Though it is very degraded in its present state, you can still see the Doric and Ionic pilasters in couples, and the heavy circular tops alternating with triangles above the windows; and though all those parts of the decoration which jutted out have been destroyed, there is still a massive dignity about the building that would have thoroughly justified its better preservation. In any case the municipal authorities might have had some memory of the traditions of the old centre of their civic life, before they moved to the commonplace erections on the north side of the Abbey Church of St. Ouen.
So, though little but the foundations remain of the original Hôtel de Ville in the Rue de la Grosse Horloge, yet the stones of its successor are still there, and the belfry that rang out its messages is much more than a name; so I have thought it convenient to attach to them a few memories of the people of Rouen as they lived in the days before the great changes of the sixteenth century. In my next two chapters I shall have to pause for a moment over the English siege, and the death of Jeanne d'Arc, but the tenth chapter will deal with a few of the numberless churches of the town, and the eleventh with that Palais de Justice which is the triumphant signal that the sixteenth century had begun. If I am to give you, then, a glimpse, however short, of the people themselves in earlier years before they are overshadowed by the great names of prelates and of princes, this will be my last opportunity.
If any Norman were asked what was the most valuable of the privileges which he possessed by right of citizenship in the earliest times, I suppose he would answer without hesitation that it was the Charte aux Normands, that confirmation, granted by Louis X. in 1315, of the old "Custom of Normandy" ascribed by tradition to Rollo and traced by record to William the Conqueror. It was also called the "clameur de haro," and affectionate antiquarians derive the word from the "Ha Rou!" with which a suppliant cried to the first pirate duke that "wrong was being done." It is no mere artifice of fiction[33] that this same consecrated phrase might have been heard among the Englishmen of the Channel Islands early in the nineteenth century, and even to this hour, that cry of "_Haro! Haro!_ à l'aide mon prince, on me fait tort!" preserves the custom of Normandy, and of Rollo the Dane, in Jersey, so that the sound of it "makes the workman drop his tools, the woman her knitting, the militiaman his musket, the fisherman his net, the schoolmaster his birch, and the ecrivain his babble, to await the judgment of the Royal Court."