--In the following century Chateau Gaillard
braved the victorious arms of Henry Vth; nor was it taken till after a
siege of sixteen months. The garrison only consisted of one hundred and
twenty men; yet this scanty troop would not have yielded, had not the
ropes, by which they drew up their water-buckets[31], been worn out and
destroyed.--During the same reign, it was again taken and lost by the
French, into whose hands it finally fell in 1449, when Charles VIIth
commanded the siege in person. Even then, however it stood a long siege;
and it was almost the last of the strong-holds of Normandy, which held
out for the successors of the ancient dukes. After the re-union of the
duchy, it was not destroyed, or suffered to fall into decay, like the
greater number of the Norman fortresses: during the religious wars, it
still continued to be a formidable military post, as well as a royal
palace; and it was honored by the residence of Henry IVth, whose father,
Anthony of Bourbon, died here in 1562.--Its importance ceased in the
following reign.--The inhabitants of the adjacent country requested the
king to order that the castle should be dismantled. They dreaded, lest
its towers should serve as an asylum to some of the numerous bands of
marauders, by whom France was then infested.
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