This paper brings together several stories that cross in Rouen in the summer of 1124. The point of intersection was the double viewing of the relics of St. Romanus at Rouen Cathedral, our knowledge of which derives from a hitherto neglected document – Archives départementales de la Seine-Maritime G 3666 (hereafter simply G 3666). It is appropriate that G 3666 in particular should engender this article in honor of C.Warren Hollister, for it was he who first called it to my attention in his research seminar in 1977. And it is symptomatic of the degree to which G 3666 has been overlooked that Hollister himself mentioned the document only in a single footnote in his biography of Henry I. (The oversight can be explained in part by the Santa Barbara, California, fire of 1990 which destroyed all of Hollister’s research notes.) But it was not only Hollister who overlooked the document. As far as I know, only two modern studies cite G 3666.

A brief statement about the document itself is in order. G 3666 is actually a liasse or folder with several papers relating to the Rouennais saint, Romanus. The part which concerns us is a five-page procès-verbal, or official report, drawn up by Magister Léonard Dupuys the prêtre secrétaire of the Rouen Cathedral chapter on April 28, 1777 when the surviving relics of St. Romanus were moved from one reliquary to another. Most of St. Romanus’s bones had been brullés in July 1562 by the Huguenots. This loss may have made Magister Dupuys more attentive to those few relics that remained, as well as to the three medieval accounts of four separate translationes of St. Romanus – in 1036, the double viewing in 1124, and in 1179. It is only the 1124 bitranslatio that we will deal with here. The document no longer survives in an original which was possibly jettisoned by Magister Dupuys after he copied it, or more likely destroyed during the French Revolution. Romanus was hardly the obscure saint he is today; he was doubtless one of the many despised vestiges of medieval prerogatives which lingered anachronistically into the modern era, for the Privilege of St. Romanus, also known as the Privilège de la Fierte, allowed for the Rouen Cathedral chapter to release a prisoner annually on Ascension Day, which privilege was annulled by Revolutionaries in 1791.