Adonis fell at the bidding of the same bold reformer to
make way for the first church of St. Paul beneath the heights of St.
Catherine.]

This is an age of great churchmen. While the Roman Empire lasted, the
Church had been dependent and submissive to the Emperors. When the
Franks arrived her attitude was changed, for to these barbarous and
ungodly strangers she stood as a beneficent superior, and a steadfast
shield over the Gallo-Roman people. So it was that the bishops became
the protectors of towns, the counsellors of kings, the owners of large
and rich tracts of land, the sole possessors of knowledge and of
letters in an age of darkest brutality and ignorance. With the names
of St. Ouen and St. Romain in Normandy at this time are bound up those
of St. Philibert, St. Saens, and St. Herbland, under whose protection
was one of the oldest parishes of Rouen. His church stood until quite
modern years in the Parvis of the Cathedral at the end of the Rue de
la Grosse Horloge. On various islands in the stream, for the very soil
of Rouen at this time was as uncertain as its chronicles, were built
the chapels to St. Clement and St. Eloi, and other saints. The
boundaries of the Frankish settlement, described in terms of modern
street-geography, were, roughly, along the Rue des Fosses Louis VIII.
from Pont de Robec to the Poterne, thence by the Marche Neuf, now
Place Verdrel, along the Palais, through the Rue Massacre to the Rue
aux Ours. From there the line passed to the Place de la Calende and
the Eau de Robec, while the fourth side was marked by the waters of
the Robec itself.

This was the Rouen which welcomed Charlemagne in 769, who came to
celebrate Easter in the Cathedral he was to benefit so largely, among
the canons who had only been organised into a regular chapter, living
in one community, about nine years before. The great Emperor not only
helped the Cathedral in his lifetime, but left it a legacy in his
will, for the town, in gratitude for his benefactions, had furnished
twenty-eight "ships" to help him pursue his enemies, out of the fleet
which had already begun to exploit the rich commercial possibilities
of Britain, and to enter into trading engagements even with the
Byzantine emperors. With the second coming of Charlemagne at the dawn
of the ninth century, the next period in the history of Rouen closes.
At his death the semblance of an empire, into which his mighty
personality had welded the warring anarchies