Chateau de Vincennes

Or, We Went to a Medieval Thing and I Was Very Excited, Secular Architecture Division.

Did you know there's a castle in Paris? I didn't, until a friend mentioned it to us. But there is!

Really it is just outside the city bounds, on the edge of a huge park which used to be its hunting grounds--because, you know, it's not a good castle unless it has nice woods for hunting.

The bois (woods) outside the post-medieval outer wall.

The keep, in the first picture, is the oldest surviving bit, dating mostly to the fourteenth century. It was mostly built by Charles V, who lived there a lot. In later centuries it was used as a prison--along with the Bastille, it had become (in)famous by the time of the Revolution as a place for the king to stick his political enemies without a trial. Incidentally castles were often used as prisons, in the middle ages as well as afterward: this is reflected in the French word for a castle keep, a 'donjon', where we get 'dungeon.'

Yikes. On the other hand, my associations with the castle of Vincennes have more to do with happy medieval peasants, probably because it appears in some famous illuminations like this one:

Image from Wikipedia.

The image is from the Tres riches heures du Duc de Berry, a late-medieval book of hours. Books of hours were prayer books for noble men and women which usually had a shorter version of the liturgy of the hours alongside other prayers, Bible excerpts, and a calendar, giving the dates of various feasts (here's a nice discussion of what goes in books of hours). This is an illustration for the December page of the calendar; you can see astronomical/astrological stuff up at the top. Calendars were often illustrated with a depiction of some kind of task typically done in that month--for December, the task is usually 'slaughtering pigs.' Sorry it's a little bloody--if only Vincennes were in the January picture. The traditional labor of January, as is still well known, is:

Image from Wikipedia, which has the full set.

Partying.

Back to Vincennes--the earliest castle on the site was built in the twelfth century. In the thirteenth, Saint Louis housed his relic of the Crown of Thorns there before moving it on to the Sainte-Chapelle in central Paris. The castle of his lifetime is completely gone now, but the chapel that Charles V started building on the grounds is modeled after the Sainte-Chapelle:

But Revolutionaries broke all the stained glass. You can see how important the stained glass and interior painting are to the look of the Sainte-Chapelle; it's not just the shape!

The chateau itself struck me as a really practical building from a defensive perspective...

In the middle ages there was no entrance to the keep on the ground floor. You had to go up a tiny winding stairway in a tower in the guardhouse (above me, in the picture to the left) and then cross the wooden walkway pictured. On the right is the moat from the battlements.

And we found it interesting to see how Charles V used the chateau as a center for administration. For instance, he had the first public clock in France installed in the castle.

The original bell is preserved today in the chapel; a copy is in its place in the tower. You can see it hasn't got a clock face--but the bell was rung by a clockwork-driven mechanism, not by hand. So this clock basically still worked in the same way that church bells worked throughout the middle ages, as the main way for most people to reckon time. Imagine how different your feeling of time passing would be if you couldn't check the hour except by estimating from the sun (though probably you would get better at estimating quickly), and if you had to wait for bells to know the exact hour...

For Charles, and for many other people, the bell was also there to tell him the times of the prayers in the liturgy of the hours. We were amazed at the tiny size of the chapel inside the castle where Charles listened to these prayers. Actually, everything inside was tiny. Here's his study/library:

I had to climb into the fireplace to take the photo on the right. For scale, think that the door is about the size of a normal modern door. That's where the king of France administered his kingdom from! The picture on the left is of the center of the ceiling in this room; there were also representations of the four Evangelists at the four corners of the room. There's hardly any decoration, but a little got in--and they are labelled in French! Charles seems to have been pretty into reading in the vernacular; he commissioned the translation of a bunch of stuff into French, including some Aristotle. The rooms are barren now, so the best views are outside:

 

In conclusion: a castle that you can get to on the Métro! It's a little obscure, but great fun to see a different aspect of medieval Paris.