Château d'Harcourt

Bernard the Dane received the lordship of Harcourt among the estates Rollo distributed to his followers from 912. Bernard's kinship with the later Harcourts remains uncertain; the first lords confirmed by record are Turketil and his son Ansquetil, around the year 1000, and the family took the name Harcourt a century after Bernard, with Errand.

The earliest castle here is put in the 11th century and is said to have been the earth-and-timber work of Errand d'Harcourt, a companion of the Conqueror. The stone castle that replaced it was built by Robert II d'Harcourt, who went on crusade with Richard the Lionheart: a charter of Bec-Hellouin mentions it in 1173–1174, and one from Notre-Dame-de-Barbery dates it after 1175. It was a large square keep on a motte isolated by a wide ditch, with a bailey and a chapel, one of the ducal fortresses along the Risle.

In the 13th century the keep was absorbed into a polygonal castle with round towers, the bailey ringed by a wall flanked with towers pierced by archères — work Philippian in style, probably ordered by Jean Ier d'Harcourt. Five round towers of that circuit survive, and a deep dry ditch girdled the whole. In 1272 Jean II d'Harcourt, who was named Marshal of France, received King Philip III here. In 1338 Philip VI raised the lordship of Harcourt, then held by Jean IV, into a county.

John II of France had Jean V d'Harcourt executed at Rouen on 5 April 1356, after arresting him at the banquet there. Jean V was mixed up in the plots of Charles II of Navarre and had been present at the killing of the constable Charles de La Cerda. His widow and their eight children were driven out and all their goods seized. His uncle Geoffroy d'Harcourt revolted and allied himself once more with Edward III, to whom he left Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte at his death in November 1356.

Jean VI had the county and his father's confiscated lands restored to him around 1358 by the dauphin, the future Charles V. He had spent four years in London as a hostage for the release of John II, taken prisoner at Poitiers; from 1364, with a large royal subsidy, he strengthened the castle, above all with an entrance châtelet. His successor Jean VII kept twelve knights, a chapel master, a choir and musicians at Harcourt, until he was taken prisoner at Agincourt on 25 October 1415.

The castle was taken by the English in March 1418 during Henry V's invasion of Normandy, and the Harcourt estates were granted to Henry's brother Thomas, Duke of Clarence, then to his uncle Thomas Beaufort. At the end of August 1449 a siege was laid before Harcourt, defended by 140 English soldiers; the Vigiles de Charles VII record that it lasted near eight days, and that the engines fired so hard against battlements and towers that they pierced the walls clean through. Not until 15 September 1449 were the defenders expelled, by the counts of Dunois, Eu and Saint-Pol, with artillery.

As the war closed the domain passed to the Rieux family, into which Jean VII's daughter Jeanne had married; from the second half of the 16th century Harcourt belonged to the house of Lorraine-Guise. Between 1589 and 1591 League troops entrenched in the castle under the count of Harcourt, Charles de Lorraine, cousin of Henri de Guise, came under assault from the royal army of Henri III under the duke of Montpensier and then from that of Henri IV; each side took the place twice, and artillery left it badly damaged. Charles returned to favour and married Catherine-Henriette de Bourbon, legitimated daughter of Henri IV.

In the 17th century the fortress lost all military interest. In 1695 Marie-Françoise de Brancas, wife of the count of Harcourt, Alphonse de Lorraine, set about making it habitable: three sides of the polygonal castle were pulled down for a pleasure garden and to light her apartments, and large rectangular bays were cut. In the 18th century its lords abandoned the castle.

Put up for sale after the Revolution, Harcourt was bought in 1802 by Louis-Gervais Delamarre, who planted one of the oldest arboretums in France around it, of rare species including two cedars of Lebanon. At his death in 1827 he left the estate to the Royal Academy of Agriculture, which later gave castle and arboretum to the Eure department; the departmental council has been the owner since 1 January 2000. The castle was classified a historic monument on the list of 1862, and was restored between 1988 and 1990 by volunteers of the Chantiers Histoire et Architecture Médiévales.