Mont-l’Évêque Castle: A Historic Episcopal Residence in France
Site at a Glance
- Rating
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- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Modern
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- French
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Castle
On this page18 sections
History
Mont-l’Évêque Castle is a historic château in France that developed as a medieval country residence of the bishops of Senlis and later received an elaborate nineteenth-century Troubadour-style revival decoration. Its history reaches back to the early thirteenth century, when Guérin, bishop of Senlis and keeper of the royal seals, established an episcopal residence at the former royal domain of Mons.
From Mons to Mont-l’Évêque
A royal fortress may have stood at Mons, the earlier name of Mont-l’Évêque, but it was apparently already in ruins by the end of the twelfth century. Its location has not been identified. Bishop Henri of Senlis possessed a residence there in 1181, although the position of that building is also unknown.
In 1214, Philip Augustus, the common English name of Philip II, king of France from 1180 to 1223, granted the lordship of Mons to Guérin. The grant recognized Guérin’s part in the Battle of Bouvines, a major French victory that year. The former royal hunting domain then took the name Mont-l’Évêque, meaning the bishop’s mount.
Guérin gave part of the land for the foundation of the Abbey of Victory. Tradition associates the abbey with the place where messengers announced the French victories at Bouvines and Roche-aux-Moines, another battle won in 1214. He also began Saint-Germain Church in the village and established a country residence farther south, probably a fortified dwelling represented by surviving elements of the present château.
The bishops’ residence
The fortified residence became the summer home of the bishops of Senlis, the senior bishops of the medieval diocese centered on Senlis. Over the following centuries they enlarged and embellished the buildings, added dependencies, and reshaped the surrounding land. Hydraulic works supported fish farming, mills, and kitchen gardens, making the estate both a residence and a managed agricultural domain.
The château suffered serious damage during the Hundred Years’ War, the prolonged conflict between the English and French crowns and their allies from the fourteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Much of the residence was reconstructed in the sixteenth century. Armand de Roquelaure was the last bishop of Senlis to live there. After the French Revolution, the estate became national property for several years.
The Pontalba transformation
Joseph-Xavier Delfau de Pontalba bought the property in 1807, and in 1810 it became a majorat, an estate attached to a baronial title. Between 1810 and 1834, he enlarged the park slightly, demolished some dependencies, extended the château northward, and added rich neo-Gothic decoration in the Troubadour style. This nineteenth-century revival used romanticized medieval and Renaissance forms. The south-west tower also belongs to this period.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, Louis-Sulpice Varé and possibly other designers created the English-style park. In the 1880s and 1890s, Clément Parent and Louis Parent carried out the last major alterations. They roofed the western towers, gave the chimneys their present appearance, remodeled the southern terrace, and undertook interior work. By the end of the 1890s, the château had running water on every floor, electricity generated by the rivers, central heating, a service lift, and a telephone.
War, occupation, and restoration
During the First World War, the estate supplied horses for the front and escaped physical damage despite extensive destruction in the surrounding region, nearby bombardments, and some looting. On 1 September 1914, English officers, including Edmund Allenby, occupied the château with about 5,000 men. German troops followed the next day, including General von Trossel, approximately 40 officers, and 7,000 men.
In 1939, parts of the park were incorporated into the Chauvineau Line, a defensive system built in the Oise area to supplement the Maginot Line. Several of its installations remain visible. The château also escaped damage during the Second World War. Luftwaffe officers requisitioned it during the Occupation and used the cellars as shelters during Allied bombing directed mainly toward the area around Creil and its V-1 bases, German pilotless flying-bomb installations. As Allied forces advanced, German troops fled and the estate received and housed Allied personnel.
After Alfred de Pontalba died in 1972, the château stood abandoned for almost twenty years. The period brought extensive deterioration and looting. In the 1990s, Charles-Edouard de Pontalba began major restoration, renewing much of the roofing, repairing the upper floors, and modernizing the property. The family returned to live there in 2000 and continues to occupy it. Mont-l’Évêque Castle is a private residence owned by the Delfau de Pontalba family and was entered on the French register of historic monuments in 1989.
Remains
Mont-l’Évêque Castle combines a principal body with four cylindrical towers, a terrace, a chapel, service and administrative buildings, and a park shaped by ponds, channels, marshes, and woodland. A ditch surrounds the complex and is crossed by a bridge. The present appearance is chiefly nineteenth-century Troubadour architecture, although medieval, Renaissance, and later elements survive throughout the estate.
The château
The four towers have slate-covered pepper-pot roofs with discreet geometric patterns and weather vanes. The façades carry varied sculpture, while each window surround has a different design. Some windows are false, having been added to improve the symmetry of the elevations. The building was intended to be viewed mainly from the west, south, and east. At the base of the south-east tower, two loopholes and a small triangular buttress preserve evidence of the residence’s earlier military character.
The west façade faces the terrace and contains a statue of a crusader. Its lance was lost or damaged during the twentieth century. A clock on the same façade has a movement dated 1794. The entrance steps lead to the terrace, where the chapel, a dependency, and a lime tree about two centuries old stand beside a stone butchering table transferred there during the restoration work of the 1990s.
The ground floor lies at pond level and occupies the former kitchens, retaining medieval architectural elements. At terrace level, the first floor contains several relatively well-preserved rooms. Service staircases connect the principal parts of the building with the kitchens, service areas, and intermediate floors once occupied by staff. A stone ceremonial staircase inspired by Renaissance architecture was built at the end of the nineteenth century.
Great dining room
Clément Parent created the great dining room in the 1890s in the Henri II style, a revival of sixteenth-century French Renaissance motifs. Its monumental fireplace bears a Saint Hubert bas-relief copied from the lintel of the chapel at Château d’Amboise. Saint Hubert is traditionally associated with hunting and the protection of hunters. The room retains the arrangement produced during its creation.
Library
A library occupies one of the towers. Its early neo-Gothic decoration consists mainly of painted plaster and is listed for its decorative interest. The room contains mainly nineteenth-century books.
Chapel and terrace buildings
Saint Mary Magdalene Chapel
Guérin built a chapel dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene at the beginning of the thirteenth century. The original building may correspond to a structure shown on an 1811 cadastral plan and in an engraving by Tavernier. That structure was demolished and rebuilt in the nineteenth century as the present chapel.
The chapel was designed to receive stones from the altar of the church of the Great Carmelites of Metz, members of the Carmelite religious order. Alexandre Lenoir salvaged the stones in 1806, placing them in fourteen crates before the church was destroyed in 1818. They were intended first for his Museum of French Monuments, then moved to Malmaison at Joséphine de Beauharnais’s request. The crates remained unopened in the cellars there.
After Malmaison was sold in 1828, Jonas-Philip Hagerman proposed using the stones as gravel for park paths. His architect, Lusson, opposed the plan and exchanged the fourteen crates in 1840 for an equivalent quantity of rubble stone. The pieces were partly restored and passed to Victor Lenoir. Their origin was later forgotten, and they were mistakenly described as fragments of Charlemagne’s tomb.
Victor Lenoir sold the stones in two lots in 1850. One went to Château de Gueulzin near Douai for a gallery that has since disappeared. The other was brought to Mont-l’Évêque and incorporated into a chapel designed specifically to display it. The building therefore combines a nineteenth-century Picard structure with fifteenth-century stones from Lorraine. Their yellow color contrasts with the paler local stone.
Ancelet planned a northern portal dedicated to the Virgin and a gallery, but the project was abandoned, either because of its cost or to preserve the adjacent small château. The château archives also preserve plans for several other ambitious nineteenth-century projects that were never executed.
Former diocesan building
The former diocesan administrative building was constructed between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on the terrace between the château and chapel. During the nineteenth century it housed château guests. In October 1834, it was the scene of Joseph-Xavier de Pontalba’s attempt to kill his daughter-in-law. The building remains inhabited.
Estate buildings and equestrian facilities
Stables and horse track
Built for Célestin de Pontalba, the stables form a large stone building covered with render made to imitate brick. They could accommodate about one hundred horses. A cistern received water pumped by one of the mills and supplied the château’s running-water system. Grain was stored in the loft and distributed through openings in the walls.
The stables are associated with a large elliptical track used for training horses. The track survives in the communal forest south of the estate.
Orangery
The orangery near the former orchard consists of a central building flanked by two heated greenhouses. Two symmetrical houses stand behind it, including one that formerly served as the estate manager’s residence. The orangery is now disused.
Washhouse, icehouse, and cellars
The château washhouse is a small hexagonal building that formerly had a thatched roof. Separate from the village washhouse, it stands in the marshes beside a spring that supplied pure water. A hidden icehouse consists of a subterranean shaft several metres deep, where ice cut from the pond in winter was stored for summer use.
The visible entrance to the wine cellars lies in front of the bridge leading to the château terrace. The cellars survive from a large building demolished after 1810 and shown on earlier plans and in a 1785 engraving by Tavernier de Jonquières. That building probably served as a stone quarry, while the cellars were used in the nineteenth century to store large quantities of wine.
Several keepers’ houses stand at the park entrances, together with a woodshed and a pheasantry. Most of these buildings are disused. One former estate mill survives as an inhabited building on the Nonette to the east, while another supplied electricity to the château before being demolished during the twentieth century.
Park and water system
The English-style park was laid out mainly in the nineteenth century. It includes woodland, clearings, and partly drained marshes in the valley of the Nonette. The Nonette, the Sangle, and a diverted channel known as the New River or Six-Foot Ditch cross the estate.
The diverted channel feeds the ditches around the château and the pond in which the building is reflected. Several springs occur on the estate, including the Pas de Saint Rieul spring. Its name refers to a local tradition that Saint Rieul, traditionally regarded as the first bishop of Senlis and venerated as the city’s patron saint, left the mark of his foot there.
Broad cleared axes organize the park and provide views of the château from different angles, as well as views across the grounds from the terrace. Oaks, horse chestnuts, lime trees, plane trees, beeches, weeping willows, poplars, liquidambars, plum trees, and other species grow among the clearings and woodland. Many of the trees are more than two centuries old. The park also includes the château dependencies and a former orchard and is enclosed by walls.
The reflecting pond in front of the château has been dry since August 2020 because of drought and reduced flow in an upstream river. The estate’s hydraulic landscape remains closely connected to its buildings, including the ditches, mills, springs, pond, and channels that supported domestic supply, power, drainage, and earlier forms of cultivation.
Structural condition
The château has continuing structural problems. Nineteenth-century additions increased its weight, and some were poorly constructed. The abandonment of the 1970s and 1980s caused serious roof and water-infiltration damage. The major work of the 1990s renewed much of the roof and partly rehabilitated the interior, but cracks, leaks, falling stone, and other structural disorders continue. The roof of the north-east tower has not yet been renewed.
The chapel also remains extremely fragile. Its eastern façade was built without a buttress and began to move outward; temporary shoring halted that movement in 2016. The roof structure and vault remain at risk, while the western façade is affected by dense vegetation whose removal presents difficult-to-assess risks. The altar stones are exposed to the weather, adding to the vulnerability of this unusual combination of a nineteenth-century chapel and fifteenth-century Lorraine architectural fragments.
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