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Origin and history

The castle of Poussey, now extinct, was a feudal castle located in Maizières-la-Grande-Paroisse in the department of the Aube, in the Greater East. It was distinct from a later bourgeois residence, built in the commons of the feudal building after its destruction. Pussey's fief, also called Poussay, was one of four baronies under the Bishop of Troyes, with rights of justice over neighbouring villages.

Formerly called The Court, the castle consisted of a house, four towers, a drawbridge and a cochère door topped by a pavilion. The whole was surrounded by walls and ditches. Its destruction occurred between the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, without the precise causes being mentioned in the available sources.

Pussey's seigneury was attested as early as 914, forming one of the baronies of La Crosse. His lords exercised a right of justice over the inhabitants of Poussey, Maizières and Origny. Several families succeeded at his head, including the de Mesgrigny, the Raguier (Marquis de Poussey from 1644), and the Le Peletier de Rosambo, until the French Revolution.

Among the notable owners, Louis Raguier, bishop of Troyes, and his nephew Dreux Raguier, the king's echanson, acquired the fief in 1479. The Raguier family kept it until the beginning of the 18th century, before he passed to the Mesgrigny by marriage, then to Louis II Le Peletier de Rosambo, last seigneur before the Revolution. François-Étienne Lenoir de Balay acquired it in 1791, followed by Jean-Louis Bayle.

Historical sources include Abbé Defer (1890) as a reference for the study of this fief. No architectural trace of the feudal castle remains today, replaced by a bourgeois house built in its former communes.

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