Timeline

Heritage classified

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Origin and history

The Château de Montille, located on a plateau overlooking the Armançon 2 km south of Semur-en-Auxois (Côte-d'Or), finds its first historical records in 1362 during a trial for looting involving its garrison. This fortified site, then surrounded by ditches, belonged to a seigneurial lineage whose heritage dates back "from father to son", as attested by Guillemette de Senevoy in 1577, without being able to specify its exact origin. The estate was then presented as a noble house typical of medieval times.

In the 17th century, the castle was partially rebuilt, although the 19th-century sources (as Abbé Court Sword in 1716) attributed it to Lazare Bizouard, an adviser to the parliament of Metz. The current building, dated from the 19th century, nevertheless retains ancient elements: a residual pond of the 16th century ditches, and a round tower transformed into a chapel at the southwest corner of the platform. The facades and roofs, as well as the dovecote, have been protected since 1976 by an inscription in the Historical Monuments.

Today's architecture thus combines traces of the sixteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, with a house with broken roofs and terraces supported by walls. The property, rebuilt by a certain Viard in the 19th century, illustrates the evolution of a medieval seigneury as a bourgeois residence, while preserving defensive remains (fossed, tower) bearing witness to its strategic past in Auxois.

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