“Fortune,” Orderic wrote, “is like a turning wheel. One moment she suddenly lifts a man up, the next throws him down.”1
With Gaillard’s fall, the wheel of fate—a staple of medieval thought—had turned, raising up Philip Capet and bringing down the Plantagenets’ far-flung empire with a mighty crash. Roger of Wendover tells us that when informed of Gaillard’s fall, King John sent a message informing his overseas barons “that they were to expect no assistance from him.” The outcome was stunning. With “all kinds of defence failing in those provinces, the whole of Normandy, Tours, Anjou, and Poictou [sic], with the cities, castles and other possessions … fell to the dominion of the king of the French.”2
Although the Plantagenets would for a time retain portions of Eleanor’s lands below the Loire, they and their successors increasingly operated as kings of England rather than of a cross-Channel empire. Philip would go down in history as Philip Augustus, the great conqueror, while John, to most men’s way of thinking, would best be forgotten.
As for Normandy, many of its nobles—who owned lands on both sides of the Channel—decamped for England, and Philip made sure that those who remained understood where power now lay. But Normandy did not merely change sovereigns. Absorbed into the kingdom of France, it quickly lost the privileged position it had once held under England’s kings. Even Normandy’s ducal title retained little of its previous luster. Philip disdained to claim the title for himself, and certainly was not interested in bestowing it upon another. Subsequent French kings occasionally conferred the title on family members, but it was England’s monarchs who would continue to value it, ruling as duke of Normandy over the tiny Channel Islands, which originally were part of Normandy and to this day remain dependencies of the British Crown.
For several centuries, England’s monarchs also continued to claim all of mainland Normandy, in addition to the rest of their former French possessions. They attempted to win these back during the Hundred Years’ War, and the two nations tangled in recurring hostilities until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Despite Europe’s relative peace during the nineteenth century, this long-standing enmity did not really begin to abate until World War I, when British and French together fought the Germans on French soil.
But it was World War II that truly brought this long and blood-soaked history to a close. Cross-Channel rivalries continue, and may do so for all time, but when the Allies crossed the Channel to the beaches of Normandy, this second Norman invasion came from England, with liberation as its goal. As a recent commemorative plaque in Saint-Clairsur-Epte puts it: “To the Normans, whose victorious daring linked the destinies of the French and the English.”
As for Gaillard, this twelfth-century fortress continued for many years to offer a rugged challenge to would-be attackers. During the Hundred Years’ War, more than two centuries after Gaillard’s birth, Lionheart’s bold fortification changed hands several times, but only after lengthy sieges.
Despite the introduction of gunpowder, Gaillard remained an active fortress until the late sixteenth century, when—during the course of fierce civil and religious warfare—it held out under siege for an impressive two years. But once under Henri IV’s control, it fell on hard times. The king agreed with local authorities that Gaillard should be destroyed, to prevent it from harboring armed bandits or falling into rebel hands. Nearby convents now received permission to go to work on the venerable castle, removing its stones to repair their own religious buildings. This demolition continued during the reign of Louis XIII and Louis’ all-powerful minister, Cardinal Richelieu, who was responsible for razing countless castles throughout France. With its towering donjon decapitated and other critical portions dismantled, Lionheart’s splendid fortress began its slow and irreversible decline.
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries forgot Gaillard, but nineteenth-century romantics rediscovered it, drawn to its brooding ruins. More recent visitors—pounded by a century of totalitarianism, terrorism, and war—tend to see a fortress flexing its muscles rather than a castle in the moonlight. Yet even the most cynical may find there is something about the place that moves them—whether it is Gaillard’s direct link to the past, or the clean, almost contemporary starkness of its lines.
Normandy has undertaken a massive restoration effort, but Gaillard will never completely recover from all those centuries of deliberate destruction and neglect. Yet more than a millennium after Rollo trod this soil and eight centuries after Lionheart set to work here, Château-Gaillard still dominates its chalky cliff above the Seine—crowning Andely’s heights and linking our century with that distant age when the royal houses of England and France began their mighty struggle for dominance.