Account of a Tour in Normandy, Volume 1 by Dawson Turner
page 22 of 231 (09%)
page 22 of 231 (09%)
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though our lion-hearted monarch was not appalled either by the papal
interdict or by the showers of blood that fell upon his workmen, yet at length he thought it advisable to purchase at once the forgiveness of the prelate and the secular seignory of Andelys, by surrendering to him, as an equivalent, the towns and lordships of Dieppe and Louviers, the land and forest of Alihermont, the land and lordship of Bouteilles, and the mills of Rouen. This exchange was regarded as so great a subject of triumph to the archbishop, that he caused the memory of it to be perpetuated by inscriptions upon crosses in various parts of Rouen, some of which remained as late as 1610, when Taillepied wrote his _Recueil des Antiquitéz et Singularitéz de la Ville de Rouen_. The following lines are given as one of these inscriptions in the _Gallia Christiana_[10]: "Vicisti, Galtere, tui sunt signa triumphi Deppa, Locoveris, Alacris-mons, Butila, molta, Deppa maris portus, Alacris-mons locus amoenus, Villa Locoveris, rus Butila, molta per urbem. Hactenus hæc Regis Richardi jura fuere; Hæc rex sancivit, hæc papa, tibique tuere[11]." Nor was this the only memorial of the fact; for the advantages of the exchange were so generally recognized, that the name of Walter became proverbial; and to this day it is said in Normandy of a man who over-reaches another, "c'est un fin Gautier." It might be inferred from the terms of the bargain in which Dieppe merely appears as one of the items of the account, that it was then a place of little consequence; yet, one of the old chroniclers speaks of it at the time it was taken by the French under Philip Augustus, as |
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