Lignières Berry: Nature, Art and History at the rendez vous

ETYMOLOGIE

Unlike other cities of the name it formerly tographed "flas fields" does not indicate an activity

related to wood ("line"), which does not singulariserait as it is in the South Chateauroux, part

Berry considered long for logging, but flax, local manufacture of yesteryear.

HISTORY

Middle Ages

The city is located on a former AO: found in this area traces of settlement dating back to Gallo-Roman times. The village of Lignières grew around a castle built in 1040 away from the oldest village of Saint-Hilaire-en-Lignières. The new village set around the castle grew and eventually became more important than the former, which changed its name accordingly.

If the city had some strategic and economic importance in the Berry because of its central location between Saint-Amand-Montrond Issoudun (both about 25 km) and Bourges and Chateauroux (about 40 km), the four major cities of the duchy of Berry, she is best known by the presence of Jeanne de Valois, daughter of Louis XI, known as Saint Joan of France (1464-1505), founder of the order of sisters of the Annunciation, beatified in 1774 and canonized in 1950. Jeanne was raised in Castle Lignières by his sister Anne de Valois, also called Anne of France and Anne de Beaujeu and the husband of one, Pierre de Beaujeu, said Pierre II of Bourbon. Jeanne de France spent a large part of his life Lignières, including during the 22 years she was officially married to Louis d'Orléans, the future Louis XII, but she hardly saw her husband. The fief held by the Knights of Lignières the eleventh to the fifteenth century until the marriage of the last heir of the tradition with Edward de Beaujeu, attached to the families of Bourbon and Orleans, in 1431.

Renaissance

In the sixteenth century Francis gives the prerogative of the fief to Catherine d'Amboise, the widow of Philibert de Beaujeu.

The sixteenth to the eighteenth century the estate passed into various hands, by purchase or inheritance (New Jerome, the La Rochefoucauld family, Princess Palatine, Colbert and his descendants), before coming by marriage to the family of Bourbon-Busset and to the family of Bourbon-Parma, until today. At the first of the religious wars and, like other cities of the duchy of Berry, Bourges which the city was taken and sacked by the Huguenots in 1562 and at that time the church was looted and burned. Lignières was an important center of Calvinism, at the time when John Calvin, a student at the University of Bourges, created many reform schools.

Contemporary Period

City of culture and breeding Lignières received at the end of the nineteenth century a significant growth, thanks in particular to the line of Societe Generale des Chemins de Fer economic through the town. She was with at the time, mills, slaughterhouses, laundries, hospital, church and chapel. Many buildings are constructed to install the artisans, whose workshop Jacques Coeur, carpentry for four generations known. Her monthly fairs were very famous.

In 1844, the neighboring town of Condé is shared between La Celle Condé Lignières and Montlouis, and the population is increased by some 200 people (2197 census souls in 1841 and 2542 than in 1846). During the twentieth century, and particularly after the Second World War it lost much of its economic importance in favor of towns, in particular because of the disappearance of the railway line.

Sixtus of Bourbon Parma, Prince of the Ducal House of Parma, leader of the Carlist Communion Traditional, pretender to the Spanish throne as a descendant of Philip V of Spain. currently owns Castle Lignières.