I once had a girl – A visit to Honfleur

Still in Le Havre, we woke up Monday morning to perhaps the heaviest rainfall we’d had on any day of the trip thus far. Although it wasn’t as windy as it had been yessterday, the weather remained rooted on the chilly side of comfort with the high temperature reaching about 11°. The original schedule planned to allow the group a full day exploring Honfleur beginning with the usual guided walking tour at 09:00. The downpour dampened that plan.

However, we were fortunate in two ways. First, our tour organizers (and for this I probably have to credit Matthew and William from Earthbound Expeditions rather than Amy and Ellie from MPR) recognized that many of us probably didn’t want to tromp around a small town for seven hours in a cold downpour. The second was geographic proximity. Since the construction of the Pont du Normandie, it’s possible to reach Honfleur from the port in Le Havre in about half an hour. Before the bridge one would have had to take a ferry (if it was still running) or drive an easterly route taking you off the map below.

So, rather than leaving us stranded in the rain, they scheduled three circulating buses that we could meet hourly beginning at 13:30. As we make that first half-hour drive, let’s take a brief look at

Some of Honfleur’s history.

People with even a passing familiarity with French might recognize the French word fleur meaning flower and think that the city’s name was florally derived. (Okay, I’m projecting because that’s what I did.) But that’s not the case. We have to recall that we are in Normandy -the land of the Norsemen.

Originally settled where the Claire River flows into the estuary of the Seine, the town’s name derives from an old Nordic word ‘fleu’ meaning port and ‘hon’ meaning lower. Thus, Honfleur likely meant “the lower port.” (There’s some speculation that ‘fleu’ also refers to estuary and ‘hon’ to horn which could make the name mean “horn of the estuary.” However, the presence of the town of Harfleur likely meaning “upper port” some five kilometers upstream from present day Le Havre gives greater credence to the idea that the name meant “lower port.”)

Occupying an important strategic position where it could serve to defend the Seine while also being a base for commerce and exploration, the first written evidence for a settlement named Honfleur appears in 1027 in a document written by Richard III, Duke of Normandy. After the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (and I’ll have more on that when we visit Bayeux), the whole of the Duchy of Normandy fell under the control of the kings of England where it remained for nearly 140 years.

The city thrived under English rule and a document from the end of the 12th century provides evidence of its importance as a port of commerce with England. Another indication of Honfleur’s growing prosperity and population from that time emerges when three distinct parishes were established in the city.

In 1204, Honfleur fell under French hegemony when Philip II – the first monarch to call himself King of France rather than King of the Franks – took back the territory by force. Control of Normandy remained disputed until 1259 when Henry III of England ceded any claims to Normandy excluding the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey when he signed the Treaty of Paris. (This was the second of six Treaties of Paris signed in the 13th and 14th centuries alone. There have been scores of Paris Treaties.)

Life remained relatively calm for Honfleur even at the outbreak of the first phase of the Hundred Years War in 1337 when Edward III of England tried to reassert his claim to the throne of France. However, three events in the middle of the 14th century disrupted life throughout the province – the outbreak of the Black Death in 1348, the terror campaign begun in 1355 by Edward III (also known as the Black Prince), and the collapse of the French government when Jean II (Jean le Bon) was captured by Edward in 1356.

Edward’s military campaign ultimately failed when a freak hailstorm at Chartres killed more than 1,000 of his troops and six times as many horses. The Black Prince then had something of a religious revelation and vowed to his god that he would make peace with the French resulting in the Treaty of Calais in 1360. That peace held for about a decade before another flare up that ended with a series of truces between Charles VI of France and Richard II of England that maintained calm from 1389 to 1415.

Despite the efforts of Charles V and Charles VI of France to fortify the port city in the late 14th and early 15th centuries constructing buildings such as the Lieutenant’s House (seen below),

when the Hundred Years War resumed in earnest in 1415, the English again seized control over Honfleur in 1419 and gained formal possession of it through the 1420 Treaty of Troyes. (Recall that Charles VI disinherited his son when he signed the Treaty of Troyes with Henry V of England.) Ultimately Charles VII would regain control of the city for France when he expelled the English in 1450.

Time for a break from history – Let’s take a walk around Honfleur.

I might be sounding a bit whiny but the truth is that the weather was so uninviting that when our guide led us off our bus and began our brief tour around Honfleur I was probably more focused on my futile effort to stay as warm and dry as possible as I was on the information she was sharing.

I recall walking through the town square, past some charming side streets and having her point out part of a crumbling wall that once belonged to the city jail. One place she took us was along a street we would likely have ignored – had we even noticed it – without a guide. It’s called Rue des Petites Boucheries or Little Butchers Street because it’s little more than an alley between the Rue de la Ville and St. Stephen’s Church.

The name of the street dates from the 17th century and was, as you might suspect, bestowed because it was lined with butchers’ stalls. Only one stall has been preserved and it was shuttered so I didn’t take a picture of it. The little gap in the lower left corner of the picture below is where you enter Rue des Petites Boucheries from Rue de la Ville.

Our walk around Honfleur continues in the next post.

Note: In keeping with my 2022-2023 reformation of the blog into shorter entries, backdated to maintain their sequence, any comments on this post might pertain to its new configuration. See the explanation in the post Conventions and Conversions.