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The study of tabellionage records can reveal the economic and social organisation of medieval industries, such as cloth production in late medieval Rouen. The earliest registers from Rouen, dating from 1360 onwards, preserve acts relating to commerce, but we do not always know the people behind the recorded names, and names are rarely accompanied by professions. Furthermore, from 1415 onwards, commercial matters relating to what is called “meuble” in Middle French disappear from the records. Any investigation is therefore restricted to a narrow period (1360-1415), and professions must be sought by examining craft regulations. Three series of acts reveal the various stages of cloth production: the purchase of the wool, the costs of dyeing, and the rental of facilities for stretching the cloth before sale, the “pentheurs” (large wooden poles), at the beginning and end of the process. According to the Florentine model, the medieval cloth trade was usually dominated by merchant-drapers who bought the wool, organised its manufacture into cloth and sold the finished product. It is unclear, however, whether this model works north of the Alps, and the present study instead reveals a world of small businesses that left little room for great merchant-capitalists. The investigation also reveals the importance of financial and family networks and the roles of mutual aid and a culture of trust. Alongside merchant-entrepreneurs, there were also small artisan-entrepreneurs.

In Rouen, the apprenticeship contracts seem to be scarce in the registers of the notaries (tabellion), because of archival losses after 1421. However, the frequency of their registration suffices to gather a corpus as significant as in other cities. Nonetheless, the comparison with the archives of the commune of Rouen and of the plumbers-pewterers suggests that ordinary apprenticeship contracts were not written down and registered. The study of the form of the contracts separates the stereotyped phrases from the singular motives that led to draw up a notarial deed. Independently from craft guilds, the parties, especially orphans or adult apprentices, resorted to written agreements to make sure that their obligations were reciprocal or that financially substantial and/or long term commitments were honoured.

This study deals with Norman poetry: it examines the authors, the texts, and especially the literary genres to which they belonged, in the period between the XIth and XIIth centuries. Following a chronological order, the analysis starts from XIth-century Normandy: the main political and religious centres, Rouen, Caen and Le Bec, were also the most important places of poetic output. Most of these writings are hagiographies or encomia of important figures in the ducal and royal courts. In this regard, Serlo of Bayeux stands out as a clear example: his poems are valuable historical evidence for the Norman relationship with the English and their king in 1105-1106. In England, after the bold enterprise of William the Conqueror, Norman, Flemish, French and Italian learned men had a very important role in cultural life. York and Canterbury were the most prominent centres for versification. The study ends by focusing on the numerous verses contained in the historical works of Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon.

The sources for the circulation of books in Rouen during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are particularly rich, and for some of them are still waiting to be exploited, especially in terms of the transmission of texts.From a fragment of a “loan register” from Saint-Ouen (1372-1378) and the records of deliberations conserved for the chapter of Notre-Dame of Rouen (1367-1493), it is proposed here, for these two libraries, to analyse principally loans, but also other forms of book circulation (sales, exchanges…, excluding bequests and donations): what were the terms of manuscript loan? who benefited from the circulation of books? which texts circulated in Rouen at the end of the Middle Ages? One of the last points, which is only hardly evoked here, concerns the vocabulary used during the lending process.

The Benedictine abbey of Saint-Amand at Rouen preserves amongst its archives, now at Archives départementales de la Seine-Maritime, an account’s roll which during the period from 1387 to 1397 was annotated by several receivers. The account’s roll reveals the abbey’s financial crisis, the collapse of its seigneurial revenues and the receivers' attempt to rebuild the acount towards the end of the XIVth century.

The career of Viscountess Emma, in the second half of the 12th century, was indeed a mysterious one… Between Normandy, England and the Paris region, she farmed out the income of the duchy, engaged in trade and appeared in the obituary registers of ecclesiastical institutions. King Henry II, his example followed by high-ranking members of his court, lent her his support, while she frequented the citizen elite, the merchants and the money-lenders involved in the emergence of the Commune of Rouen. Two of her sons played an active part in the governing of the town, but nothing is known of the social origins of the Viscountess, who was never considered in association with a husband, yet rose to positions of importance and took on responsibilities rarely assumed at that time by a woman acting in her own right.