Scarcely less numerous than the religious edifices in this region were the châteaux. Of these comparatively few are now standing, either as picturesque ruins or as residences. The bas-reliefs and tapestry of the ancient buildings of La Ferté-Milon, the birthplace of Racine, are still worthy of a visit. Of Nanteuil, a fine château of the time of Francis I., a single tower remains. The magnificent manor-house of the Ducs de Valois at Villers-Cotterets (a little beyond the limits of the region I am now treating of) was made an historic monument by Napoleon III.; but it is none the better for base uses against which it surely ought to have been protected as the birthplace of Alexandre Dumas by the ghosts of Porthos, Athos, and Aramis! The towers and the donjon of the Château of Nesle on the Somme, whence sallied forth, in the time of Louis XV., the four much too famous sisters De Mailly, were not so maltreated in 1793 as to be quite uninhabitable when the first Napoleon passed a night there, during his final struggle for empire; and there still is to be seen the old Lombard-Roman church of St.-Leger, wherein was held a council strong enough to coerce Philip Augustus into doing what Henry VIII. refused, three centuries afterwards, to do, and to make him take back his divorced queen Ingelburga of Denmark. Braisnes, planted upon a peak, overlooks what is left of the exquisite twelfth-century church of St.-Yved, ruthlessly battered and abused in 1793, and robbed of certain matchless monuments in enamelled copper for the benefit of a syndicate of patriotic rogues. The Châteaux de Gandelu, de Neuville, de St.-Lambert are ruins. The lordly cradle of the great House of Guise; the tower of Marchais in which, tradition tells us, the League was first conceived by which the princes of Lorraine were backed in their struggle for the throne of France; the keep of Beaurevoir, one of the prisons of the Maid of Orléans—these may be seen. Of how many others, the names of which ring out as from a chronicle of French history, nothing but the names is left! Caulincourt, Cœuvres d'Estrées, de Bohain de Luxembourg, d'Armentières, de Conflans, de Condé, de Comin, de Buzancy, de Puységur.
Two of the most important châteaux in this region in 1789 were those of Pinon and of Anizy. The first still exists, and stands substantially as it then stood, and is now admittedly the finest in the Laonnais. The second was wrecked and demolished. It is perhaps worth while to tell what befell Anizy, and how Pinon escaped.
Both Anizy and Pinon are of very ancient origin.
Anizy seems to have been a fortress of the Emperor Valentinian in the fourth century, and it was pillaged by the Vandals in the fifth. On December 26, 496, Clovis, in recognition of the baptism he had received on the preceding day at the hands of St.-Rémi in the cathedral church of Reims, gave the lordships of Anizy, Coucy, and Leuilly to that prelate. Two years afterwards St.-Rémi, who had made Laon a bishopric, gave Anizy to his nephew St.-Génébaud, the first bishop of Laon, to be held and the revenues thereof to be applied by the bishops of Laon for ever to the benefit of the poor of that diocese. He coupled the gift with a solemn curse and anathema upon all who should ever disturb or misapply the donation. From that time to 1789 Anizy was a lordship of the bishops of Laon, who in time were made dukes and peers of France.
The annals of Laon attest the loyalty through long ages of the bishops of Laon to the injunctions laid upon them by St.-Rémi. The Normans came to Anizy, for example, in 883, and pillaged and ruined the place. Four years afterwards the bishop of Laon founded there a hospital, or Hôtel-Dieu, for the poor and infirm of the diocese, and the king, Charles le Gros, endowed it handsomely. In 904 Jeanne, sister of Raoul, bishop of Laon, with the help of her brother, founded at Anizy a priory of Sisters to receive and care for the young girls of the place. In 996, Adalberon, bishop of Laon, founded a maladrerie, or lepers' hospital, at Anizy, to be 'a refuge and place of healing for the poor of Anizy, Wissignicourt, and Pinon.'
As time went on and the feudal system became more fully developed, the bishops of Laon found it judicious to establish one of those high feudal personages known as Vidames, and the relations of the Vidames of Laon with their episcopal superior, on the one hand, and with the people of such lordships as Anizy on the other, become very interesting.
They are made more interesting still by the entrance upon the scene of the kings of France, contending for a real royal authority, of great barons like the Sires de Coucy bent on getting a complete local independence of any central government, and of the people of the communes, who very early saw their own game as between the Church, the barons, and the king, and played it here, as in so many other places, with most respectable skill and success. There is a picturesque story of Pope Benedict VIII., who held a council at Laon, going from Laon to view the episcopal château at Anizy, with a cortège of cardinals and bishops, and on the way springing down nimbly from his horse to rescue the bishop of Cambray, obviously a prelate of much weight, under whom a little bridge gave way as they were crossing the river Lette. This was in the year 1018. A century later, in 1110, Gandri, bishop of Laon, summoned John Comte de Soissons, Robert II. Comte de Flandre, and Enguerrand I. Sire de Coucy, the three loftiest and lordliest personages then of this part of the world, to a conference at his château in Anizy, there to fix and define where the authority of the Sire de Coucy ended and that of the bishops of Laon began. In 1210 the burgh of Anizy became a free commune and elected its first mayor. The next year its seigneur, Robert de Châtillon, bishop-duke of Laon, at his own cost fortified the place with walls and towers, and did this so well that three years afterwards Enguerrand III. de Coucy, just then the most masterful person in all this part of France, thought it wise to treat with the bishop-duke as to their respective rights of ownership in the adjoining forest of Roncelais. They agreed so perfectly that the formidable lord of Coucy immediately afterwards did the bishop-duke and the people of Anizy the notable service of leading a band of his retainers against a company of brigands who were burning lonely farmhouses and carrying off the crops.
Having got their mayor and their walls and their towers, the burghers of Anizy took to quarrelling with the bishop-dukes of Laon, and so got their communal rights suppressed by one of those prelates in 1230, only to see them re-established again half a century later in 1278, by another bishop-duke, Geoffroi de Beaumont, who made a compromise with his troublesome vassals, reserving only to himself the right to nominate the officers of justice. The king of France, Philippe le Hardi, be it observed, took sides with the burghers in this affair, and they raised a monument to him in 1293.
This, with almost everything else of any importance in Anizy, was destroyed by the English of Edward III., in the next century, one of the local seigneurs, the lord of Locq (where a château still represents the extinct lordship) and the curé of the church of St.-Peter falling valiantly in the defence of their people. The bishop-duke came over to help them from Laon, and died in his château at Anizy the next year.
In 1352, another bishop-duke founded a free market at Anizy for three days in each year, at the feast of St.-George, and in 1408 his successor built a grain-hall there. In 1513 Louis XII. granted the burghers a free market every Monday. This so incensed the then bishop-duke, Louis de Bourbon-Vendôme, that he tried to suppress the annual market and take back the grain-hall, in return for which attempts the worthy burghers pillaged his château at Anizy and pulled it nearly to pieces.