The chief city of Normandy and a major political, ecclesiastical, and commercial center.
Rouen stands on the Seine about 120 kilometres north-west of Paris, far enough downstream for sea-going ships to reach it and far enough inland to be defended. That position made it the capital of the Norman dukes from the tenth century, the richest city of the Anglo-Norman world, and the prize of the decisive sieges of Normandy's medieval history: by Philip II of France in 1204 and by Henry V of England in 1418–19, before Charles VII recovered it in 1449.
It is also where William the Conqueror died in 1087, where Richard the Lionheart's heart was buried in 1199, and where Joan of Arc was tried and burned in 1431. The cathedral, the abbey church of Saint-Ouen, the church of Saint-Maclou, the Gros-Horloge and the keep of Philip II's castle still stand in the medieval centre.
The Roman town of Rotomagus was the chief place of the Veliocasses and, in the late empire, the capital of the province of Lugdunensis Secunda, which made its bishop the metropolitan of the whole region. That rank outlasted Rome. Rouen's archbishops presided over the bishops of what became Normandy, and seventh-century bishops such as Saint Ouen, a counsellor of the Merovingian king Dagobert I, made the city a centre of monastic foundation along the lower Seine.
The same river made Rouen a target. A Viking fleet came up the Seine in 841 and burned the city and the abbey of Jumièges, and raiders returned repeatedly over the next two generations. By the early tenth century a Norse army under Rollo had settled in the lower Seine valley, and around 911 the Frankish king Charles the Simple granted him Rouen and the lands around it, traditionally at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, in return for defending the river and accepting baptism.
Rouen became the seat of Rollo's descendants, the counts and later dukes of Normandy. Rollo and his son William Long-Sword were buried in the cathedral, and the dukes ruled from a fortified palace beside the Seine. The ducal city grew rich on river trade with England and the Low Countries, and after 1066 it was the principal city of a realm that straddled the Channel. William the Conqueror died at the priory of Saint-Gervais on the city's western edge on 9 September 1087, of an injury taken at the burning of Mantes, and was carried to Caen for burial.
Rouen had one of the largest Jewish communities in northern France. Guibert of Nogent reports that crusaders setting out in 1096 attacked it, and a Romanesque stone building of about 1100, found in 1976 beneath the Palais de Justice and known as the Maison Sublime, is the oldest surviving Jewish building in France. The citizens' own constitution, the Établissements de Rouen, drawn up under Henry II, gave the city a council of a hundred peers who put forward candidates for mayor, and was copied by towns across the Angevin lands from La Rochelle to Bayonne. Rouen was also where the Empress Matilda spent her last years. After the English civil war ended in her son’s favour she settled in Normandy and advised Henry II from the city, and she died near Rouen on 10 September 1167 and was buried at the abbey of Bec-Hellouin.
In 1204 Rouen was the last great city of the Angevin empire to hold out against Philip II. After the fall of Château Gaillard in March, with King John in England and no relief coming, the citizens agreed a truce and surrendered on 24 June. Philip built a new castle on the high ground north of the city; its round keep, now called the Tour Jeanne d'Arc, is the only part that survives. The exchequer of Normandy, the duchy's supreme court, went on sitting at Rouen under the French kings.
Much of the medieval Rouen that survives was built in the following two centuries. The cathedral was largely rebuilt after a fire in 1200, the abbey church of Saint-Ouen was begun in 1318, and the belfry of the Gros-Horloge received a mechanical clock in 1389. The city's wealth also bred revolt: in 1382 the cloth workers rose against royal taxation in the rising called the Harelle, and Charles VI punished Rouen by suspending its commune and confiscating its great bell.
Henry V's Siege of Rouen began in July 1418. The city was crowded with refugees, and as food ran out the garrison expelled thousands of the poor, whom the English would not let through their lines; they starved in the ditch below the walls through the winter. Rouen surrendered on 19 January 1419 and for thirty years was the capital of Lancastrian Normandy. John, Duke of Bedford, regent of France for the infant Henry VI, governed from it, died there in 1435 and was buried in the cathedral.
Joan of Arc was brought to Rouen as a prisoner in December 1430 and held in the castle while an ecclesiastical court under Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais, tried her for heresy from January to May 1431. On 9 May she was taken into the keep and shown the instruments of torture, and on 24 May, in the cemetery of the abbey of Saint-Ouen, she signed an abjuration that she withdrew days later. She was burned in the Old Market on 30 May 1431, and her ashes were thrown into the Seine.
Charles VII's army reconquered Normandy in 1449. The citizens rose against the English garrison, Rouen capitulated in October, and the king made his entry on 10 November. On 7 July 1456, in the archbishop's palace at Rouen, papal commissioners declared Joan's trial null in the city that had condemned her.