France - Fuedal - Lordship of Déols - William I
Silver Denier 19mm, (0.97 grams) Struck between 1207-1233 AD
Reference: N# 6719, PA# 1946, Montlebeau Hoard
Certification: NGC AUTHENTIC 5872718-110
+ RADVLFVS,
Encircled square cross.
+ DE DOLIS, Six-pointed star. You are bidding on the exact item pictured, provided with a Certificate of Authenticity and Lifetime Guarantee of Authenticity.
 Déols is a commune in the department of Indre in the Centre-Val de Loire Region of central France.
Déols is an ancient town with a famous Benedictine abbey, Abbaye Notre-Dame-du-Bourg-Dieu. Today it is somewhat overshadowed by the nearby city of Châteauroux, which faces it across the river Indre. It preserves a fine Romanesque tower and other remains of the abbey church, once the most important in the duchy of Berry. Toponyms revealing the presence of former Neolithic dolmens (Grandes and Petites Pierres Folles), near the resurgent springs of the Montet into the river Indre, above which a Gaulish village of the Bituriges was later established, then a nearby Gallo-Roman fanum, confirm the age of Vicus Dolensis or Dolus. The village was moved westward by the Romans next to the antique ford and later bridge built over the river Indre on the road from Paris to Toulouse. In 469 or 470 the Visigoths of Euric defeated the army of the Briton king Riothamus at the battle of Déols, the victory carrying with it the supremacy over the district of Berry and initiating the Visigothic threat over the last years of the Roman empire. But it was only during the Middle Ages that, through the pilgrimage to the tomb of Saint Ludre and his father Saint Léocade in the crypts of the parish church of St Stephen built upon their graves, later one of the steps on the route from Paris to Santiago de Compostela, then through the lords of Déols and Châteauroux, that Déols acquired its significance. The Benedictine abbey of Our Lady of Déols was founded in 917 by Ebbes the Noble, prince of Déols. He gave his palace, originally the villa of Saint Ludre according to legend, to the monks in order to build a monastery and transferred his residence to Châteauroux, where the monks of Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys in Brittany took as well refuge from Norman raids from 920 to 1008 with the relics of Saint Gildas, and founded another abbey under his vocable. The name of the new town comes from Château Raoul, the castle overlooking the river Indre built about 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) west by Raoul, son of Ebbes, rebuilt in the 15th c. and later seat of the Préfet, then departemental assembly. For centuries this change did not affect the prosperity of the place of Déols, which was maintained by the prestige of its abbey. The abbey was rebuilt about 1150 with seven towers, of which only one remains, on a floorplan larger than the cathedral of Bourges; its dependencies, both churches and priories, extended through seven dioceses. A gateway faces the remains of the old bridge destroyed by a flood in the 17th c., next to the northern part of the medieval ramparts of the town and, opposite the city, a second gateway is flanked by two towers and bears the city clock. The parish church of St Stephen (10th to 16th centuries) has a Romanesque façade and two symmetrical crypts containing antique sarcophagus, a marble carved one brought from Rome and a limestone one, which are the ancient Christian tombs of Saint Léocade, who according to the tradition of Limousin was senator and proconsul of subligerian ] Gaul, and of his son Saint Ludre, the lords of the town in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries. They were baptised by St Ursin and founded the church of Sainte-Marie-la-Petite, suppressed a few years before the Revolution. Some walls of the original funerary chapel from the late 6th c. or 7th c. remain above the crypt of Saint Ludre, as well as traces of 12th c. frescoes and some paintings from the 17th century represent the ancient abbey and the miracle of Déols. In the late 18th c. the church of Saint Germain, also dating from the 10th to 16th c., which was intended to be destroyed by the city for the creation of the new road to Paris, was preserved but sold. In the Middle Ages the head of the family of Déols enjoyed the title of prince and held sway over nearly all Lower Berry, of which the town itself was the capital. The last of the house was Raoul VII, who died in 1177 leaving a three-year-old heiress, Denise. Henry II of England took the child, who represented the inheritance of Déols-Châteauroux, worth more, it was said, than all of Normandy, into his care, and affianced her to one of his barons, Baudoin de Reviers 3rd Earl of Devon and at his death to André de Chauvigny. In 1187, during the war between Henry II and his sons (Richard the Lionheart, Prince John) and Philip Augustus, the truce declared at Châteauroux was so unexpected that it was attributed to a "miracle of Our Lady of Déols" and published in a Liber miraculorum B. Mariae Dolensis. This influenced the religious devotion of the inhabitants of the region towards the Virgin Mary. The Chapel of Notre-Dame des Miracles built on the north side of the abbey to protect the statue was destroyed in 1833 and the statue was then transported to the church of St Stephen where it is still today. The abbey church was sacked by the Protestants and burned out in 1568, during the religious wars; not one of the manuscripts from its library has been identified. In 1627 the abbey was suppressed by the agency of Henry II, prince of Condé and of Déols, who received its annual incomes, after the monks were denounced for corruption. With the abbey in ruins, the town declined and was eclipsed by its neighbour.
  France, officially the French Republic (French: République française), is a sovereign state comprising territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories . The European part of France, called Metropolitan France , extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea , and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean . France spans 640,679 square kilometres (247,368 sq mi) and has a total population of 67 million. It is a unitary semi-presidential republic with the capital in Paris , the country's largest city and main cultural and commercial centre. The Constitution of France establishes the state as secular and democratic, with its sovereignty derived from the people.
During the Iron Age , what is now Metropolitan France was inhabited by the Gauls , a Celtic people. The Gauls were conquered in 51 BC by the Roman Empire , which held Gaul until 486. The Gallo-Romans faced raids and migration from the Germanic Franks , who dominated the region for hundreds of years, eventually creating the medieval Kingdom of France . France emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages , with its victory in the Hundred Years' War (1337 to 1453) strengthening French state-building and paving the way for a future centralized absolute monarchy . During the Renaissance , France experienced a vast cultural development and established the beginning of a global colonial empire . The 16th century was dominated by religious civil wars between Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots). France became Europe's dominant cultural, political, and military power under Louis XIV . French philosophers played a key role in the Age of Enlightenment during the 18th century . In 1778, France became the first and the main ally of the new United States in the American Revolutionary War . In the late 18th century, the absolute monarchy was overthrown in the French Revolution . Among its legacies was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen , one of the earliest documents on human rights , which expresses the nation's ideals to this day. France became one of modern history's earliest republics until Napoleon took power and launched the First French Empire in 1804. Fighting against a complex set of coalitions during the Napoleonic Wars , he dominated European affairs for over a decade and had a long-lasting impact on Western culture. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a tumultuous succession of governments: the monarchy was restored , it was replaced in 1830 by a constitutional monarchy , then briefly by a Second Republic , and then by a Second Empire , until a more lasting French Third Republic was established in 1870. By the 1905 law , France adopted a strict form of secularism , called laïcité , which has become an important federative principle in the modern French society. France reached its territorial height during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when it ultimately possessed the second-largest colonial empire in the world. In World War I , France was one of the main winners as part of the Triple Entente alliance fighting against the Central Powers . France was also one of the Allied Powers in World War II , but came under occupation by the Axis Powers in 1940. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and later dissolved in the course of the Algerian War . The Fifth Republic , led by Charles de Gaulle , was formed in 1958 and remains to this day. Following World War II , most of the empire became decolonized . Throughout its long history , France has been a leading global center of culture, making significant contributions to art , science , and philosophy . It hosts Europe's third-largest number of cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites (after Italy and Spain ) and receives around 83 million foreign tourists annually, the most of any country in the world. France remains a great power with significant cultural , economic , military , and political influence. It is a developed country with the world's sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and eight-largest by purchasing power parity . According to Credit Suisse, France is the fourth wealthiest nation in the world in terms of aggregate household wealth. It also possesses the world's second-largest exclusive economic zone (EEZ), covering 11,035,000 square kilometres (4,261,000 sq mi). French citizens enjoy a high standard of living , and the country performs well in international rankings of education , health care , life expectancy , civil liberties, and human development . France is a founding member of the United Nations , where it serves as one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council . It is a member of the Group of 7 , North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the World Trade Organization (WTO), and La Francophonie . France is a founding and leading member state of the European Union (EU).
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