Pont-Audemer is a small, neat, country town, situated upon the Risle, which here, within ten miles of its junction with the Seine, is enlarged into a river of considerable magnitude.  But its channel, in the immediate vicinity of the town, divides into several small streams; and thus it loses much of its dignity, though the change is highly advantageous to picturesque beauty, and to the conveniences of trade.  Mills stand on some of these streams, but most of them are applied to the purposes of tanning; for leather is the staple manufacture of the place, and the hides prepared at Pont-Audemer are thought to be the best in France.

From Brionne the valley of the Risle preserves a width of about a mile, or a mile and half:  at Pont-Audemer it becomes somewhat narrower, and the town stretches immediately across it, instead of being built along the banks of the river.—­The inhabitants are thus enabled to avail themselves of the different streams which intersect it.

Tradition refers the origin, as well as the name of Pont-Audemer, to a chief, called Aldemar or Odomar, who ruled over a portion of Gaul in the fifth century, and who built a bridge here.—­These legendary heroes abound in topography, but it is scarcely worth while to discuss their existence.  In Norman times Pont-Audemer was a military station.  The nobility of the province, always turbulent, but never more so than during the reign of Henry Ist, had availed themselves of the opportunity afforded by the absence of the monarch, and by his domestic misfortunes, to take up arms in the cause of the son of Robert.  Henry landed at the mouth of the Seine, and it was at Pont-Audemer that the first conflict took place between him and his rebellious subjects.  The latter were defeated, and the fortress immediately surrendered; but, in the early part of the fourteenth century, it appears to have been of greater strength:  it had been ceded by King John of France to the Count of Evreux, and it resisted all the efforts of its former lord during a siege of six weeks, at the end of which time his generals were obliged to retire, with the loss of their military engines and artillery.  This siege is memorable in history, as the first in which it is known that cannon were employed in France.—­Pont-Audemer, still in possession of the kings of Navarre, withstood a second siege, towards the conclusion of the same century, but with less good fortune than before.  It was taken by the constable Du Guesclin, and, according to Froissart[48], “the castle was razed to the ground, though it had cost large sums to erect; and the walls and towers of the town were destroyed.”