Rouen

Rouen stands on the Seine at the last crossing before the estuary, the great port and cloth town of Normandy and the seat of its archbishop and of the Exchequer of Normandy. Its merchants held a lucrative monopoly on the river traffic to Paris, and in 1293 Philip IV founded the royal shipyard of the Clos des Galées beside the Seine. A fourteenth-century clock, the Gros-Horloge, marked the hours over the street, and the cathedral's Tour de Beurre, built from 1485 with money from Lenten indulgences for eating butter, rose above the old town.

The Harelle revolt of 1382 against new taxes ended in a heavy fine and the loss of the city's privileges. After a six-month siege Rouen surrendered to Henry V in January 1419; one of its captains was hanged. In the Old Market on 30 May 1431 Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, and the French recovered Rouen in 1449 and annulled her sentence there in 1456.

Rouen prospered again in the sixteenth century. The Parlement of Normandy was fixed in the city in 1515, and its merchants traded for brazilwood, the source of a red dye for the cloth industry; in 1550 a Brazilian festival on the Seine celebrated the visit of Henry II. Religion then divided the city. Protestants took control in 1562, and the royal army stormed Rouen in October and sacked it.