Fréfossé Castle

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Fréfossé Castle, south-west facade

The Fréfossé Castle ( French Château de Fréfossé ), more rarely also called Le Tilleul Castle ( Château du Tilleul ), is located about 1.5 kilometers south of Étretat in the French town of Le Tilleul in the Seine-Maritime department in Normandy . Its roots can be found in a medieval castle from the 14th century. The property has been privately owned since 1998 and cannot be visited.

description

Castle Fréfossé stands in a 50  hectare large castle park with forest, grass and water. The main building is a rectangular brick building with three storeys and a high, slate hipped roof , which is pierced by numerous portholes and ox eyes with a stone frame. Although it was not built until the second half of the 18th century, its architecture shows clear references to the forms of the Renaissance , because its appearance can be traced back to a renovation and expansion in the style of the Neo-Renaissance around 1900. Its representative facade on the south-west side has a semicircular central risalit that extends over all storeys , has narrow balconies with baluster parapets and a high, helmet-shaped roof. The building sections to the right and left of the porch are each divided into four axes by windows. On the ground floor, like the balconies of the porch, they have a baluster parapet made of light stone. On the north-eastern side of the building are three round towers from the 19th century, one of which at the time reached a height of around 50 meters at the top of its conical roof . Nowadays, however, the tower roofs have been cut quite a bit.

history

In 1374, Galehaut de Saâne built the first fortified castle complex in the region at the site of today's castle. Towards the end of the Hundred Years War , she and the Seigneurie Fréfossé came to the de Pelletot family. Jehan de Pelletot is recorded as the owner for 1452. In 1494 the facility was known as Clos de Saint-Louis . Francoise de Pelletot married Antoine Doullé, Seigneur de Gerpouville , around 1611 and brought the castle to her husband's family. She then came to the Puchot de Gerpouville family via the female line . The old castle was demolished and replaced by a new building in the classicist Baroque style in the 1770s . Only a pigeon tower remained from the previous facility. The new castle building finally came back into the hands of the Doullés.

The Fréfossé Castle in 1893 before it was redesigned in the Neo-Renaissance style

When Anne Doullé married Jacques Emar Compoinct, Seigneur de Boulhard , Fréfossé changed hands again. Anne's daughter brought the castle into her marriage to the Viscount Toussaint Hocquart in 1786 . During the French Revolution in 1789, the castle was occupied by the famous, notorious Montargis Battalion . As in 1779, soldiers were also stationed on the site in 1800. The last male offspring of the family, Baron Édouard Armand Hocquart , was not only mayor of Le Tilleul from 1814 , but also chamberlain to the French kings Louis XVIII. and Charles X. He sold the Fréfossé Castle in 1825 in order to use the proceeds to finance the purchase of the Valmont Castle . The new owner was a gentleman called Fiquet, a notary from Criquetot-l'Esneval , from whom it was bought in 1849 by Félix Val (l) ois, a wealthy merchant from Rouen . After his death, Ernest Dubosc, an industrialist from Le Havre , bought it . Before 1893, he added two mighty round towers to the property. His family remained the owners of the complex until the 20th century, which was changed and expanded around 1900 in the neo-renaissance style.

During the Second World War , the building was damaged in 1940/44. At first German soldiers used it as barracks, then it was used as accommodation for Allied troops. After the city of Le Havre became the owners of the castle in the 1960s through a gift from the Dusbosq family, it has been privately owned again since 1998. In October 2009, one of the outbuildings on the property was completely destroyed by fire.

literature

  • Jules Adeline et al .: La Normandie monumentale et pittoresque, Seine-Inferieure. Lemale & Cie., Havre 1893, pp. 463-464 ( digitized ).
  • Jean Benoît Désiré Cochet: Etretat. Son passé, son present, son avenir. Delevoye, Dieppe 1850, pp. 69-70 ( digitized version ).
  • Claude Frégnac: Merveilles des châteaux de Normandie. Hachette, Paris 1966, p. 312.

Web links

Commons : Fréfossé Castle  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Le Tilleul - Curiosités , accessed January 18, 2020.
  2. ^ A b Claude Frégnac: Merveilles des châteaux de Normandie. 1966, p. 312.
  3. ^ Website of the municipality of Le Tilleul , accessed January 18, 2020.
  4. ↑ a b c Jean Benoît Désiré Cochet: Etretat. 1850, p. 69.
  5. ↑ The annual figures for the new building fluctuate between 1771 and 1776.
  6. ↑ a b Jules Adeline: La Normandie monumentale et pittoresque, Seine-Inferieure. 1893, p. 463.
  7. ↑ a b Auguste Lechevalier: Recherches historiques sur les communes du canton de Criquetot-l'Esneval depuis l'époque féodale. Librairie Normande, Paris 1897, p. 163.
  8. ↑ a b Jean Benoît Désiré Cochet: Etretat. 1850, p. 70.
  9. ^ Jean Benoît Desiré Cochet: Les églises de l'arrondissement d'Yvetot. Volume 2. Didron, Paris 1852, p. 171 ( digitized version ).
  10. ^ PTC Institute (ed.): Le guide de la Seine-Maritime. 3. Edition. PTC, Rouen 2004, ISBN 2906258962 , p. 420.
  11. ↑ Feu ravageur au château , accessed January 18, 2020.

Coordinates: 49 ° 41 ′ 35.5 ″  N , 0 ° 12 ′ 24.4 ″  E