At Cherbourg...a summer trip to Courtomer
Coming into Cherbourg harbor...peace and trade, mayhem and trickery...on a summer's trip to Courtomer
Above: The Fort de l’Oeust guards the entrance to Cherbourg and keeps an armed look-out on the La Manche…the English Channel
Chère amie, cher ami,
“There’s a castle!” young Liam exclaimed, as the behemoth hove into the harbor of Cherbourg. The sea glittered into the mist behind us.
We’d been in Ireland for a week of splendid summer weather. Now, after a 17-hour crossing on the W.B Yeats, we debarked onto familiar French shores. It was 11 o’clock in the morning and we had the rest of the day ahead of us on our way to Courtomer.
Liam’s castle is the Fort de l’Ouest. It stands on the western edge of a long, thin sea-wall that arcs across the entrance to the port of Cherbourg at the end of the Cotentin peninsula of Normandy. The Fort is round, stoutly made of granite, pierced with gunports. It guards the Passage à l’Ouest, the Western Passage used by ships going to and from Ireland. The Passage à l’Est, also guarded by forts, opens to England. Another fort, in the middle of the sea-wall, aims its gunports at the English Channel.
“Ah, les Anglais, nos meilleurs ennemis, si étranges, si étrangers et si proches !” sigh our friends.
“The English, our best enemies, so strange, such strangers and so close!”
The best of enmities has deep roots in Cherbourg.
We parked our car. Under an awning on a cobble-stoned street near the Quai Alexandre III, we drank coffee and breakfasted on a proper French croissant, crisp on the outside, light and buttery within. Nearby, at the Place Napoléon, a large bronze equestrian statue of the Emperor gazes ahead intently. His outstretched hand points in the direction of England.
John Bull, personnification of British pluck, perches on the cliffs of Dover contemplating the jaunty Emperor across the English Channel, La Manche.
Napoléon had the solid rock of the Arsenal blasted to a depth that would hold the massive “modern” battleships of the late 18th century. He extended the sea-wall, making it the largest man-made “rade” in Europe. He and his high-born Empress, Marie-Louise d’Autriche, visited the works in 1811 to the cheers of the assembled crowd.
The French Empire was then at its greatest expanse, encompassing all of Europe except the Balkans. An heir to the throne had just been born.
“Cherbourg,” pronounced the port’s mayor as he addressed his illustrious visitors, “brims with joy!”
The French navy, which had been annihilated by the English at the Battle of Trafalgar, will be reborn! Maritime commerce will prosper, the freedom of the seas prevail!
"And," the mayor added triumphantly, “the cabinet de Londres will have something to think about!
“Britain’s warships have heard our hymns of happiness at the birth of your heir and they will hear our lusty chants as we build our new ships; the innocent lighthouse, signaling to our ships, will soon become a dreaded harbinger, the gentle glow that precedes the lightning bolt!”
But just as Napoleon’s Armée d’Angleterre never carried out its planned invasion of England, Cherbourg never sent forth a flotilla against les Anglais.
Napoleon became distracted by troubles to the East. The 22-year-old Empress came alone to inaugurate the “avant-port” in 1813.
The "avant-port," or first basin, was inaugurated in 1813 by Napoleon's young Empress. Napoleon had ordered the basin to be deepened in order to hold the "new" man-o'-war ships. These floating fortresses first developed by the British Navy had been used at the Battle of Trafalgar years earlier. Napoleon intended to use Cherbourg to rebuilt the French Navy. Collection BNF
“A pistol pointed at the heart of England” was how William Pitt the Younger, prime minister during the Napoleonic years, described French ambitions across the Channel.
But it was not aways thus.
The history of the town is the story of human relations evolving over the centuries, reacting to geographical constraints, new technologies, the desire for domination, and political intrigue. It captures a slice of the Courtomer story, too. The founding patriarch of the Chateau’s Saint-Simon family was a landed seigneur in the Cotentin Peninsula.
Settled as Coriallo by Celtic fishermen, the port was along the ancient trade route that linked the Mediterranean with the tin-mines of England and the gold of Ireland. Collars of Irish gold were discovered at the “montagne de Roule,” a fortified site overlooking the harbor. The same type of early Roman amphoras excavated in Cherbourg also show up in archaeological digs in England. Dorsetware, a black, burnished pottery dating from the Roman occupation of England, has been unearthed in Cherbourg, too.
Local “antiquaires,” amateur scholars, of the 19th century unearthed and assembled this statuette -- in the form of a curvaceous goddess -- and other Gallo-Roman artefacts from Cherbourg in a “cabinet de curiosités” that became part of the Musée Emmanuel Liais in the town.
But the happy exchanges of tin, gold and pottery vanished with the Danish and Saxon invasions of the 5th century. In 410 A.D., the Roman Empire retreated from England. They threw up fortifications facing the Littus Saxonicum, the “Saxon coast” on the English Channel.
Scattered medals and 4th-century coins, broken statues and pottery shards found flung about the remains of Gallo-Roman villas and a temple in Cherbourg suggest that the raiders crossed the La Manche nevertheless.
Then, starting in the 840s, Vikings used the English coast as a stepping stone for lucrative raids into Francia. Charlemagne, the great French emperor who briefly unified France and Germany, and who had led devastating expeditions against the raiders from the North, was dead. The Vikings sailed up the rivers to rob and wreck abbeys and farms. By 911, they had taken Paris itself hostage. Charlemagne’s descendant, the pragmatic Charles le Simple, bought them off. Rollon, leader of the Viking invaders, became duke of Normandy.
The kingdom of Neustria in 742, encompassing most of today's Normandy, and showing Saxon settlement on the Cotentin Peninsula.
But as the ecclesiastics who despairingly chronicled the devastation might have said, “Qui sème le vent, récolte la tempête!”
“For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind”...
What goes around, comes around.
In 1066, William the Conqueror cast off from the French coast – at Dives-sur-Mer, about 90 miles from Cherbourg -- to conquer England. The count of Cherbourg and his two sons sailed with him.
For almost 200 years thereafter, Cherbourg was the territory of the Anglo-Norman kings of England, also dukes of Normandy. Finally, Philippe II Auguste, determined to extend royal control over French lands, laid hold of the Duchy in 1202. Cherbourg fell in 1203, the last English possession in Normandy.
Throughout the next 200 years, the English yearned for Cherbourg. A secure foothold in France would have aided the vital English wool trade with the Continent. And it would have given them a strong position from which to make good their dynastic claim to Normandy. But the thick walls of the Cherbourg’s château resisted medieval siege machines. Still, the English burned the town a few times.
When war finally broke out in 1337 between the French and English kings, the Cherbourgeois took fearsome revenge on Southampton, directly across the Channel. The incident is still taught in English schools.
[ils] vinrent un dimence au matin ou havene de Hantonne, entrues que les gens estoient à messe. Et entrèrent li dit Normant et Genevois en le ville et le prisent et le pillièrent et robèrent tout entirement, et y tuèrent moult de gens, et violèrent pluiseurs dames et pucelles, dont ce fu damages ; et chargièrent leurs naves et leurs vaissiaus dou grant pillage..., wrote the Flemish poet and chronicler, Jean Froissart.
“[The French ships] came on a Sunday morning to the harbor of Southampton, while the townspeople were at mass. And they entered in the town, those Normans and the Genoese sailors took it, and pillaged it, and robbed it entirely, and killed a multitude of people, and raped many ladies and maidens, which," the poet adds ruefully, "was very bad."
The next tide floated the French ships out of Southampton.
Trickery was more effective against tenacious Cherbourg than laying siege. Charles le Mauvais – Charles the Bad – had been given the town of Cherbourg by his brother Jean le Bon, John the Good. Hoping the English would help him take the French Crown, or at least Normandy, from his brother, Charles the Bad invited them to defend him in Cherbourg. Instead, they took possession. Charles fled.
War also prompts attempts at peace.
As part of the truce of Leulinghem a couple of years later, Jean le Bon’s 6-year-old granddaughter became the wife of the next English king, Richard II. Richard offered Cherbourg as a wedding present. Although the marriage was never consummated, Cherbourg remained French until the Battle of Agincourt in 1415.
Isabelle de Valois, just 6 years old, meets her bridegroom Richard II. Standing by her side is her father, Charles VI of France. The marriage, never consummated, was an effort by the two kings to resolve the problem of Normandy. Cherbourg was a wedding present. Illumination from the Chronicles of Jean Froissart. British Library.
This disaster led to the overthrow of Normandy. English arrows at Agincourt destroyed the French cavalry. The English massacred the French captives. Then, the English forces swept up the major ports and towns of Normandy. Around Chateau de Courtomer, Argentan and Alençon fell in 1417. The places-fortes, the strongholds, of the Cotentin Peninsula were captured the following year. Cherbourg alone held out. Its fortress was still impregnable.
The “Capitulation de Cherbourg” carefully lays out the terms of surrender. If the “roy nostre souverain seigneur” did not drive off the besiegers by “le dit jour de St.-Michel,” September 29, 1418, Cherbourg and its garrison would lay down their arms and open the gates. Safe passage out of the fort was granted.
Henry V took Cherbourg.
Although the kings of England and France were at war, nationality was an evolving concept in those far-off days. The defenders of Cherbourg included “Engloiz, Yroiz, Galloiz” – English, Irish, and Welsh as well as native-born Normans.
Charles VII “le victorieux” reconquered Normandy with a professional army in the 1440s. The Guerre de Cent Ans drew to a close. But Cherbourg resisted all attempts to take it by force. Finally, Jacques Coeur, Grand Argentier de France and financier of the war, negotiated the rendition in exchange for 2 000 ecus and the captured son of the English commandant of the garrison. The port and its fortress were considered so vital to French interests that the king proclaimed an annual Commémoration on the date of August 12, 1450.
The unsuccessful siege of Cherbourg by Charles VII. The French king finally paid the garrison to surrender. Illumination from the Chronicles of Jean Froissart. British Library.
But as Charles’ heir, Louis XI “le Prudent,” realized, Cherbourg was “continuellement en peril et dangier de nos ennemis anciens: les Anglois.”
The old enemy across the Channel would never cease desiring Cherbourg and its access to the rich lands of Normandy. In 1464, Louis gave Cherbourg the “franchise,” a charter that declared its habitants perpetually “francs, quittes et exempts” of all taxes. In return, the Cherbourgeois must be armed and continually on the watch for the “Anglois.”
“Ah! Les Anglais!” exclaimed old Monsieur Oudin, when I showed him this Letter. He had been a douanier, a customs officer in the Pas de Calais. In those glory days, he used to intercept English workmen attempting to illegally enter France. He inspected car trunks and once found a cache of jewellery cunningly stowed under the lining.
“Mais les Anglais ne sont pas les seuls!”
“But the English aren’t the only ones,” he added, narrowing his eyes and glowering slightly.
Some of these troublemakers in days of yore came from the doughty Norman aristocracy itself...perhaps like the seigneurs at Chateau de Courtomer.
To be continued...
A bientôt, au Chateau!
Elisabeth
www.chateaudecourtomer.com