Some Domfront history

The text in this post is my translation/adaptation of a sign posted for visitors at the site of the ruins of the Château de Domfront in Normandy. The sign is hard to read because the text is in all caps, there are no accents on letters, and there are no spaces after punctuation marks. As usual, you can enlarge the image for a better view.

In about the year 1010, at the far western edge of his territories, Guillaume de Bellême built a wooden fort on top of a rocky outcropping on the southern edge of Normandy. Nothing remains of that structure. Made Lord of Domfront in 1092, then king of England (in 1100) and duke of Normandy (in 1106), Henri I Beauclerc, the third son of William the Conqueror, had a fortified stone tower built on this site, along with the St. Symphorien chapel, a priory affilated with the abbey at nearby Lonlay. This was one of the most formidable fortresses in France at that time.

The château served as a residence for the Anglo-Norman kings in the 12th century and was used as such by king Henri II Plantagenêt and queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, as well as by Richard the Lion-Hearted and John Lackland.

In August 1161 at Domfront, Eleanor gave birth to a daughter known as Eleanor of England, who was probably baptised in the chapel at the Domfront château. She would later give birth to the French queen Blanche de Castille (wife of Louis VIII) and the grandmother of French king Louis IX, who was known as Saint-Louis. In August 1169 in Domfront, Henri II Plantagenêt met with emissaries sent there by the Pope to try to work out a reconciliation between him and Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury.

When the French king Philippe-Auguste conquered Normandy in the year 1204, ownership of Domfront and its château was granted to various members of the French royal family over the course of the 13th and subsequent centuries.

During the Hundred Years’ War, the château was occupied by the English from 1336 until 1366, and again from 1414 (after a nine-month siege) until 1450. It was one of the last towns in Normandy that the French crown succeeded in taking back from the English after that long war.

In the late 15th century, the château was “modernized” to accommodate artillery weapons. In 1574, during the French Wars of Religion, the Protestant leader Gabriel de Mongomery was forced to surrender himself and Domfront to the Catholic commander of the Royal army, the Maréchal de Matignon, after a long siege.

Declared obsolete, the château was demolished in 1608 by order of the French king Henri IV and Sully, his powerful minister. The first restoration work on the site dates back to the 1860s when it was turned into a park that replaced vegetable gardens the townspeople had planted on the property. The old fortifications were excavated and restored beginning in the 1980s.