For more than a thousand years the Creuse has bristled with chateaux, many of them originally built by local warlords defending their patch of territory from encroaching neighbours or invading foreigners. Even what are now the stateliest of homes may have evolved from sites with a crude and bloodstained past.

The sheer number of chateaux is amazing. Everyone has heard of the sumptuous royal chateaux of the Loire but the Creuse makes little fuss about its own fascinating but more modest heritage. There are more than 120 chateaux listed in the department (many of them admittedly not open to the public) and they bear witness to how this strategically-important part of France was fought over and defended.

During the summer season it is possible to visit many Creuse chateaux which represent a cross-section of the different periods and styles, and throughout the year judicious peeps over walls and drive-past views can make chateau-spotting an addictive pastime. During the coming two or three months I hope to describe some of the most interesting to you, and tell you about the lives of their inhabitants, but first, here's some general background information about early medieval chateaux.


The word 'chateau' doesn't really translate as 'castle' in the literal English sense of a medieval stone building with towers, portcullis and moat. At one end of the chateau spectrum are simple motte and bailey structures, while at the other there are magnificent houses where the nobility of the Ancien Regime flaunted their riches. In between the two extremes are what we would think of as classic 'fairytale' castles, commanderies, country houses, manoirs and domaines.

It is common to find that a chateau has been built over a Roman villa or large farm. With almost a blank page to write upon, the Romans could choose the best sites for their settlements and subsequent inhabitants simply added to and extended what they had got. For example, the new owners of a 12th century chateau near us, which had degenerated into a stable and lodging for farm servants, looked at the post-war concrete floor in their great hall one day and decided its proportions didn't match the walls. They dug down about a foot and not only found the original stone paving, but also the remains of a Roman villa underneath. In the grounds were typical Roman pottery shards and granite artifacts.

After the decline of Rome, feudal lords built simple timber forts and lookout towers on the tops of hills or on artificial mounds, known as 'mottes'. At the foot of the mound, in the bailey (courtyard) entrenched behind a ditch, an earthen bank created from the ditch excavations and a wooden palisade, would be a self-contained community whose people could shelter in the fort with the lord's family at times of danger.

La Tour, in the commune of St Dizier la Tour, was once an important border post monitoring the busy medieval routes from Bourges to Limoges and Ahun to Montluçon via Gouzon. It had four such mottes at various times. Two small twin ones survive virtually intact, a third has disappeared completely and the fourth, the largest, has been pillaged for building materials over the years. However, archaelogical excavations have revealed that it wasn't just a random pile of earth built up by forced labour but had been strengthened by a process called vitrification. Stones, wood and metal were subject to intense heat to the point where they melted together to make a solid aggregate core, and then the mound was built by putting down layers of stone over this. The tower from which the village gets its name was then erected on top.


These fortresses were known as mottes castrales (from the Latin castrum, castle). In the Creuse their remains can also be found – among other sites – at Les Mottes, in the commune of St Oradoux de Chiroux, at Drouilles and at Bridiers. As time went on many become more sophisticated and impregnable when stone replaced wood – which had the big disadvantage of being inflammable – as the building material. They evolved into what were called "chateaux forts".

During the Middle Ages Europe was divided into lots of small, viciously warring states and conflicts were common.The Creuse, then known as la Marche, was no exception. Jealous members of individual powerful families were also often busy slaughtering or mutilating one another in unpleasant ways (the nobility round here were particularly partial to putting out eyes), and of course there were always those pesky English to contend with.

Under the power pyramid of the feudal system, kings granted land to nobles in return for a promise of military and other services, and they in turn let out their lands to lesser barons and lords on the same terms, with the process being repeated right down to the local chevalier or knight who had his own small base perhaps only a few kilometres away from a colleague or rival of similar rank.

Looking at the old field names in the vicinity of our commune of 10 hamlets it is possible to identify about half a dozen different minor seats on neighbouring hilltops, two of which have vanished almost without trace. One of these, whose medieval chevalier had an impressive tombstone in the nearby chapel, had degenerated by the 1812 cadastre into a tumbledown cottage and some stables.

Each powerful lord's chateau served as his home, armoury, barracks, storehouse, prison, treasury and administrative centre. To foil would-be invaders, castle builders made the bailey walls (which had replaced the palisades) immensely thick and added round towers at the corners. Guards walked along the tops of the walls and towers, and were protected by battlements where they could shelter behind the upright merlons and shoot arrows or drop stones on attackers through the open spaces, called crenels.

Around the 11th century, the next stages in castle development were the addition within the bailey of a towering masonry keep or donjon with small windows set into thick walls, and the broadening of the defensive ditch into a wide moat crossed by a drawbridge. The ground floor of the rectangular donjon, windowless or perhaps pierced by a few arrrow-slits, had no access from the outside while the living quarters above were reached by external wooden steps to the first storey which could be removed to make entry difficult for an enemy. Incidentally, since these dank, dark basement places were sometimes used in England by the Norman conquerors as prisons, our ancestors coined the spine-chilling word 'dungeon' from the originally innocent donjon.


Crusaders returning from the Holy Land in the 12th and 13th centuries had experienced first hand the current developments in siege engine weaponry and castle fortification, and they applied these ideas to the design of their own chateaux.

They knew there were three ways of entering a besieged castle – climbing over the walls, knocking them down or tunnelling under them and forcing a collapse. Square cornered buildings were the most easily damaged by mining, and they also presented vulnerable angles to attacks with crowbars and battering rams. Not only were the corner stones easier to remove than those in a flat wall but the corner sheltered the attacker. The answer was to build round keeps – which also had the advantage of deflecting arrows or rocks that were aimed at them – and to splay the stonework out from the base to frustrate a sapper or battering ram. Following this principle, the original rectangular donjons were often protected by the erection of round towers at each corner, which also provided additional accommodation.

An associated idea was to construct wooden galleries round the battlements, overhanging the base of the wall so that defenders could drop missiles on the attackers below. (These were later to become a permanent part of the stonework and were called machiolations.) Battlements were also improved to make better use of the crossbow by narrowing the merlons and incorporating arrowslits into them, so that bowmen could fire whilst staying under cover.

Finally, tall projecting towers built along the bailey wall acted as lookout points and enabled defenders to attack anyone trying to scale the wall with ladders. They divided the bailey wall into sections so that if one part was captured, the rest was not inevitably lost.

These basic designs continued to be refined, as we shall see in the next article, and a certain style of Creusois chateau, the type marchois evolved. But eventually the invention of the cannon meant that however well they were defended, chateaux could no longer hope to be impregnable fortresses and they began to be constructed as beautiful status symbols.

Annik

* There is a free exhibition called "Vies de Chateaux en Creuse" currently on at the Archives départementales de la Creuse, rue Franklin Roosevelt, Guéret. It finishes on September 30. The archives are open from Monday to Thursday from 8.30am-5pm, and on Fridays from 8.30am - 4pm. Parking is difficult because of the work on the new roundabout outside.