Among the prisoners who were released at William's death was that half-brother, Odo of Bayeux,[20] to whose skill and knowledge is due the marvellous pictorial record of the Bayeux Tapestry. Its inscriptions are in the Latin letters of the time, and its eleventh-century costumes, the short clothes easy to ride or run or fight, the arms depicted, the clean-shaved faces, are all very different to those which Orderic Vital describes as usual in the twelfth century. Neither Matilda the Queen, nor Matilda the Empress, could have embroidered the details on the border, and neither could have known so many facts as the Odo who was on the Council that advised invasion, who rallied the troops at Senlac when William was supposed to have been dead, who was made Regent of England, Count of Kent, and Bishop of Bayeux. It was to the advice of this rich, powerful, and intelligent prelate, that the new and feeble Duke Robert had to trust in the first year of his reign in Rouen. With all the vices of the Conqueror, Robert had neither his virtues nor his strength. The difficulties which met him first came from a cause too deep-seated for him to recognise either its value or its far-reaching issues.
I have already described how the first attempts of Norman peasants to found a "commune" had been crushed with horrible brutality. The movement now began again. It is perhaps possible that the very pre-eminence of the Conqueror over all his barons helped to emphasise the fact that the feudality which he employed for his own uses only, and threw away when he had done with, was not to be an order of things fixed by any eternal providence. When the King rose at one end of the social framework the people naturally came into greater prominence at the other.
The truce of God, insisted upon by William himself, had helped to the same end. For every male of twelve years old swore to help the Bishop to keep that truce, and by degrees his parishioners combined to organise the safety of their town, "ex consensu parochianorum." They used the resources for which all subscribed, and placed them under the control of a "gardien de la Confrèrie," or "fraternarum rerum custos." While these associations preserved the peace of the towns, the King was responsible for the peace of France. But the feeling of independence and the strength of union grew steadily among the citizens year by year. The rise of commerce, which has been already noticed in Rouen, also contributed to this. As cities grew in wealth, they became more and more desirous of escaping from feudal rapacity and of regulating their own affairs by magistrates chosen by themselves. In 1066 Le Mans had already done this. Ten years afterwards Cambrai followed the example. Noyon, Beauvais, Laon, Soissons, and many more clamoured for the charter of their liberty. In the absence of so many overlords at the Crusades the towns beneath the shadow of their castles seized the opportunity of strengthening their position. The same spirit of revolt began to work in Rouen as soon as the strong hand of the Conqueror was taken from the helm of government. But Rouen did not win her civic liberty until she had changed her own Norman dukes for the kings of France. The descendants of Duke William, feeble as they were, were still too near the feudal overlord to admit of rapid change. Yet the leaven was working already, and the disputes of the Conqueror's children fostered the unruly elements in the town.
Scarcely three years after Robert had attained the Duchy he quarrelled openly with his brother, the Red King of England; and Rouen was instantly in an uproar under Conan, a rich bourgeois, who probably sided with William Rufus, because he saw more chance of a commune under a distant king than in the presence of a duke at Rouen. In the days of the Conqueror there had been no tyrants or demagogues in the city, no armies in civic pay, no dealings of the citizens with other princes. But now the chance for an independent commonwealth seemed really to have come. However, the youngest brother, Henri Beauclerc, came from Côtentin to assist Robert in his difficulty, but not before the debauched and treacherous duke had been obliged to fly by the eastern gate of Robec into the faubourg of Malpalu, where he was cordially welcomed, and passed on to safety in St. Sever. Then Henri Beauclerc, "The Lion of Justice," took up the fighting for himself, swiftly beat back the soldiers of the Red King, threw Conan, the leader of the revolt, into the Tower of the Dukes by the Seine, and finally cast him down headlong from the battlements to die upon the stones beneath. The place preserved the name of "Saut de Conan" for many years, in the south-east corner of the Halles. So this first Artevelde of Rouen came to an untimely end. Henri Beauclerc, helped by Robert of Bellesme, one of the de Warrens (whose tomb is in the church of Wantage), and by the Count of Evreux, proved far too strong for him and for his companion in revolt, William, the son of Ansgar, who had to pay a vast ransom as the price of disobedience, while many of the rebellious citizens were massacred, and this immature attempt to form a commune ended.
The three brothers continued to quarrel, and to make it up again for some years. First, Robert and Rufus combine against Henry. Then Robert sends over troops to help the barons who were rebelling against his brother in England. Finally he went off with his Uncle Odo on the first crusade in 1096, pledging the Duchy in his absence to his brother the Red King, who, of course, seized it, and the real quarrel between England and France began. For when Normandy had been independent, Rouen blocked the road from Winchester to Paris. But as soon as it belonged outright either to one or to the other, the ancestral strife of French against English was certain to begin, and to go on. The revolt of Elias, Count of Maine, against the English King was repressed by his imprisonment—by Robert of Bellesme again—in the same Tour de Rouen that had seen the death of Conan. But Rufus never used his great gifts and power of ruling for anything but evil, and his brother Henry followed him, the husband of that descendant of Edmund and of Alfred who called herself Matilda at his coronation.
When the weak and incompetent Robert Short Hose returned from his crusading, he had the temerity to lay claim not merely to his Duchy but to the throne of England with it. He naturally lost both, at the battle of Tinchebray, where Henri Beauclerc won Normandy, and beat the Normans with his English soldiers. For many years Robert languished in English prisons until he died at Gloucester. And the Duchy he had lost throve infinitely under his brother's wise and prosperous rule, which gradually repressed more and more of the remnants of feudal anarchy and misrule. In 1114, his daughter Matilda gained her title of Empress by marriage with Henry V., but won her greatest fame by her second match—after this first husband's death with Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, in 1125, from which Henry II. of England was to be born. But Henri Beauclerc was unfortunate in his other children. For in 1119 his sons, William and Richard, were drowned in the White Ship on their way to England. The occurrence caused a very painful and widespread sensation, for besides the brilliant young nobles of the suite, eighteen high-born ladies, many of them of royal blood, perished in the wreck. In Orderic Vital, in William of Malmesbury, in Henry of Huntingdon, the story is fully set forth. The captain was the son of that pilot who had steered William the Conqueror to Pevensey in the good ship "Mora" built at Rouen. The weather was calm and bright with moonlight, and as the young princes urged their captain to row harder after their father's ship, he took a short cut along the treacherous coast, and the boat split open on a rock on the night of the 25th of November. The only survivor was a butcher of Rouen, called Bérold, or Gueroult as Robert Wace gives the name,
"Cil Gueroult de Roem esteit
Machecrier ert, la char vendeit". …
and he was only preserved because of the thick clothes he wore through the frost of the night, to be rescued by some fishermen next morning.
"Un peliçon avit vestu
Ki del grant freit l'ont defendu;
Iver esteit, grant freit faiseit,"
says the "Roman de Rou" (15,319), so that in the Rue Massacre (close to the Rue Grosse Horloge) at Rouen, one home was gladdened with good news after a catastrophe that threw at least three courts into mourning, and gave the succession of the English throne to the great house of the Plantagenets of Maine.
Rouen had not remained entirely submissive to the Lion of Justice. In 1109 the King of France encouraged yet another rising of the citizens in Rouen and elsewhere against feudal power. And after the wreck of the White Ship, Fulk of Anjou took the opportunity to push the claims of Duke Robert's son both in England and Normandy, but the rebels were badly beaten at Bourgtheroulde (between Seine and Rille), and the Lion of Justice held a court in Rouen to judge them. Some were imprisoned in his Tower by the Seine, and some in Gloucester, while a satiric poet, named Luke of Barre, paid the penalty of being a pioneer in scoffing politics by having his