the Priory St.
Lo, and in the Place Verdrel in front of the Palais de Justice. I have
marked out the limits of this earliest _castrum_ on Map C; and in the
Rouen of to-day you may see a strange confirmation of the fact that
Roman Rotomagus was a far more watery place than may be realised at
first. For if you stand anywhere about the level of the Cathedral
foundations and look in the direction of the river, you will notice
that all the streets slope upwards. Go nearer still, and at the angle
where the Rue du Bac meets the Rue des Tapissiers, the upward slope
becomes even more pronounced, for though the river is not so far away,
there is even less of it to be seen. A great embankment has been
slowly built; and upon what was once marshland and islands and the
tidal mud, has grown up nearly all that part of Rouen which lies
between the Cathedral and the river.

This gradual consolidation of the land which was reclaimed slowly from
the Seine must have gone on from the time when the Roman walls stopped
at the Rue aux Ours on one side, and at the Rue Saint Denis on the
other. Their northern boundary was very slightly farther than the Rue
aux Fosses Louis VIII. The Rue Jeanne d'Arc runs just outside them to
the west, and the stream of Robec forms their natural boundary to the
east, flowing into the _Mala Palus_ that has left its name in the Rue
Malpalu which leads from the west front of St. Maclou towards the
Seine. Robec himself is well-nigh hidden now, though once his southern
turn formed one of the defences of the town. Now he gropes underground
his way into the Seine, and even when his waters can be traced, in the
Rue Eau de Robec, their muddy waves were almost better hidden.

There is a striking likeness to all this in the early days of the
history of London. Apart from all legends of the Troy Novant, of Lud
and Lear and that King Lucius who sanctified Cornhill, legends which
have their counterpart in all the old histories of Rouen, there are
almost as few relics of the fortified barrack on the Thames, or of the
more pretentious "Augusta" which followed, as there are of Roman
Rouen. The same mud flats along the river bank remained until, in 982,
after the first great fire, Cnut made a canal for