Milburg Mansfield - Castles and Chateaux of Old Burgundy

Before 1163 Villeneuve was known as Villa-Longa, after its original Roman nomenclature, but a newer and grander city grew up on the old emplacement with fortification walls and towers and gates, built at the orders of Louis VII. It was then that it came to be known as the king’s own city and was called Villeneuve-le-Roi. By a special charter granted at this time Villeneuve, like Lorris on the banks of the Loire, was given unusual privileges which made it exempt from Crown taxes, and allowed the inhabitants to hunt and fish freely – feudal favours which were none too readily granted in those days. Louis himself gave the new city the name of Villa-Francia-Regia, but the name was soon corrupted to Villeneuve-le-Roi. For many years the city served as the chief Burgundian outpost in the north.

The great tower, or citadel, a part of the royal chateau where the king lodged on his brief visits to his pet city, was intended at once to serve as a fortress and a symbol of dignity, and it played the double part admirably. Attached to this tower on the north was the Royal Chateau de Salles, a favourite abode of the royalties of the thirteenth century. Little or nothing of this dwelling remains to-day save the walls of the chapel, and here and there an expanse of wall built up into some more humble edifice, but still recognizable as once having possessed a greater dignity. There are various fragmentary foundation walls of old towers and other dependencies of the chateau, and the old ramparts cropping out here and there, but there is no definitely formed building of a sufficiently commanding presence to warrant rank as a historical monument of the quality required by the governmental authorities in order to have its patronage and protection.

Philippe-Auguste, in 1204, assembled here a parliament where the celebrated ordonnance “Stabilementum Feudorum” was framed. This alone is enough to make Villeneuve stand out large in the annals of feudalism, if indeed no monuments whatever existed to bring it to mind. It was the code by which the entire machinery of French feudalism was put into motion and kept in running order, and for this reason the Chateau de Salles, where the king was in residence when he gave his hand and seal to the document, should occupy a higher place than it usually does. The Chateau de Salles was called “royal” in distinction to the usual seigneurial chateau which was merely “noble.” It was not so much a permanent residence of the French monarchs as a sort of a rest-house on the way down to their Burgundian possession after they had become masters of the duchy. The donjon tower that one sees to-day is the chief, indeed the only definitely defined, fragment of this once royal chateau which still exists, but it is sufficiently impressive and grand in its proportions to suggest the magnitude of the entire fabric as it must once have been, and for that reason is all-sufficient in its appeal to the romantic and historic sense.

Situated as it was on the main highway between Paris and Dijon, Villeneuve occupied a most important strategic position. It spanned this old Route Royale with its two city gates, and its ramparts stretched out on either side in a determinate fashion which allowed no one to enter or pass through it that might not be welcome. These graceful towered gateways which exist even to-day were the models from which many more of their kind were built in other parts of the royal domain, as at Magny-en-Vexin, at Moret-sur-Loing, and at Mâcon.

A dozen kilometres from Villeneuve-sur-Yonne is Joigny, almost entirely surrounded by a beautiful wildwood, the Forêt National de Joigny. Joigny was one of the last of the local fiefs to give up its ancient rights and privileges. The fief took rank as a Vicomté. Jeanne de Valois founded a hospice here – the predecessor of the present Hotel Dieu – and the Cardinal de Gondi of unworthy fame built the local chateau in the early seventeenth century.

The Chateau de Joigny, as became its dignified state, was nobly endowed, having been built to the Cardinal’s orders by the Italian Serlio in 1550-1613. To-day the structure serves the functions of a schoolhouse and is little to be remarked save that one hunts it out knowing its history.

There is this much to say for the schoolhouse-chateau at Joigny; it partakes of the constructive and decorative elements of the genuine local manner of building regardless of its Italian origin, and here, as at Villeneuve, there is a distinct element of novelty in all domestic architecture which is quite different from the varieties to be remarked a little further north. There, the town houses are manifestly town houses, but at Joigny, as often as not, when they advance beyond the rank of the most humble, they partake somewhat of the attributes of a castle and somewhat of those of a palace. This is probably because the conditions of life have become easier, or because, in general, wealth, even in mediæval times, was more evenly distributed. Certainly the noblesse here, as we know, was more numerous than in many other sections.

Any one of a score of Joigny’s old Renaissance houses, which line its main street and the immediate neighbourhood of its market-place, is suggestive of the opulent life of the seigneurs of old to almost as great a degree as the Gondi chateau which has now become the École-Communal.

Of all Joigny’s architectural beauties of the past none takes so high a rank as its magnificent Gothic church of Saint Jean, whose vaultings are of the most remarkable known. Since the ruling seigneur at the time the church was rebuilt was a churchman, this is perhaps readily enough accounted for. It demonstrates, too, the intimacy with which the affairs of church and state were bound together in those days. A luxurious local chateau of the purely residential order, not a fortress, demanded a worthy neighbouring church, and the seigneur, whether or not he himself was a churchman, often worked hand in hand with the local prelate to see that the same was supplied and embellished in a worthy manner. This is evident to the close observer wherever he may rest on his travels throughout the old French provinces, and here at Joigny it is notably to be remarked.

Saint Fargeau, in the Commune of Joigny, is unknown by name and situation to the majority, but for a chateau-town it may well be classed with many better, or at least more popularly, known. On the principal place, or square, rises a warm-coloured winsome fabric which is the very quintessence of mediævalism. It is a more or less battered relic of the tenth century, and is built in a rosy brick, a most unusual method of construction for its time.

The history of the Chateau de Saint Fargeau has been most momentous, its former dwellers therein taking rank with the most noble and influential of the old régime. Jacques Coeur, the celebrated silversmith of Bourges and the intimate of Charles VII, Mademoiselle de Montpensier, and the leader of the Convention – Lepelletier de Saint Fargeau – all lived for a time within its walls, to mention only three who have made romantic history, though widely dissimilar were their stations.

An ornate park with various decorative dependencies surrounds the old chateau on three sides and the ensemble is as undeniably theatrical as one could hope to find in the real. In general the aspect is grandiose and it can readily enough be counted as one of the “show-chateaux” of France, and would be were it better known.

Mlle. de Montpensier – “la Grande Mademoiselle” – was chatelaine of Saint Fargeau in the mid-seventeenth century. Her comings and goings, to and from Paris, were ever written down at length in court chronicles and many were the “incidents” – to give them a mild definition – which happened here in the valley of the Yonne which made good reading. On one occasion when Mademoiselle quitted Paris for Saint Fargeau she came in a modest “ carosse sans armes .” It was for a fact a sort of sub-rosa sortie, but the historian was discreet on this occasion. Travel in the old days had not a little of romanticism about it, but for a lady of quality to travel thus was, at the time, a thing unheard of. This princess of blood royal thus, for once in her life, travelled like a plebeian.