A royal town on the Eure between Chartres and Dreux, where Philip VI died on 22 August 1350 — at the castle, or at the neighbouring abbey of Coulombs.
Nogent-le-Roi lies in the valley of the Eure in the Eure-et-Loir, on the roads linking Dreux, Chartres and Rouen and within a long day of Paris. The first part of the name is Gaulish, from an element meaning "new" with a suffix for a settlement — the new village. The second part is the point: le-Roi, the king’s, because the place belonged to the crown.
It matters to the archive as the place where Philip VI of France, the first Valois king, died on 22 August 1350 — though whether he died in the town itself or at the abbey next door is not agreed.
The fortress began as a motte, seized by Amaury II de Montfort about 1080, and passed by marriage to the Tosny family. Philip Augustus took it around 1203, in the campaign that stripped the Plantagenets of Normandy and the lands along its border, and by 1218 the town was a crown possession — which is when it acquired its royal name.
Its position explains the interest. This is the frontier country between the royal domain around Paris and the duchy of Normandy, ground that changed hands repeatedly and was rebuilt and refortified through the Hundred Years’ War. A king held it because of what lay on either side of it.
The Eure gave the town a second function. By 1473 the river was navigable from Chartres down to Nogent-le-Roi and onward to Rouen, making the place a river port on the route between the grain country of the Beauce and the Seine.
That traffic, rather than the castle, is what sustained the town in the later Middle Ages, and it is the context for its one great building project: the church of Saint-Sulpice, begun in 1494 under Louis de Brézé and continued into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was never completed — the intended nave was never built, so the austere front opens almost directly onto the choir.
Philip VI died on 22 August 1350, aged fifty-seven. French sources place the death at Nogent-le-Roi or, in the same breath, at the neighbouring abbey of Coulombs a few kilometres away; the English-language account states flatly that he died at Coulombs. The archive records the death here while noting that the abbey has at least as good a claim, and the two places are close enough that a king taken ill at one could plausibly die at the other.
He was buried at Saint-Denis beside his first wife, Joan of Burgundy, in the abbey that held the French kings; his viscera were buried separately at the Jacobin convent in the rue Saint-Jacques in Paris, since demolished. The division of the body between two or three places was normal for a French king of this period.
Philip had come to the throne in 1328 on a disputed succession, and the dispute became the Hundred Years’ War. By the time he died the French crown had lost a fleet at Sluys and an army at the Battle of Crécy, Calais had fallen in 1347 and would stay English for two centuries, and the Black Death of 1348 and 1349 had killed something approaching a third of his subjects.
The last months were not entirely bleak: he bought the Dauphiné and the lordship of Montpellier in 1349, enlarging the kingdom on paper while it collapsed in practice. In January 1350 he married Blanche of Navarre, who had been intended for his son — a match that offended the heir and much of the nobility. He left his son John II a kingdom that was militarily beaten, financially exhausted and short of a third of its people.