Beauvais (US: /boʊˈveɪ/ boh-VAY,[4] French: [bovɛ] ⓘ; Picard: Bieuvais) is a town and commune in northern France, and prefecture of the Oise département, in the Hauts-de-France region, 75 kilometres (47 miles) north of Paris.

[citation needed] De Bello Gallico II 13 reports that as Julius Caesar was approaching a fortified town called Bratuspantium in the land of the Bellovaci, its inhabitants surrendered to him when he was about 5 Roman miles away.

Much of the older part of the city was all but destroyed, and the cathedral was badly damaged before being liberated by British forces on 30 August 1944.

[14] The city's cathedral, dedicated to Saint Peter (Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais), in some respects, the most daring achievement of Gothic architecture, consists only of a transept and quire with apse and seven apse-chapels.

The small Romanesque church of the 10th century known as the Basse Oeuvre occupies the site destined for the nave; much of its east end was demolished to make room for the new cathedral.

Begun in 1247, under Bishop William of Grès (Guillaume de Grès, Guillaume de Grez), an extra 5 metres (16 feet) were added to the height, to make it the tallest cathedral in Europe: the work was interrupted in 1284 by the collapse of the vaulting of the choir, a disaster that produced a temporary failure of nerve among the masons working in Gothic style.

The church possesses an elaborate astronomical clock (1866) and tapestries of the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries; but its chief artistic treasures are stained glass windows of the thirteenth, fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the most beautiful of them from the hand of the Renaissance artist, Engrand Le Prince, a native of Beauvais.

To him also due to some of the stained glass in St. Etienne, the second church of the town, and an interesting example of the transition stage between the Romanesque and Gothic styles.

[5] During the Middle Ages, on 14 January, the Feast of Asses was celebrated in the Beauvais Cathedral, in commemoration of the Flight into Egypt.

[16] The episcopal palace, now housing the Musée départemental de l'Oise, was built in the 16th century, partly upon the Gallo-Roman fortifications.

[5] The church of Saint-Étienne is a Romanesque-Gothic building (early 12th-late 16th centuries), including, in one of its transept's portals, a sculpture of the "Wheel of fortune".

[17] The railway station, Gare de Beauvais, opened in 1857 is currently served by several TER lines: Beauvais–Tillé Airport, dating from the 1930s, lies in the north of the city, in Tillé.

Also present since 1986 is RS Components, founded by Jerry Vaughan, and now operating from a purpose-built distribution centre to the east of the town Beauvais also has a small airport, Beauvais Tillé, which is used by several low-cost carriers and charter airlines such as Ryanair as a terminal for nearby Paris, to which frequent shuttle buses run.