But everything did not go smoothly in the streets of Rouen while these pacific changes were in progress. In 1213 the town was filled with the levy of counts, barons, and knights, with all their men-at-arms, whom Philip was collecting to attack the King of England; and in 1250 a far more disorderly and plebeian assembly gathered under the leadership of André de St. Léonard to express in the practical form of riot and pillage their disapprobation of the ten per cent. exacted by the Church for grinding corn in the ecclesiastical mills. Near the Pont de Robec and the Rue du Père Adam flour and wheat were forcibly stolen, but Archbishop Odo Rigaud soon asserted his authority, by fining the ringleader 100 marks of silver, equivalent to about £2000 sterling, and the dissatisfaction ceased. In the next year a rising, that had some slight degree of religious colour in it, gave a good deal of trouble, not to Rouen only, but to the rest of France. Bands of peasants, styling themselves "Pastoureaux," asserted their indignation at the captivity of King Louis IX. by chasing the archbishop out of his cathedral. From the fact that they had been joined, not merely by all the lazy ruffians of the neighbourhood, but by some burgesses, and even by certain municipal office-holders, we may infer that the privileges or prerogatives of the Church were once more the real objects of the dispute. Though the ecclesiastics were as usual strong enough to exact a public apology and absolution from the mayor and his councillors, the strange frenzy spread to the Provinces; men averred that the Holy Virgin and her angels had appeared to urge them to release St. Louis, and it was necessary for Queen Blanche herself to intervene before the trouble was stopped in Paris and many parts of France.
This widespread affection felt for St. Louis may, perhaps, be explained not only by his personality, but by the fact that he was always moving from one part of his dominions to another, in spite of the obvious inconveniences of mediæval travel. I have already noticed some of the things he did for Rouen on his various visits. But such pilgrimages as that of 1255 to Adam Bacon, the solitary abbot of St. Catherine, cannot have failed to increase his local reputation. He celebrated Christmas here in 1264, after another short visit previously on his way from Pont de l'Arche to Bec, and in 1269 he came again from Port-Audemer. On every such occasion he prayed in the churches and left offerings suitable to his rank; he ate in the refectories with the monks, he dispensed alms to the poor, and gave money or its equivalent to the hospitals. His charity was, indeed, extraordinary, for Queen Margaret's Confessor has related that he not only fed the hungry at his every meal, but went round the beds in the sick houses, smoothing the pillows of the sufferers, speaking to them, and trying to supply their wants.