Jumièges Abbey

Two pale towers about 46 metres high still rise over a loop of the Seine, flanking a roofless nave whose walls climb 25 metres in three tiers of arches. With the sky for a ceiling, Jumièges shows the bones of Norman Romanesque more plainly than any intact church could: the rhythm of piers, galleries and windows is left bare, and the scale of what the monks built in the eleventh century is easy to read.

The monastery goes back to 654, when Philibert, a nobleman turned monk, founded it on land granted by the Merovingian king Clovis II and Queen Bathilde. In 841 a Viking raid burned it and the community fled with its relics and books. Monks returned around 930 under William Longsword, Duke of Normandy, and the house grew into one of the great Benedictine abbeys of the duchy. Its main church, dedicated to Notre-Dame, was begun in the first half of the eleventh century and consecrated on 1 July 1067 in the presence of William the Conqueror, freshly crowned king of England. One of its abbots, Robert of Jumièges, became Bishop of London in 1044 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1051, a sign of how closely the abbey was tied to both sides of the Channel. Of the great crossing tower only the west wall still stands.

Next to the main church lies the smaller church of Saint-Pierre, the oldest part of the site: its west front and the first bays of the nave date from the tenth century, while the rest of the nave was rebuilt in Gothic form in the fourteenth. In the seventeenth century the reforming Maurist monks added a large classical abbot's lodge, which still stands among the lawns and old trees. Agnès Sorel, the mistress of Charles VII, died at Jumièges in February 1450, and her heart was buried in the abbey.

The French Revolution dispersed the monks. Sold as national property in 1795, the buildings served as a stone quarry until 1824, and part of the cloister was carried off to England to be rebuilt at Highcliffe Castle in Dorset. From 1852 the Lepel-Cointet family bought the ruins and stopped the destruction. The French state acquired them in 1947, and since 2007 they have belonged to the Seine-Maritime department. The abbey stands in the village of Jumièges, inside the Boucles de la Seine Normande regional nature park.

Getting there

Jumièges lies in a meander of the Seine west of Rouen; the nearest town of size is Canteleu, on Rouen's western edge, about 15 km away. The nearest airport is Deauville Normandie Airport (DOL), about 49 km in a straight line. Rouen, with its main railway station, is the usual starting point by road.