The Norman town whose castle was the birthplace of William the Conqueror, the prison in which William the Lion of Scotland agreed the Treaty of Falaise, and a key fortress lost by King John in 1204.
Falaise stands in the Calvados country of central Normandy, its castle on a rock spur above the valley of the Ante. The site controls the roads between Caen, Argentan and the south, and it was one of the principal residences of the Norman dukes long before it was fortified in stone.
Its fame rests on a birth, but its importance to the dukes was strategic: whoever held Falaise held the interior of Normandy, which is why every ruler of the duchy from Henry I to Philip II spent money on its walls.
William was born at Falaise about 1027 or 1028, the son of Robert I, duke of Normandy, and Herleva, a woman of the town traditionally said to be a tanner's daughter. His parents were not married, and the illegitimacy shadowed his whole early career — he was called William the Bastard by contemporaries long before he was called the Conqueror.
Robert nonetheless designated him heir before leaving on pilgrimage, and William succeeded as duke in 1035 at about seven or eight years old. His minority was violent enough that several of his guardians were murdered, and he did not control the duchy in his own right until the early 1050s. The whole of that story starts at Falaise, and the town has marked it since the nineteenth century with an equestrian statue in the square below the castle.
The stone castle is essentially the work of William's descendants rather than of his own time. Henry I of England, his youngest son, built the great rectangular keep from the 1120s, the classic Anglo-Norman donjon of hall and chamber over a storage undercroft. A second, smaller keep was added beside it later in the century.
Arthur of Brittany, King John's nephew and rival claimant, was imprisoned at Falaise after his capture in 1202; the custodian Hubert de Burgh is said to have refused an order to blind him, and Arthur was moved to Rouen, where he disappeared in 1203. After the French conquest, Philip II added the tall cylindrical tower still called the Talbot tower, in the round-keep style his engineers used across the newly won duchy.
William the Lion, king of Scots, invaded northern England in 1174 in support of the revolt against Henry II and was captured at Alnwick in July of that year. He was taken south and then across the Channel, and held prisoner in the castle at Falaise.
The terms extracted from him there were the harshest ever imposed on a Scottish king. He became the liegeman of the English king for Scotland itself, the Scottish church was declared subject to the English church, and five castles — Roxburgh, Berwick, Jedburgh, Edinburgh and Stirling — were handed over to English garrisons, with hostages including his brother David. The agreement was issued at Valognes on 8 December 1174 and confirmed publicly at York in August 1175. It bound Scotland for fifteen years, until Richard I cancelled it by the Quitclaim of Canterbury in December 1189 for ten thousand marks toward his crusade.
Falaise fell to Philip II of France in 1204 during the campaign that took Normandy from King John, and its surrender — like that of Château Gaillard earlier the same year — marked how little support John's cause retained among the Norman baronage. The duchy was annexed to the French royal domain, and the political unit that had joined Normandy to England since 1066 ended.
The town was held by the English again through much of the Hundred Years War and was retaken by French forces in 1450. In August 1944 Falaise gave its name to the pocket in which the German armies in Normandy were destroyed, and the town was largely flattened; the three keeps survived, and were restored in a deliberately modern idiom in the 1990s.