Castle of Caen

Duke William of Normandy — soon to conquer England in 1066 — raised his citadel at Caen from about 1058–1060, on a limestone spur above the lower Orne valley, isolating it with a ditch. Marked by the rebellion of the Cotentin barons in his youth, he wanted a sure strongpoint in Lower Normandy, and Caen, equidistant from Rouen and the Cotentin, became a second capital of the duchy, the castle rising alongside his two great abbey foundations, the Abbaye aux Hommes and the Abbaye aux Dames.

From the start it seems to have been more princely residence than fortress: its heart was a palace of private apartments, a chapel and a great ceremonial hall, the aula. The rocky escarpment was recut to make it steeper, and by the end of William's reign the palisade thought to have ringed the plateau had been replaced by a stone wall. Yet the five-hectare enceinte was militarily awkward — sited at mid-slope, overlooked by the hills to the north, and guarded there by nothing more than a single gate-tower.

Robert Curthose left the site untouched, but his brother Henry I Beauclerc, who supplanted him in the duchy in 1106, transformed it. He heightened the rampart, studded its 850-metre circuit with eleven square towers and two round ones, and around 1120–1123 built a donjon-palace near the gate-tower — a square keep wrapped in a wall more than 3.5 metres thick and its own ditch, a castle within the castle. The chronicler Robert de Torigni recorded that Henry 'made a very high keep in the castle of Caen'. Henry also erected a new Aula Magna, twice the size of the old — the hall known today as the Exchequer of Normandy.

Henry II received Louis VII of France in the new hall in 1158 and 1173, and at Christmas 1182 he gathered his sons — the future kings Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland — and more than a thousand knights for a celebration staged to display the superiority of his court to his rival Philip Augustus. John used the castle as a prison for the partisans of his nephew Arthur of Brittany, and sheltered there with his wife Isabelle after Philip Augustus declared war on him.

In 1204 town and castle submitted to Philip Augustus three days before the French king, fresh from taking Falaise, reached Caen. He then modernised the fortress: the square keep was enclosed in a chemise flanked at each corner by a powerful round tower — on the model of his Louvre — and ringed by a deep ditch. The vulnerable northern approach was sealed off, a new fortified east gate, the porte des Champs, was built, and the round towers Mathilde and Puchot rose at the junctions with the town walls. Royal visits grew rare — Louis X promulgated the Charte aux Normands there in 1315, and Henry IV, in 1603, is held to be the last king to stay — but the Exchequer of Normandy met in the castle once a year until it settled at Rouen in 1302.

Edward III's chevauchée of 1346 took town and castle quickly, the defences having grown weak and outdated. Repairs followed — the southern postern became a fortified gate, the porte Saint-Pierre, probably in this period. In 1417 Henry V took the town, and the castle, where the sire de Montenay had taken refuge, surrendered on 20 September after a four-day siege. The English occupiers later built the barbican of the porte Saint-Pierre to guard against attack from the town itself. After the French reconquest of 1450 the castle lost its strategic weight: the bailli moved into the town, the keep went unmaintained, and the prisons closed.

The castle stayed a target for those contesting royal authority: from 1 March 1563, in the first War of Religion, the Protestant troops of Admiral de Coligny bombarded it from the cemetery of Saint-Julien; a breach opened on the third day and the encircled Catholics surrendered, giving Caen and the whole province to the Protestants until a force of 2,000 men under François du Plessis de Richelieu retook it on 14 April. In July 1620, during Louis XIII's quarrel with Marie de Médicis, a captain loyal to the duc de Longueville turned the castle's cannon on the town; the king besieged it and it yielded after eight days.

The keep was pulled down in 1793 by order of the National Convention. Used as a barracks in the Second World War, the castle was bombed in 1944 and seriously damaged. From 1946 the Caen archaeologist Michel de Boüard opened excavations to recover its medieval traces, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts opened within the walls in 1971. The castle has been a classified monument historique since 1997.