d
goods under warrant, and in the South Hall are piled the famous
"Rouenneries" and coloured cottons, and those "draperies" which have
been famous almost since Edward the Confessor allowed the Rouen
merchants to use his Port of Dungeness, and the town was granted the
monopoly of the Irish trade, with the exception of one ship a year
from Cherbourg.

When Warwick the Kingmaker made a memorable visit to Rouen in 1467 as
an ambassador, King Louis XI. ordered the town to furnish the English
with all they wanted at his expense, with the result that "tous les
gens de l'ambassade s'en retournerent chez eux, vetus de damas et de
velours, et de ces draps fins et precieux qui asseurent au commerce de
Rouen la superiorite sur toutes les villes du royaume." That
"superiority" lasted well through the sixteenth century, and when
Huguenots fled from Rouen to Westminster and Rye and Winchester, they
were nearly all cloth-makers and silk-weavers. Such names as the Rue
aux Anglais, the Rue aux Espagnols and others preserve the memory of
commercial ventures that are even more picturesquely suggested by the
ships carved here and there upon old house-fronts in the town. Nor did
Rouen commerce stop at England, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Flanders, or
other countries of the old world. Her citizens, as we have seen, had
known long ago a "King of the Canaries," and it was no doubt at the
suggestion of either Spanish or Portuguese companions that Rouen ships
sailed on towards the Guinea Coast, to the Cape Verde Islands, and
"the Indies," even across the Atlantic to Brazil, whence they brought
back the rare wood called by Jean de Lery "araboutan."[70]

[Footnote 70: The native name for this staple of trade was
"ibirapitanga," and with it they shipped across monkeys and parroquets
for the ladies of the French Court. That there was a considerable
rivalry with Portugal in these matters may be gathered from the remark
in Marino Cavalli (Venetian Ambassador to the Court of France) that a
Portuguese vessel was burnt off Brazil in 1546. But the first document
on Brazil ever published in France was the account of the savages
exhibited before Henri II. in 1550. It is probably written by Maurice
Seve and Claude de Tillemont and was published in 1551. Before that
year it will be remembered that the only works about America known
were the book of Fernandez in Spanish, Ramusio's account in Italian,
and the letters of Cortes in German. After it, Thevet's "Fran