Siege of Rouen

The siege of Rouen in the "Vigiles de Charles VII"

date	July 1418 to January 1419
place	Rouen , France
output	English victory

Parties to the conflict

Kingdom of England

Kingdom of France

Commander

unknown

Guy Le Bouteiller

The successful siege of Rouen by the English from July 1418 to January 1419 was an act of war during the Hundred Years War .

The siege

At the beginning of the 15th century, Rouen had around 70,000 inhabitants, making it one of the largest cities in France. The conquest of the city was decisive for the possession of Normandy , which was fought over in these years. Around 1415, the year in which the English King Henry V conquered Harfleur at the mouth of the Seine , Rouen was relatively well fortified. When the English attacked the city, it was under the command of the citizen-elected Guy Le Bouteiller , a party member of the Burgundians in the civil war of the Armagnacs and Bourguignons and former captain of the city of Dieppe . His officers included Alain Blanchard , who commanded the crossbowmen.

In the absence of effective siege engines, the English could not carry out an assault on the city, which is why they decided to lock it off from the outside world, which they could easily do from land and from the river. The hunger that spread in Rouen after a while led to the expulsion of the people who had fled to the city at the beginning of the cold season, who were also trapped in the trenches in front of the city wall because the English did not allow them to leave.

The town's residents undertook several outages, including one in which the bridge over the Seine under the garrison collapsed after its girders were sawed off. The Chronique de Saint Denis , whose authors were not among the supporters of the Burgundians, started rumors of sabotage and betrayal by Guy le Bouteiller.

Since the King of France and the Armagnacs were unable to come to the aid of the city, Rouen finally began negotiations with the English under the leadership of Guy Le Bouteiller and six other men. However, when they had no results after eight days, a mood spread in Rouen that aimed at the destruction and abandonment of the city. When Heinrich V found out about the development and had to fear that after six months of effort he would be standing in front of a mountain of ash, he offered the residents a handover under comparatively moderate conditions. On January 20, 1419, he received the keys to the city.

Part of the surrender conditions was that three of the city's most important citizens should be extradited and executed, and the choice fell on Robert Livet, Vicar General of the Archbishop, and officers Jean Jourdain and Alain Blanchard. With Livet and Jourdain wealthy enough to buy themselves out, only Blanchard was fated.

consequences

Rouen remained under English rule for 30 years. It was not until 1449 that Charles VII managed to get the city back with the financial support of Jacques Cœur and the modern artillery of Jean Bureau .

literature

Anne Curry, Les villes normandes et l'occupation anglaise: l'importance du siège de Rouen (1418-1419) , in: Pierre Bouet, François Neveux (ed.), Les villes normandes au Moyen Âge. Renaissance, essor, crise. Actes du colloque international de Cerisy-la-Salle, 8-12 Octobre 2003 , Caen, Presses universitaires de Caen, 2006, ISBN 978-2-84133-270-0 , pp. 109-124 ( online , accessed 6 July 2020)
Léon Puiseux, Siège et prize de Rouen par les Anglais (1418-1419) principalement d'après un poème anglais contemporain , Caen, Le Gost-Clérisse, 1867