Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/309

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precinct, does in some faint way preserve the memory of the dwelling-place of Rolf. But by the days of Robert, the dukes had moved their dwelling to the south-eastern corner, also near the river, where the site of the castle is marked by the vast halles, and by the graceful Renaissance porch, where the chapter of our Lady of Rouen yearly, on the feast of the Ascension, exercised the prerogative of mercy by saving one prisoner condemned to die. Here the memory of the castle, though only its memory, lives in the names of the Haute and the Basse Vieille Tour, one of which is soon to be famous in our story. On the eastern side the wall was washed by a small tributary of the Seine, the Rebecq, a stream whose course has withdrawn from sight almost as thoroughly as the Fleet of London or the Frome of Bristol. On this side of the city lay a large swampy tract, whose name of Mala palus still lives in a Rue Malpalu, though a more distant part of it has taken the more ambitious name of the Field of Mars. Within the wall lay the metropolitan church of our Lady and the palace of the Primate of Normandy. If this last reached to anything like its present extent to the east, the Archbishops of Rouen, like the Counts of