Roman wall of Nantes

A map of medieval Nantes and its Roman and medieval walls.

Under the Roman Empire, Nantes was one of the major cities of Gaul, and the main Atlantic port on the Loire River. The Celtic Namnetes inhabited the territory north of the Loire in the pre-Roman and Roman era, and Julius Caesar passed through the area during his conquest of Gaul in 56 BC. 

Latin inscription, now located in the history museum in the castle.

In the third century AD, Nantes and the rest of Gaul was beginning to suffer from the decline of the Roman Empire and the invasions of Germanic tribes, so around the end of the century, a wall was built around the city.

I first realized there was a Roman wall because of the "Wiki Loves Monuments" project on Wikimedia Commons, the photo database of Wikipedia, and the French Wikipedia's list of national historical monuments in Nantes. The possibility that there might be Roman remains right outside my door was extremely exciting, and I was pretty much obsessed with finding them. There's nothing like that in Canada!

The Couvent des Cordeliers

Location: 9, rue du Refuge; 47° 13′ 08″ N, 1° 33′ 10″ W
 
According to the coordinates in the Wikipedia list, the remains of the wall were about a minute away from my apartment, and appeared to be referring to this wall on Rue des Cordeliers:

I was a bit disappointed...it didn't look very Roman. The bricks should be lighter, smaller, and there should be rows of thinner red bricks in between. But I could be wrong, maybe not all Roman walls look like that, maybe this one is different. All I knew about Roman masonry came from books and pictures, so how could I doubt this actual physical example?

Still, I had to do some more searching, and eventually I realized that the Google coordinates were a few metres behind this. The Roman wall is actually inside an old Franciscan monastery, the Couvent des Cordeliers, now the courtyard of an elementary school, where it can't be seen unless you are on the grounds of the school itself.

Since I passed the school everyday on my way to and from work, I knew that the gate to the courtyard was open when the children were being let out for the day. One day I went up to the one of the teachers, in a crowd of children and their parents, and told her that this might sound a bit crazy, but there is a Roman wall inside your school, and could I take some pictures of it?  I don't think I could just walk up to a school full of kids in Canada and ask to go inside...that's kind of creepy. But no school at home has anything as awesome as a Roman wall inside of it.

Fortunately, the teacher knew what I was talking about and said I could go see it:

Exactly what I expected a Roman wall to look like! It's mostly in ruins, and only a small part of the original extent of the entire wall, but it was still exciting to see. This is the exterior side, what someone approaching the city from the north would have seen. It's about 18 metres long and 5 metres high, and its base is a bit lower than the current level of the school's courtyard. Over the centuries, other buildings have been built into it or alongside it - in the Middle Ages it was actually the exterior wall of the monastery's church. Some passageways were cut into it, one of which had a small chapel. And now it's part of the school, although at least they've put up a fence to block it off.

The squared stones, the layers of
red bricks, the cement - definitely
a Roman wall.

I wonder if the kids appreciate what they're looking at everyday, or if it's just another wall to them? One day the kids from this school also took a field trip to the medieval cathedral, just down the street. When I was a kid, maybe we would go to a reconstructed native site, or visit a 19th-century pioneer village...

I found that my French colleagues, even the fellow medievalists, generally were not very excited about ancient and medieval stuff, since there are ruins like this almost everywhere. There are much more impressive Roman walls not far away, in Le Mans for example. But they would humour me when I would go on and on about how great Nantes' wall was.

I thought that would be the only chance I would have to see it, but months later I was able to go inside the courtyard again. Near the end of the summer holidays, I guess they were getting ready for the new school year (the "rentrée" as they say in France) and the gate was left open. No one seemed to be around, so I wandered inside, and spent more time taking better close-up pictures.


Eventually someone in charge noticed I was there and wondered who I was and what I was doing. When he heard my accent, he wanted to practice his English (which seemed to be limited to the words "Roman" and "three"). He was just as excited that an English-speaking person had managed to find the wall as I was that it was still there.

That was the last time I visited the school, but in the meantime I had discovered many other remnants scattered throughout the Roman and medieval limits of the city.

A passage was cut into the wall
in the Middle Ages.

The interior side of wall, through a hole in the non-Roman
wall on Rue des Cordeliers.

 

The Château des ducs de Bretagne

Location: 47° 12′ 56″ N, 1° 32′ 59″ W

I'll have more to say about the castle later, but the earliest parts of the castle were built on top of the Roman wall in the thirteenth century. There is still a small section in the bottom of the castle, in the lowest level of the history museum.

These remnants are pretty deteriorated, and this is also probably the interior side, which did not have to look as ornate as the exterior side. You can see the obvious Roman elements though, especially the small square stones and the layers of thinner red bricks.

There are some more Roman artefacts in the museum, including the inscription at the top of this page, but for the most part it deals with Nantes' more recent history, especially the 18th and 19th centuries when the city was the centre of the French slave trade. But it's free on the first Sunday of the month! (Except during the summer.)

Porte St-Pierre

Location: 47° 13′ 08″ N, 1° 33′ 01″ W

Porte St-Pierre is the only remaining gate of Nantes' medieval walls, which replaced the Roman wall starting in the 13th century. It's right beside the cathedral and there is a very long section of the medieval walls nearby, which are very interesting in their own right. But there is another bit of the Roman wall there, which is extremely easy to miss despite being right out in the open.

While researching more about the wall inside the school, I read that there was a small section between Porte St. Pierre and the cathedral. I had never noticed it before, so I assumed that if it was still there in the 19th century when these books were written, it may no longer exist.  

One day I passed by the Porte, as I had done a hundred times before, but this time I looked more carefully. Sure enough, what had always seemed to be an unremarkable bunch of rocks definitely was the Roman wall! If I hadn't specifically read that it was there I would never have noticed it. At the time, there were various signs pointing out the remnants of the medieval city, even a few right around here pointing out the cathedral and the medieval wall, but there was no sign or plaque or any other indication whatsoever that the Roman wall is right there too.

I assume the vast majority of people walking by there everyday had no idea it was there either. It was down in a ditch, below street level, and not very noticeable. In fact, while I was standing there wondering how I had never noticed it before, someone went down into the ditch to pee, right on the wall. That's not really uncommon in France...I saw someone peeing on the World War II monument once, among other things. But still, I bet this was the oldest thing that guy ever peed on.

Interior side.

Exterior side.

It was in a ditch because this section is actually the part that was underground when the wall was still standing. When the medieval walls were built, in this part of the city they ran alongside, or were built into or top of, the Roman wall, as was the Porte. The stones and bricks are noticeably Roman, but they're more weathered than the section in the school. There used to be a little garden in the ditch too, so obviously the city looked after it, but it seemed bizarre that they didn't advertise it in any way.

The interior side of the wall was completely open and I could walk right up to it. The exterior side was less accessible. Through some stairs and a path in the Porte itself, I could also walk out onto the top of the wall, so I liked to sit there sometimes and just imagine I was back in the Middle Ages or the Roman era. I thought about jumping down into the ditch on the other side of the wall where the little gardens were, facing the exterior side of the wall, but I don't think I would have been able to get back out again. But while sitting there I noticed some other things, like the Roman stones that seem to be built into the medieval Porte, and a cemetery.

I had noticed some random broken stones in there long before, but I didn't think anything of them either. But now that I actually looked at them, they were obviously man-made, some of them were coffin-shaped, and some had crosses carved into them, so they were definitely sarcophagi. I figured the tombs probably dated from the later Middle Ages, along with the Porte, but I did some more reading and this was actually a 6th-century Merovingian cemetery. That's awesome. Apparently when the wall and the cemetery were excavated in 1906, there was even a skeleton down there.

A couple of weeks later (in August 2012), the stone with the cross carvings had broken off (or someone had broken it off). So if that much damage could happen in two weeks, how much more have these tombs been damaged in the previous hundred years? How much has the wall been damaged?

Same view, with the broken stone.

Roman elements built into the Porte.

Porte St-Pierre (update, 2014)

I went back to Nantes for a conference in October 2014, and of course I had to go see all the Roman sites again. But this part of the wall and the cemetery were much different. The city had, at least, put up a new sign explaining the various parts of the Roman and medieval walls that are visible here, but they have covered over the cemetery and seem to have done some other work around the Roman wall.

There is a new path going past the interior side, so you can't walk right up to it anymore, and you can't walk out on top of it from the Porte anymore. The trees around it have also been removed.

The exterior side no longer has a garden and trees around it, but I guess the work isn't done yet...looks like there should be grass there in the future, at least.

The biggest difference is the Merovingian cemetery. The whole thing has been covered over, and the sarcophagi that are visible are just copies of the original! But that is probably for the best, considering the damage I saw in 2012.

Cours St-Pierre

Location: 47° 13′ 03″ N, 1° 32′ 58″ W

Roman elements in the medieval wall
on Cours Saint-Pierre.

The largest remnants of the medieval wall are on Cours St-Pierre, heading towards the castle between the cathedral and Rue Prémion. Most of it is purely medieval, but looking closely, there is also a very small section that has been built into the Roman wall. I'm not sure why there are Roman bits here but nowhere else. I do know that the original wall was damaged in the 9th century when the Vikings invaded - among other things, they killed the bishop in the cathedral. So I can imagine they broke down the wall here and it lay in ruins until the medieval wall was built into it 400 years later.

Rue Bossuet

Location: 47° 13′ 02″ N, 1° 33′ 19″ W

My street, Rue Léon-Blum, connected to Rue St-Léonard, which used to be the northwestern edge of the Roman wall. There was a church there, and a Roman and then a medieval tower, which were all destroyed long ago to make room for the current Hôtel de ville. The wall ran south along Rue St-Léonard, and the current street and the other streets that connect to it still have, or used to have, remnants of the wall in various places.

On Rue Bossuet there are some timber-framed houses, some of the few surviving medieval houses in Nantes (the rest burned down, or were destroyed so they wouldn't burn down). They're private residences now so I couldn't go inside, but they were definitely built next to the Roman wall. Several metres away, there is a small parking lot or storage garage, where the remnants of a wall are visible through the gate. One day, the gate was open so I wandered inside and took some pictures. It's completely in ruins and covered by plants and trees, but it must be the interior face of the Roman wall. The medieval wall didn't extend this far south, it turned west and crossed the Erdre a bit further north.

Rue St-Léonard

So, the exterior side of the wall would most likely be visible in the shops along Rue St-Léonard and in Place du Change, as it was in the 19th century, unless those remnants have since been destroyed. I worked at the university, and I had a long conversation about this with a colleague there, Philippe Le Pichon, an historian and a member of the Société archéologique de Nantes. He confirmed that the bit on Rue Bossuet was certainly Roman, and that there are still vestiges visible along Rue St-Léonard, so I went looking for those too.

Unfortunately they are not just out in the street, which meant I had to go talk to people and try to explain what I was doing. The most likely spot, since it was on the other side of the wall on Rue Bossuet, was a Chinese restaurant, whose owners were often sitting outside on their patio. But they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about...and since none of us spoke French natively, I think we were all having a hard time understanding each other (they suggested I should bring a native-speaker friend next time, haha). They were nice though, they always remembered me when I walked by in the weeks afterward.

Next I talked to the owner of an Italian restaurant, who also happened to be standing outside. She understood me just fine, but she wasn't originally from Nantes and she didn't know anything about a Roman wall. She suggested I ask the tourist office, but because the city doesn't seem to have much interest in the Roman remains, I already knew they wouldn't know anything either.

Place du Change

Location: 47° 12′ 57″ N, 1° 33′ 18″ W

If I had lived in Nantes longer I might have eventually asked everyone in all the shops and restaurants along the street, but this was already way too embarrassing for me. I can't go up to random people like this in English, so it even more difficult in French. But there are probably remnants at Place du Change too. Rue St-Léonard turns into Rue des Carmes, which ends in Place du Change. The highlight of Place du Change is another medieval timber-framed house, which is also almost certainly built into the Roman wall. There is a café in there now though, and I could never get the nerve to go disturb people there when they always seemed so busy...maybe I would have if they had just been standing out on the street doing nothing like the other people I talked to.

From here, the wall would have continued south to the modern Place du Bouffay, and then turned east to follow the edge of the Loire, up to the site of the modern castle. But neither the Roman nor the medieval walls are visible there anymore.

That's it for the Roman wall, but there is one more Roman building in Nantes, the Chapelle St-Étienne, the subject of the next post.