Château de Vic-sur-Aisne

En un regard

Le château en bref

The Château de Vic-sur-Aisne overlooks the right bank of the Aisne, on a site fortified as early as the early Middle Ages and linked to the Abbey of Saint-Médard in Soissons, which is said to have received this castrum around the 9th century. In 893, King Odo confirmed the abbey's possessions and ordered the castle to be repaired; it was then contested between the lords of Coucy, the monks of Saint-Médard and the kings of France. Placed under the protection of the lords of Pierrefonds, who kept a garrison there until the 13th century, the site later became a castellany dependent on Pierrefonds and then a viscounty attached to the counts of Soissons. The keep, about 25 metres high, was built in the 13th century and altered in the 15th and 17th centuries. After the destruction of the Wars of Religion, a residential building (logis) was rebuilt at the end of the 16th century and in the 17th century by the commendatory abbots of Saint-Médard, with reconstruction work documented between 1599 and 1604. Damaged during the First World War, the ensemble was restored between 1990 and 1997. The château is now privately owned and surrounded by a French formal garden with 17th-century statuary and an English landscape park.