Tour d’Arles: A Medieval Tower House in Caussade, France
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern
- Civilizations
- County of Toulouse, French
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Elite Residence
On this page11 sections
History
The Tour d’Arles, also called the Tour d’Arlet, is a medieval brick tower house in Caussade, France, built in the Gothic period during the third quarter of the thirteenth century, approximately between 1260 and 1270. It was probably erected outside and against Caussade’s first enceinte, a defensive town enclosure surrounding the early settlement near Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption church and the vicomtal castle. The tower belonged to a group of knightly residences built against this enclosure.
Formation of the medieval town
A charter of 1248 granted customs to the inhabitants of Caussade and probably corresponds to the formation of the town. The first enclosure itself dates from the twelfth century. Sections of its walls were exposed during demolitions in the Placette and Basse streets in the 2000s, helping to clarify the urban setting in which the Tour d’Arles was built.
The tower is attributed to the Lalo family. An inventory made after the death of Gausbert de Lalo in 1295 lists a house near the Estivenque gate, adjoining a public street and the town ditch. This property appears to correspond to the Tour d’Arles. By the fifteenth century, much of the Lalo family’s property had passed to the Castanède family. The Castanèdes apparently leased the tower to a member of the Arles family, who appears in Caussade’s 1535 property register. The name Tour d’Arles or Tour d’Arlet, known since the seventeenth century, is thought to derive from this family.
Religious conflict and changing ownership
On 8 September 1562, the Calvinist captain Symphorien de Durfort, lord of Duras, captured and pillaged Caussade during the French Wars of Religion. Calvinists were adherents of the Reformed branch of Protestant Christianity associated with John Calvin. The town’s clergy were thrown from the church bell tower, while the church and the old castle, restored by Jean V d’Armagnac, were burned. The church was demolished in 1570 so that the town enclosure could be repaired, although its bell tower was retained as a watchtower.
Caussade remained under Reformed control after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, the 1572 killings of Protestants and Catholics in the context of the French religious wars. Catholics consequently gathered in the Tour d’Arles to celebrate Mass. Notre-Dame church was rebuilt between 1633 and 1637.
In 1616, Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully, purchased the barony of Caussade, and the tower became his property. His son, François de Béthune, Count of Orval, later sold it to Jacques Thuet, a former consul of Caussade. Thuet’s direct descendants, the Valmary family, continued to own the building.
Investigation and restoration
An inventory from 1640 recorded five other houses called towers in the Estivenque quarter. Most later disappeared. The Arbot gate tower and the Taverne house survived within the second enclosure, which existed by the sixteenth century. The Tour d’Arles itself was divided into five levels before restoration, but archaeological investigation found the edge beams embedded in the masonry and showed that its original arrangement consisted of a ground floor and two habitable floors.
At the request of the Caussade municipality, which owned the tower, the Hadès consultancy undertook a historical and archaeological study in 1995 to prepare a restoration project by Régis Martin, an architect of historic monuments. Work carried out between 1997 and 1999 restored the interior volumes and openings. The tower was classified as a historic monument on 23 November 1989 under France’s system of legal heritage conservation.
Remains
Form and construction
The Tour d’Arles is a sub-rectangular brick house-tower standing on the west side of Notre-Dame Square, opposite Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption church in Caussade’s historic center. Its base measures approximately 8 by 11 meters. The east and south façades face the streets and were given an intentionally ostentatious appearance, including fine paired windows, each divided into two openings by a central support.
The walls taper from approximately 85 to 90 centimeters thick at the base to 65 to 70 centimeters at the level below the top floor. At the top, they narrow abruptly to about 37 centimeters, indicating that this level was added later. The upper part of the building was raised to attic level at a date between the second half of the seventeenth century and the nineteenth century.
Floors, entrances, and alterations
The ground floor originally had two entrances, one in each street-facing façade. It was poorly lit and probably served as a storage area. The two habitable floors above were reached by straight, single-flight staircases. During the second quarter of the fifteenth century, a floor was inserted into the first upper level. This work lowered the floor and reduced and lowered the eastern doorway.
In the sixteenth century, another habitable floor was created with a new floor structure and three new windows. A masonry staircase was later built against the west façade at an uncertain date, with doors opened in that wall to give access to it. The house was substantially reorganized in the eighteenth century through alterations to its façades. Restoration in the late twentieth century recovered the interior volumes and openings identified by the archaeological study.
Painted interiors
First-floor decoration
The two original habitable floors carried painted decoration. On the first floor, the north and west walls were plastered and painted with a red faux-ashlar pattern on a white ground. This design imitates regularly cut stone blocks through painted joint lines, with vertical joints shown by double lines and horizontal joints by single lines. Comparable decoration from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries is known at Cahors, Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val, and Cordes.
Second-floor decoration
On the second floor, the north, east, and south walls were decorated up to the tops of the windows with double-outlined circles containing small clustered motifs. On the south and east walls, these designs were replaced by geometric flowers. A folded-ribbon frieze crowned the decoration. Probing began in 1988, followed by a further study and cleaning test in 2004. Comprehensive cleaning in 2009 made the decoration on all four walls of the principal room clearer.
Scenes on the west wall
The east and west walls also had an additional painted zone. Only the west gable wall preserves scenes that can be partly identified. Its lower zone contains an arcade extending across the wall, with about ten arches and one human figure in each. The two southern arches remain legible: one shows a kneeling figure with outstretched hands facing a female figure holding a flower.
Above the arcade is a mounted combat scene. The rider on the right wears a plumed helmet, and his lance strikes an opponent who recoils violently. The figures stand on opposite sides of a tree within a frame bounded by architectural elements. Firmin Galabert interpreted the scene as a Moorish rider being unhorsed by a Frankish knight and linked it to Peyre de Lalo’s alleged participation in the Eighth Crusade. Virginie Czerniak rejected that interpretation because the two figures are not represented differently, proposing instead that the scene expresses the owner’s aristocratic social status. Two large birds occupy the northern part of the west wall, but their meaning remains unidentified.
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