Marne: fascinating conference on this village

It is a remarkable presentation thatArnaud Sarazin performed this spring at the Barbara Hall of theLeisure Culture Space of Montmirail. With humor, precision and numerous documents projected in front of an attentive audience, the speaker went into detail about the history of Morsainsits central town, its hamlets, its castles and the history of its families who have left their mark on the territory.

One conference per month

“I try to lead the history workshop of the ELC of Montmirail by giving a conference every month on one of the villages located in the Montmirail region,” Arnaud Sarazin already explained to Pays Briard a few weeks ago. This Monday, he did not try to animate this moment in history, he sublimated it, not so much his knowledge, the fruit of his in-depth research on the village of Morsains, as much by the quality of the iconographic illustrations projected on a big screen, in his very personal way of arousing interest, without ever tiring his audience.

This is how he developed at length the origin of the name of this town through the centuries and archives. “We find Morains in 1179, Morci around 1222, Morcini in 1381, Morsins and Moursins around 1395, Morcini in 1457, Morsin in 1731 then Morsins in 1797.”

Presentation of the hamlets

He endeavored to present the hamlets of the village, each time proposing an origin. Thus Les Buteaux would be a name derived from the langue d’oïl (from the north, as opposed to the langue d’oc from the south) meaning small height. Or even Les Hants, “which can be compared to an old French term Hante which is used to designate either a spear shaft, or a scythe, flail or whip handle. We therefore imagine agricultural land. » Everything passes there before stopping at length on Leuze, its fountain, its castle, and on Morsains, there also with its fountain, its Saint-Denis church in reference to the decapitated saint and its castle.

Arnaud Sarazin reviewed the names of the families who marked the history of Morsains with a lot of genealogy work in order to find the dates, the names of the wives or husbands, those of their children, and this, since the middle of the 1400s. The names “de Champagne”, or “Champagne” following an illegitimate child who lost his particle in passing, but also “de Verdelot”, or even “Le Goux”, to name but a few some, have been widely debated.

Anecdotes

Among the listeners, around ten residents of Morsains came, sometimes with documents or anecdotes. Thus, we mentioned the presence of a display case, now missing in the school, which contained flints, probably dating from the Neolithic, thus attesting to the human presence for a long time around the village, but also of Tréfols, of Gault -Soigny, among others.

Each month, Arnaud Sarazin details the history of the villages around Montmirail, “in alphabetical order so as not to get angry with a mayor. »

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