take possession of the synagogue and
houses in the Rue aux Juifs, and the Jews were only allowed to return
sixteen years afterwards, on the payment of large sums of money. In
1202 they were again mercilessly "bled" by King John, and the
protection naturally accorded by this needy prince to their usurious
practices was bitterly resented by the burghers.

The fires that were of such continual occurrence even in the small
space of the Jews' quarter were by no means confined, unfortunately,
to that part of the city. I have had to notice several times already
the repeated devastation caused in this way to a town that was still
chiefly built of wood, and in the last days of the Norman Dukes the
ravages of fire were exceptionally widespread and pitiless. The year
1116 was a peculiarly fatal one, and only ten years afterwards flames
broke out in the Rue des Carmes, and devoured both the Abbey of St.
Amand and the Abbey of St. Ouen, while the Cathedral itself only just
escaped, and an earthquake that immediately followed the fire
completed the destruction of what little had been left standing within
its area. But the Metropolitan Church which had been struck by
lightning and injured in 1117, was not spared by the soldiers of
Geoffrey of Anjou in 1136; and before the end of the century the whole
of the building that William the Conqueror had seen consecrated before
the invasion of England was destroyed by the flames on Easter Eve, and
of the Cathedral built by his Bishop Maurilius where the Lion Heart
received his crusading sword and banner from the Archbishop Gautier,
nothing now remains except the lower part of the Tour St. Romain. In
that same terrible year of 1200 the first shrine of St. Maclou was
also burnt to the ground with several other churches, and the fire
swept through the southern parts of the city to the river itself, and
even set alight some buildings of the Tour de Rouen which the Norman
dukes had built, though the chapel must have been saved, for it is
recorded that in 1203 this building was given to his chancellor by
John Lackland. But the ancient donjon to which Henri Beauclerc had
added the palace standing where the Halles are now, and the
fortifications which were erected near the spot by the same Duke,
whose walls were strong enough to resist for three months a close
siege by Geoffrey Plantagenet after the faubourg of St. Sever had been
ruined, all this was utterly destroyed by Philip Augustus in 1204, and