One of the best pleasures in a river cruise is the ability to stop by small towns or villages to see exceptional sights not readily available through road or rail. Such was our experience in Les Andelys, France. As our first port of call on the Seine from Paris, this large village with riverfront park hosted picnicking families, older citizens with loyal dogs, and a lone fisherman hopeful for an addition to that night’s supper. A few quayside streets dominated by a Gothic church, unpriested but nonetheless opened daily by the locals, and shops oriented to visitors, all was pleasantly somnolent on a foggy Sunday morning. The village had suffered damage from WW II, despite its main asset being an historic glass factory. Although the church’s stained-glass windows had been protected during bombing by a sandwich of sandbags, many had needed replacement. Perhaps the town’s historic guardianship of the upper Seine and Paris made it strategically vulnerable. All locals lived in homes distantly inland from the river and up on hillsides surrounding the narrow valley. Our small walking group, led by our guide Simone, began a hike in dense morning fog on one of the roads leading up those hillsides. Our particular road was laid down in the 1100’s to allow builders to access a bluff overlooking the Seine and the valley of Les Andelys. At that bluff Richard the Lionhearted, simultaneously King of England and Duke of Normandy, had built two fortresses, the larger of which this childless monarch referred to as his “beautiful daughter”. A castle built in only two years starting in 1196 to protect Normandy from repossession by the French, it’s more formal name became Chateau Gaillard, or strongpoint. Our efforts a few hundred feet up the hill climbing road, a single lane affair used both ways by the local drivers, taught us an appreciation of the vigor required of Gaillard’s speedy medieval craftsmen and especially of Phillip II’s French forces that finally overcame it in 1204 after a two-year siege.
Gaillard’s father was not to defend her honor. Richard had died earlier elsewhere of a crossbow bolt to the shoulder which he refused to have removed despite three days of suffering. Sustaining the English claims to Normandy fell to Richard’s brother, the ineptly evil King John of Robin Hood legend. Phillip II’s forces ascended the steep hill and laid siege to the main Chateau after first overcoming and raising the smaller protective fortress. All the villagers at Petit Andelys had sought refuge with Richard’s daughter, but in one of his more notorious acts of infamy John expelled them, as they were “useless mouths to feed”. Those men of unmilitary age, women, and children all gradually starved to death openly isolated in the Chateau’s outermost moat between the French, who offered no aid, and the English who abandoned their own subjects. Some, by historical reports, resorted to cannibalism before perishing in the mud within sight of the walls and within reach of the French. King John soon abandoned Chateau Gaillard as well as his local peoples and the castle fell to the French. This re-established their sovereignty over Normandy for the first time since Charles the Simple had given it as a peace offering to Rollo, Viking warlord and first Duke of Normandy. Rollo’s successors were vassals to William the Bastard, raised and educated a little way down the Seine. He in 1066 became William the Conqueror, establishing Norseman rule over England. Guide Simone painted these scenes in sanguine colors on the remnant walls of Chateau Gaillard. Those old battlements had been savaged over the centuries not mainly by the French but by local descendants of its abandoned victims. They salvaged the stones covering its flint rubble walls for other building over the centuries of her ghosthood.
Reaching the fortress-castle and catching our breath, we gained an appreciation of its then state-of-the-art construction. Besides a smaller fortress protecting access to the larger, Chateau Gaillard had three concentric circles of walls with moats in between each. One moat had a cavern from mining rock for the walls that was also used for storage. At the innermost keep were stone benches built into the walls next to windows providing wonderful views of the Seine and surrounding lands. Here also was a second very deep hand-hewn cavern leading down into the base rock that was used for food storage, a kind of giant natural refrigerator. On the more protected downhill side of the castle, again overlooking the river, was a subsidiary protective wall with very large ground level windows—a “latrine“. Here the castle’s garbage and night products could be safely cast out from the living areas. The foundation of a massive horseshoe bread oven remains in the outermost courtyard; what was not evident was any well or other water source on this high bluff. That and rapidly diminishing food stores may have caused the end of the reign of Richard’s beloved daughter after the French siege.
While Simone’s historical guidance was extensive and detailed, we further benefited from a live demonstration of medieval “re-enactors “scattered about the area of the guardian castle’s remnants. Here were full families, including toddlers, clothed in the fibers and fabrics of that long ago day. Soldiers of various ranks demonstrated the functionality of their leather armor, chain mail, and steel helmets. We examined one soldier’s broadsword in detail as it has been remade per exact specifications from the Middle Ages. Astonishingly, it weighed about 1 kg and had an extremely flexible steel blade. A far finer and more agile weapon than would be expected. Our final stop was made at the surgeon’s table with a display of all the typical instruments used in dealing with wounds and afflictions in medieval times. There were quite a few instruments designed to deal with dental problems, such as extractions or drainage of tooth abscesses; a rather forbidding bone saw; and a very long, wide steel plate with wooden handle, designed to cauterize wounds after being rendered red hot in a fire.
The morning’s fog now burned away, Les Andelys was fully available as we sauntered down the millennial road. Our arrival in town generated a flurry of activity as a few of the shops opened in recognition of our presence, and we dutifully enjoyed beautiful clothing, art, handiworks, and especially a bakery worthy of any large American city. The Gothic church, abandoned to the custody and upkeep of its loyal townspeople, now displayed both its surviving original as well as its replacement-stained glass stories of Christ’s travails. One more stroll through the main part of town and along the river park and time returned from the 13th century to our present as we boarded our river cruiser to slide towards Hon Fleur, Le Havre, and Omaha Beach, the midpoint of our tour through the region’s remarkable history. On the way we would see that the Seine moves not only towards the Atlantic, but perhaps more importantly laterally, refashioning Normandy over centuries visible in the lay of the landscape. But that is a further story for another drifted day.