The text at the center of this manuscript purports to derive from a chronicle composed around 1153 by Frère Hervé de la Queüe, a Dominican friar, recording the antiquities of the Loire Valley — the lineages of the Seigneurs d’Amboise, the history of Loches, Beaulieu, Blois, and Châteaudun, interwoven with the annals of France and Anjou. Whether Hervé was a genuine medieval author or a scholarly construction of later humanists remains an open question, but the chronicle itself was rooted in genuine local knowledge of the Touraine.
1538. The manuscript was found near Loches in that year and copied by Jean Moreau, avocat de Loches, from what he described as an older original. Moreau was a man of local standing — the Moreau family held the fief of Vauroux near Loches — and his copy preserved the text for the following century. The 1840 sale catalog, drawing on inscriptions still visible in the manuscript, confirmed this transmission explicitly: “J. Moreau, avocat de Loches, copia ce livre, en 1538, sur un manuscrit plus ancien.”
1604. Pierre Moreau Lochois — of the same family or circle — annotated this same 1538 manuscript in October of that year, adding a title page, a dedication, and other material. He was no casual reader. Pierre Moreau de Loches was a humanist scholar of the second generation of French Renaissance learning, formed at the Benedictine abbey of Beaulieu-lès-Loches just outside the town walls before pursuing advanced study at the Collegium Trilingue at Louvain, where he acquired a mastery of Byzantine Greek that would define his career. He worked as a translator of Greek patristic and Byzantine liturgical texts — among them the Liturgy of St. James and the Choniates Monodie — placing his philological tools in the service of Catholic confessional scholarship during the Wars of Religion. Some of his translations were still being reprinted, without attribution, in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca in the 19th century. Expelled from Poitiers in 1559, peripatetic between Loches, Paris, and the Loire Valley throughout the upheavals of the 1560s to 1580s, he represents the provincial Catholic Greek-philological strand of late French Renaissance humanism: not a grand name, but a man of real learning who kept humanist scholarship alive at the ground level while the Wars of Religion raged. Scholars who recovered his work in 1989 rightly called him “un humaniste méconnu.”
It was this man who in 1604 took Jean Moreau’s 1538 copy of the Hervé chronicle and gave it its present form — dedicating it to Jeanne d’Amboise, Dame de Renel et de Tisanges, a noblewoman of the Clermont d’Amboise line whose landholdings extended from Champagne to the Vendée, and more broadly to the magistrates and citizens of Loches, Tours, Angers, Amboise, Blois, and Alençon. He appended a commendatory poem in verse, invoking Foulques, Thibaud de Champagne, Villon, and the Seigneur d’Amboise who died a prisoner at Châteaudun, casting the chronicle’s author as a herald of Loire Valley history. He signed it Pi. Moreau Lochois, en Octob. 1604, and added a note recording that the manuscript had been acquired at the Michaelmas fair at Loches (“Ceste copie fut acquise a la feste de S. Michel”). A later bibliographer, misreading these 1604 additions, incorrectly described the manuscript as a fresh copy made in that year from a 12th-century original.
1730. The manuscript passed into the hands of Gobreau, at that date vicaire ordinaire of the collegiate church of Saint-Ours de Loches — the great Romanesque church at the heart of the town whose history the manuscript celebrated. Gobreau added an extract on the administrative structure of Loches, drawn from a 1631 printed history of the principal cities of France, describing the town as a ville royale under the présidialité of Tours, with echevinage rights since 1500, governed by a mayor, a procureur, two élus, three échevins, and a greffier.
1740. Now signing himself notaire ordinaire de Lahet, Gobreau inscribed the manuscript to René Rocher, gentilhomme ordinaire of the late Philippe II, duc d’Orléans. René Rocher was seigneur de Vauroux, the fief near Loches whose history reached back to the 13th century and which his father Louis Rocher had held with the same Orléans household title since 1707. The Rocher family’s deep Lochois roots made this a natural local transfer of a local document.
1744. Gobreau signed the manuscript a final time, now as prieur de Saint-Ours de Loches — having risen from vicaire to prior of the very church he had served since at least 1730.
By 1839. The manuscript had reached Paris and the library of Claude Aubron (†1839), ancien premier commis of the department of Titres et généalogies at the Bibliothèque royale, the institution responsible for the genealogical records of the French nobility. That a professional genealogist of the royal library should have owned a manuscript devoted to the lineage of the Seigneurs d’Amboise is entirely fitting. Whether it reached him directly from the Rocher family or through intermediaries remains undocumented, but the gap between 1740 and Aubron’s library is the only break in an otherwise continuous chain.
16 November 1840. Sold at Maison Silvestre, Paris, as lot 890 of the Catalogue des livres anciens et modernes composant la bibliothèque de M. Aubron, ancien généalogiste, 1,721 lots. The catalog described it as “Histoire écrite par frère Hervé de la Queue, jacobin, trouvée près Loches, l’an 1538… manuscrit du XVIe siècle, in-fol., vél.” — a physical description matching the present manuscript exactly, and confirming that the 1840 cataloger was reading directly from the annotations Pierre Moreau had entered in 1604.
Five centuries of documented ownership, entirely within the gravitational field of Loches and its history, ending in the library of the man charged with preserving the genealogical memory of France.