“Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless? …the deeper we delve and the farther we press and grope into the underworld of the past, the more totally unfathomable become those first foundations of humankind, of its history and civilization, for again and again they retreat farther into the bottomless depths…” – Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers
For as far back as the records reach—into the late fifteenth century—the Chastain name recurs with striking regularity in the surviving documents of Vesc. And for it to appear so steadily, the family must already have had deep roots there. It is tempting, then, to sink further into that well of the past to see what may still be glimpsed. At first, there is light enough for clear outlines.
After centuries of instability and population decline in Europe, due in part to Viking and Saracen raids, Vesc was among many towns founded during the rapid population growth of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. New settlements were established as forests were cleared and marshlands were drained for farm land to accommodate the growing population.
In places like Vesc, local lords, such as the Bishops of Die, an important town to the north, would strike deals with settlers. The settlers would receive advances in money or land (or at least the right to work the land) in exchange for clearing it and settling on it. The settlers gained a livelihood; the lords gained revenue.
Vesc emerged in the fragmented world that followed the dissolution of Charlemagne’s Frankish Empire. Many European lands were no longer under the rule of vast kingdoms or empires but under overlapping layers of dukes, counts, local lords and even bishops and other church leaders. The village stood in the counties of Valentinois-Diois, where secular counts and the bishops of Die contested authority. At one point, no fewer than twenty secular and ecclesiastical lords claimed taxes, tithes, or fealty from Vesc’s inhabitants. For a time, the region was also incorporated into the Holy Roman Empire, adding yet another layer of allegiance.
A neighbor to the north, the County of Albon, was an independent principality also with ties to the Holy Roman Empire. One of the counts, having an extreme fondness for dolphins, changed the name of the county to Dauphiné and gave himself the title Dauphin. In 1349, the last Dauphin, Humbert II, sold his lands to the King of France. The last Count of Valentinois-Diois followed suit in 1419. These territories were merged into the Province of Dauphiné under the French crown during the reign of Charles VI.
Through these centuries, our Chastain ancestors lived amid profound upheaval—watching armies march past during the Crusades, burying those lost to the Black Death, and enduring the turmoil of the Hundred Years’ War—all while Europe transformed culturally and politically from the High Middle Ages into the Renaissance.
The light through these waters begins to fade dramatically as we go beyond Charlemagne back to Clovis, the first king of the Franks, whose reign began in 481 AD. Before him, this region formed part of the Kingdom of Burgundy, established by the Burgundians, a Germanic people who settled here after Rome’s fall. During the time of the Roman Republic and Empire itself, Gaul was the name for France, and this part was Gallia Narbonensis, a province of Rome since the 120s BC, many decades before Julius Caesar conquered the rest of Gaul.
The Iron Age Celts who settled in this part of Gaul before the Roman conquest were the Vocontii. Like many Celtic tribes across Europe, they dotted the landscape with hilltop fortresses known as oppida. Evidence suggests there was an oppidum at Vesc itself, as well as another several miles to the south at Le Pègue—a prosperous walled town and one of the region’s most important economic centers.
If we continue our descent beyond this point, the murkier and more uncertain everything becomes, until we reach those depths where almost no light penetrates at all; where we can only speculate and wonder.
In the 1980s, a Copper Age burial site was discovered in a cave near Vesc, dating to before 3000 BC. After the Alpine glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, Neolithic farming cultures settled the area. Earlier still, the region lay uninhabited for a time, too close to the glaciers. Before that came the Paleolithic—the Old Stone Age—when nomadic hunters followed reindeer herds for food and clothing. And deeper still, near the very bottom of the well of the past, are the mysterious and awe‑inspiring cave paintings for which France is so famous.
This part of the story, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, Antiquity, and even Prehistory, is ripe for exploration, and maybe we will revisit it once our main story is told, but there’s a danger of getting stuck in these depths. So, for now, we must head back towards the surface where there is more light and be content with a more recent starting point or we will never reach the end of our story.
Though the surname appears in records as early as the 1400s, the first Chastain to appear clearly and solidly out of the mists of history — the first we can name and recognize as our direct ancestor — is Elie Chastain. He was born in Vesc in 1606 into a Huguenot family; French Protestants within a Catholic kingdom, struggling for the right to practice their faith. Elie’s birth came just eight years after King Henri IV promulgated the Edict of Nantes in 1598. The edict granted Protestants a temporary measure of toleration after decades of grueling and vicious fighting during the bloody civil wars known as the French Wars of Religion.
So now, with all of the preliminaries out of the way, it is with Elie at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century that we will start our story.
