In the next days he promised to confirm the charters of the town, assured the canons in the exercise of the Privilège St. Romain, and asked that the procession of the prisoner might pass by his château, which was the more appropriate as the man released had been condemned to death for killing a groom attached to one of the royal suite, who had given wanton and continued provocation. Not till the seventeenth of May were the requests both of the ecclesiastical and the civic authorities fully granted at St. Ouen; the spokesman for each had been Maître Michel Petit, the "chantre" of the Chapterhouse, and by that one fact, if by no other, King Charles must have been properly impressed with the importance of the Church in Rouen.
Before he left the city, he could have seen the exquisite little shrine of St. Maclou in all the fresh untainted delicacy of its first achievement. "The eldest daughter of the Archbishop of Rouen," this marvellous church was the result of one perfect and harmonious plan, and inasmuch as the design of its originator has been faithfully completed, it is far more of an architectural unity than its larger rivals, the Cathedral or St. Ouen. Of these three either one would make the reputation of an English town alone, and the jewelled chiselling and admirable proportions of the smallest of them make a fitting complement to the heavy splendour of the Cathedral on the one hand, and to the dizzy altitudes of the Abbey on the other.
The first Maclou, as may be imagined, was a Scotchman. He fled to Brittany, became Bishop of Aleth, and died in the Saintonge in 561. Ever since the tenth century a shrine had been erected to his memory outside the earliest walls of Rouen, in that morass which gives its name to the Rue Malpalu in front of the present church. Twice burnt and twice rebuilt, it became a parish church within the walls by 1250. A larger building was soon necessary; even during the miseries of the English Occupation it was determined to make the new church worthy of the town that already held the Cathedral and part of St. Ouen; and before 1500 indulgences had been granted by Hugues, the Archbishop, by Cardinal d'Estouteville, and by twenty Cardinals of Rome, to raise sufficient sums of money. In 1437 Pierre Robin, one of the royal architects from Paris, was paid 43 livres 10 sols for a plan and work that must have been begun some eighteen months previously with stone quarried in Val des Leux and Vernon. In 1470 Ambroise Harel was "Maître de l'oeuvre," and in 1480 the same Jacques le Roux finished it who worked in the Cathedral. Of individual bequests that of Jean de Grenouville, who was buried in the Chapelle de la St. Vierge in 1466, gave most help. From 1432, when the irreparable ruin of the old church was first recognised, until 1514, the accounts for only seven years have been preserved. In 1520 the spire of wood and lead above Gringoire's lantern was placed on Martin Duperrois' platform, to which a man might ascend without the help of any ladder. In 1735 this was removed, and in 1795 the lead was melted into bullets, and the six bells of 1529 were recast into cannon. In 1868 M. Barthélemy erected the stone Pyramid 83 metres high to hold the fine new bells.[58]