---
title: "On a Burgundy hilltop, after Rome fell, someone kept the floors warm"
description: "At Mesmont, west of Dijon, excavators have found a possible palace with a Roman hypocaust next to a church that may date to the fifth century"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-14T23:24:03Z
modified: 2026-10-15T03:16:57Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/on-a-burgundy-hilltop-after-rome-fell-someone-kept-the-floor-177472
language: en
tags: ["archaeology", "history", "france", "roman", "medieval", "europe"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# On a Burgundy hilltop, after Rome fell, someone kept the floors warm

*At Mesmont, west of Dijon, excavators have found a possible palace with a Roman hypocaust next to a church that may date to the fifth century*

By Jan Sokol · October 14, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/on-a-burgundy-hilltop-after-rome-fell-someone-kept-the-floor-177472

## In brief

- Excavations at the Montagne de Saint-Laurent, Mesmont, about 20 km west of Dijon, have revealed a possible early medieval palace
- The site was occupied from the 5th to the early 8th century, and a new research programme there began in 2019
- Stone buildings next to the church had a Roman-style hypocaust underfloor heating system
- The church, about 27.5 m long, has an apse and has yielded more than 500 glass fragments since 2019
- Written sources link the area to a senatorial family, but the buildings’ occupants have not been identified

Empires end the way most things end. Nobody announces it. The legions leave, the tax collectors stop coming, a king with an unfamiliar name takes the province, and the people who were rich before work out how to stay rich. On a hill above the Ouche valley in Burgundy, some of them seem to have managed it, and they also managed to keep their floors warm.

The hill is the Montagne de Saint-Laurent, at Mesmont, about 20 kilometres west of Dijon. As [Leman Altuntaş reported for *Arkeonews*](https://arkeonews.net/1500-year-old-palace-with-roman-heating-system-discovered-on-a-hilltop-in-france/), excavations directed by the archaeologist Antoine Guicheteau have exposed a settlement that thrived from the fifth century to the early eighth. Its stone buildings stand next to an early Christian church, and they have traces of Roman underfloor heating. The French archaeological institute Inrap, where Guicheteau works, has published its account under a question: [a palace on the Montagne de Saint-Laurent?](https://www.inrap.fr/un-palais-sur-la-montagne-de-saint-laurent-mesmont-cote-d-or-20983)

## The hill

The summit is broad and the slopes are steep, and from the top the Burgundian countryside lies open below. That is good ground for anyone who wants room to build, protection, and a view of whoever is coming.

![A vintage engraving shows a hilltop village and church atop steep cliffs, surrounded by wooded slopes, winding roads, patchwork farmland, distant mountains, and clouds.](https://rews.cc/img/58c52b3c130217e2bcf7fe930d6c254b45a388e7.webp)

People have been digging and picking things up here for a long time. *Arkeonews* says the hill has been explored since the nineteenth century, while the university laboratory ARTEHIS, describing the [research programme on the site](https://artehis.ube.fr/appel-a-fouilleurs-la-montagne-de-saint-laurent-a-mesmont-21-archeologie-dun-site-de-hauteur-2/), dates the first reported finds to the eighteenth. The laboratory adds that the plateau has been occupied since the Neolithic. In 2019 a new campaign began, combining surveys, test pits and excavation, and according to ARTEHIS the geophysical and LiDAR surveys revealed a carefully organised settlement laid out around a central spur at the summit. Until then the hill had been taken for a refuge. It turned out to have been a seat of power.

## Warm floors

The latest season uncovered a stone building of roughly 15 by 12 metres beside the remains of the church. Its walls are thick and its mortar was carefully made, and it may have had an upper storey. South of the church lies a second building, more than 20 metres long, whose width is still unknown because the excavators have not yet exposed all of it. Together the buildings covered several hundred square metres.

Then there is the heat. The archaeologists found small stone pillars, pieces of ceramic pipe and the remains of raised floors. These are the parts of a hypocaust, the system Roman baths and Roman villas used to send warm air under the floors of the rooms above. It was expensive to build and expensive to run, and few households in early medieval Gaul could have afforded one. Inrap describes this kind of installation as typical of the residences of high-ranking people who could pay skilled craftsmen, brickmakers and lime burners among them.

![A woodcut-style cutaway shows a furnace sending hot air beneath a stone floor supported by brick pillars and upward through a wall flue.](https://rews.cc/img/03efa3388d631f5500db769a431f9423abef8ded.webp)

The comfort was not new on the hill. Earlier work on the plateau had already found a fifth-century building with a heated floor. In the sixth and seventh centuries it was replaced by a larger residence, about 22 metres long, with a central room, rooms opening off it and a gallery along the front. Weapons and clothing accessories came out of the residential area. A dig recorded in *Archéologie médiévale* in 2021 already listed [“aristocratic residence” among its keywords](https://inrap.hal.science/hal-03674081).

A reflection, and only that: when a state collapses, the first things to disappear are usually its roads, its courts and its coins. The bathhouse habits of the wealthy tend to last longer.

## The church

Beside the residence stood the church, which may go back to the fifth century. It is about 27.5 metres long and 12.4 metres across at its widest point, and it ends in an apse. The excavators have identified features of Christian worship, including traces of what may have been a wooden screen dividing the sanctuary from the congregation.

It was a well-furnished building. Since 2019 more than 500 fragments of glass have been recovered, and around 50 of them may have come from its windows. Pieces of lamps and glass vessels have been found as well. Placing the house of the powerful next to the house of God was no accident in the early medieval world, where churches were becoming attached to local centres of authority. At Mesmont that link can be seen in the ground plan.

![A green glass oil lamp hangs in a stone interior beside an arched window, with green glass shards on the sill and dark wooden paneling.](https://rews.cc/img/c89a25ba92b40e802e5d3e01d660a5bffb536e20.webp)

## After Rome

The Western Roman Empire fell in the fifth century. The Burgundians set up a kingdom in the region, and in 534 it came under Frankish rule. The rulers changed, but much of the old order stayed in place: the building techniques, the religious practices and the habits of administration.

Mesmont grew in that half-changed world. Medieval records link the area to the pagus Magnimontensis, an administrative district, which suggests the hill mattered in the region. Written sources also connect it with prominent churchmen, among them Gregory of Langres and his grandson Eustace. Inrap says those texts tie Mesmont to a leading senatorial family, but it is careful on one point: researchers have not established who actually lived in the buildings now coming out of the ground. Documents can name a family, but they cannot show which family slept above these particular warm floors.

Pottery and radiocarbon dates put the occupation between the fifth and the early eighth century. According to ARTEHIS, the complex kept its basic layout for most of that time. Then the hilltop declined, perhaps because activity moved to nearby Sombernon. Power on a hill tends to last only as long as the reason for being on the hill. Elsewhere in Europe, as at [Otto the Great’s lost palace](https://rews.cc/a/a-thousand-years-under-the-hill-the-lost-palace-of-otto-the--9bf3a3), the earth has hidden such places for centuries.

Guicheteau and his team are still digging, trying to work out how the rooms were used and how the settlement changed over three centuries. The southern building’s full width is still under the soil.