The commune of St Dizier la Tour is in the department of the Creuse, in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of central France.

It is essentially rural, consisting of two former communes, La-Tour-St-Austrille (now known simply as “La Tour”) and St Dizier, which were united in 1848 because they were both considered too small to be viable.

On the banks of the Goze are the remains of numerous Roman settlements and villas which were equipped with their own large artificial pools or étangs.

The village of La-Tour-St-Austrille grew up at the first crossing-point of the Goze, which starts a few kilometres away at La Faye and passes through a glacial valley.

By the mid-950s, more than a century after the death of Charlemagne, his far-reaching Carolingian Empire was a distant memory, split by internal divisions, power struggles and land seizures.

A multitude of large and small warlords, who laid claim to the lands, started to build feudal mottes as a sign of their power but also as watchtowers monitoring channels of communication and places for extracting tolls from travellers.

The area in which the territory of La-Tour-St-Austrille stood was border country called La Marche – “the frontier” – which acted as a buffer zone for the Duchy of Aquitaine against the neighbouring powers.

La Tour-St-Austrille itself was part of Aquitaine, and only slightly further north was the kingdom of France, with the frontier fluctuating between Boussac and Parsac.

An avouerie was an arrangement between a religious establishment and a lay seigneur, who undertook to represent its interests in secular affairs and sometimes defend it in combat.

Droctricus built and endowed a church on the site and in August 958 he gave it to Ebbles, bishop of Limoges and brother of the Duc d’Aquitaine.

The sale of 957 may have been a precaution taken by Rothilde to get rid of property that she knew was going to be disputed and was too remote to be defended from her base at Chaillac, about 90 km away.

In the same general period a pair of small mottes was also built in La-Tour-St-Austrille to act as a toll station for the Roman road.

In the first half of the 11th century the priory chapel of St Austrille was constructed in stone, probably replacing the original wooden church.

From 1200, powerful lords, all belonging to the family of the princes of Déols, took over the title and received the rents of the seigneurie of La Tour-Saint-Austrille.

In that year the priory buildings still existed but they had no religious presence and the priest of La Tour was obliged to say Mass in the chapel of St Austrille every Friday.

In addition to the revenue from the tithe, this included “a house and other buildings situated in the centre of La Tour, of which there remain only ruins, a pool, a mill which has been closed and a domaine in the same place.” The revenue of the priory was valued at 3200 livres in the commune of La Tour, and 890 in the commune of St Dizier.

Also, until the Revolution, the seigneurs of Villemonteix, Orgnat, Vidignat, Malleret, Haute-Faye, the religious communities of Les Ternes and Bonlieu, and the vicairie of St Catherine d'Etansannes (among others), collected their dues from the two parishes.

La-Tour-St-Austrille has retained traces of its exceptional early history and the smaller pair of its remaining three feudal mottes is very well preserved.

Many items were found there connected with daily life in the Middle Ages, including agricultural and forestry tools, hand-operated grinding mills for grain, a mortar, whet-stones, spinning equipment, many pottery fragments, sheep shearing scissors, a drill, an awl and a toothed piece of metal to hold a cooking pot over a fire.