Château de Tancarville

The castle occupies a triangular spur of chalk cliff above the Seine, a kilometre south-east of the church of Saint-Michel at Tancarville, and it guarded the entrance to the river. The first lord, Tancrède, gave the estate nothing but his name; it was his grandson Raoul de Tancarville, tutor and then chamberlain to Duke William the Bastard, who after founding the abbey of Saint-Georges de Boscherville in 1050 obtained the duke's permission to build here. Raoul had the walls and the old tower raised.

The work was completed in the early twelfth century with the square tower on the south-west, probably the Romanesque keep: twenty metres high, four storeys served by a stair turret, its walls 1.65 metres thick. The chapel in front of the Vieille Tour was built in 1131.

In 1316 Jeanne de Tancarville, the sole heiress, married Jean II de Melun, and their son became the second count of Tancarville. In 1364 the county of Tancarville was separated from that of Longueville. The knights' hall dates from 1410, and in 1417 Countess Marguerite de Tancarville married Jacques d'Harcourt.

In 1418, during Henry V's conquest of Normandy, the title of Count of Tancarville — Earl of Tankerville — was granted to John Grey, while within the kingdom of France it continued to be borne by the House of Harcourt, who recovered the castle after the English withdrawal. The Harcourts strengthened the place in the fifteenth century and built a keep on an almond plan outside the walls to the north-west, reached by a long ramp. The English title is still extant in the Peerage of Great Britain.

A reception hall was built in 1468, and in 1488 the castle passed by inheritance to François I d'Orléans-Longueville, son of the great Dunois. In 1505 Louis XII raised the county of Longueville to a duchy and Tancarville became no more than an annexed county; in 1590 Jean III d'Aché held the post of captain here. It passed from the Orléans-Longueville to the Montmorency and then to the La Tour d'Auvergne.

It was Louis de La Tour d'Auvergne (1679–1753), count of Évreux and of Tancarville, who in 1709 built the Château Neuf, a large classical block leaning against the medieval fabric and masking part of the southern rampart. On 30 June 1718 the financier John Law bought the castle from Évreux, though he does not appear ever to have lived in it.

After the Revolution of 1789 the castle was looted and partly burnt. It was classified as a monument historique on the list of 1862 by the French Ministry of Culture.

For twenty-nine years, from 1910 to 1939, the castle was rented by Fernand Prat and his wife, born Jehanne Leblanc, sister of Maurice Leblanc. They received a long list of writers and artists there — Maurice Maeterlinck and his companion Georgette Leblanc, Colette, Margaret Caroline Anderson, James Joyce, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Pierre Lecomte de Noüy and Louis Fabulet. Maurice Leblanc wrote Le Bouchon de cristal in the fifteenth-century Eagle Tower. In the 1960s the castle served as a summer camp for local children.

The castle is privately owned. A property company has been offering to fit luxury apartments into it since 2001, and press accounts describe a group of about ten footballers buying the place in 2013, intending to restore it and create nineteen dwellings under the heritage tax provisions of the Malraux law of 1962. By 2019 only a length of roof had been repaired, and the commune issued an order closing the site to the public on grounds of danger.