Château d'Ivry-la-Bataille

The castle occupies a promontory north of Dreux, on the edge of a plateau thrust out above the valley of the Eure and the town at its foot, a position that gave visual control of the surrounding country and command of the bridge over the Eure. Three parallel ditches, with a fourth cut deep into the rock on the western flank, isolated it from the rest of the plateau, and a flanked enceinte later doubled that defence. Researchers have thought the site occupied as early as antiquity, in connection with the ancient road from Évreux to Paris, though archaeology has not yet confirmed it. Late in the tenth century Richard I of Normandy, judging the strategic value of this frontier place, entrusted it to his uterine brother Raoul d'Ivry. The commune, formerly Ivry-la-Chaussée and appearing as Ibriacum in eleventh-century documents, is now Ivry-la-Bataille, a name connected with the famous battle of Ivry fought on 14 March 1590 between the future Henry IV and the troops of the Catholic League, generations after the fortress had been pulled down.

The earliest masonry here was an aula, a Carolingian princely hall of some 32 by 25 metres with walls three metres thick, begun around 960. At the end of the tenth century further building turned the hall into a buttressed residential keep of apparently two storeys, taking in a turret and a chapel dedicated to Saint Ursin. The donjon itself is dated to around the year 1000, the product of two building campaigns and apparently complete by 1040. Orderic Vitalis, writing in the twelfth century, credits it to an architect named Lanfred, also given as Lansfred or Lanfrai, who had built the castle of Pithiviers; the commission is put to Count Raoul in some tellings and to his wife Aubrée in others, and Orderic describes what rose here as a turris famosa, ingens et munitissima, a famous tower, huge and very strongly fortified. Aubrée, he adds, is said to have had the architect beheaded to stop him building the like for another lord.

With the towers of Rouen and Avranches, the keep raised around the year 1000 was among the first stone fortifications to appear in Normandy, and among the earliest examples of the stone donjon that became a common feature of later Norman castles in various parts of Europe. It has marked similarities with keeps built afterwards, Avranches in Normandy and, in England, Colchester Castle and the White Tower at the Tower of London, the three linked by the incorporation of an apse to house a chapel, a feature not repeated at other keeps. Ivry has been suggested as the model for the other two, though all three may equally have followed a prototype now lost, one candidate being the ducal castle of Rouen, destroyed in the thirteenth century and of unknown form.

Around 1029 Hugues d'Ivry, bishop of Bayeux, who had succeeded his father Raoul as count of Ivry on the latter's death about 1015, rose against Robert I the Magnificent and armed the castle with a French garrison. The duke took it back and put a ducal garrison into it, and Hugues went into exile for a time before returning to favour. In 1040 Albérède, natural daughter of Hugues, began a fresh campaign of works, the second of the two building programmes; recorded by William of Jumièges, she is a documented figure, as against the half-legendary Aubrée of Orderic's story.

During the eleventh century the ground floor of the original building was blinded by a considerable mass of infill, after which Ivry presented a rectangular plan with the apse of the chapel in its north-eastern angle. Works on that scale are unlikely to have been undertaken without the duke's approval, and they have been attributed to William the Conqueror, given the clear resemblance between the tower of Ivry and the tower of London of about 1070, the first perhaps serving as the model for the second.

Around 1050 William the Bastard brought the castle back into ducal hands and the title of count of Ivry disappeared. Orderic has William committing its keeping to Roger de Beaumont. Guillaume Louvel, son of Asselin, received the castle after the death of his brother Goel; he had married a sister of Galéran IV de Meulan, himself son of Robert I de Meulan and grandson of Roger de Beaumont. About 1089 Robert Curthose made it over to Guillaume de Breteuil, a great-grandson of Raoul, handing Roger de Beaumont Brionne in exchange and provoking his fury.

The fortress guarded the south-eastern frontier of the duchy of Normandy, a strategic stake between the crowns of France and England, on the confines of Normandy and the Île-de-France facing the Pays Chartrain. This lock on the Eure valley belonged to the same line of defence as the castles of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte and Gisors. In 1119 Louis VI the Fat burned it. In 1177 the tower was put into the hands of Henry II Plantagenet.

In 1194 Philip Augustus seized the fortress during a campaign in the region. He razed the western half of the tower and heightened the part he kept, turning it into a donjon of a kind that lost its residential function, which passed to the bailey lying further south. By the treaty of Issoudun in 1195 the castle of Ivry was attached to the royal domain.

The castle was rebuilt several times up to the fifteenth century, gaining an outer wall with round towers, a châtelet before the main approach and, probably in the fourteenth century, a heavy tower strengthening the north-eastern angle. During the Hundred Years' War, in May 1419, the fortress, commanded by Pierre Dorgessin, capitulated to the English after a siege of forty days.

The French retook it in the summer of 1423 under Géraud de la Pallière, a Gascon gentleman in the service of Charles VII, and held it for a year, using it as a base from which to raid and to trouble Évreux. Judging its recovery a priority, the English laid siege again in June 1424 with the duke of Bedford at their head. The place capitulated on 5 July and was handed over to them on 15 August. Unable to keep a garrison there, they set about destroying the upper parts, preferring to pull the fortress down rather than see it fall back to the French.

In 1449 the constable Jean de Dunois made himself master of the town of Ivry for good. An aveu of 1456 sets down the castle as struck down, demolished and put to total destruction by the occasion of the war. Stripped of any strategic interest, it appears thereafter only in valuations of the domain. Diane de Poitiers bought the barony of Ivry in 1547. Philibert de l'Orme repaired the castle in 1553. In 1567 the castle, said then to have been demolished by the English in the reign of King Charles VII, was assessed along with the warren surrounding it, and in 1740 an expert named Mouchet found it reduced to nothing, consisting only of some remains of building debris that could not be used.

Levelled and abandoned, the remains served as a stone quarry, were filled up with earth and slipped out of memory; by about 1960 only a wooded hill with a few fragments of standing wall marked where the fortress had been. In 1968 Robert Baudet, a cabinetmaker in Ivry, began clearing the substructures with an archaeology club he had just founded, and after twenty years of work the original ground levels reappeared and the ruins came back out of the earth. Of the square keep planted at the end of the eleventh century facing the royal domain, only the first level survives.

The visible parts, together with the ground of the parcels on which they stand and which may hold further remains, were classified as a historical monument by order of 8 February 1990. The castellologist Jean Mesqui, the English archaeologist Edward Impey and the historian of Normandy Lucien Musset recognised the interest of the work and published the first analyses of the remains, concentrating on the oldest parts, those of the year 1000; further excavations between 2007 and 2010, with a re-examination of the ruins, threw more light on the castle's history. The site belongs to the commune and is freely accessible all year round.