The double monastery in Anjou founded by Robert of Arbrissel about 1100, ruled always by an abbess, and the burial church of Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Richard the Lionheart.
Fontevraud stands in the valley the sources call Fons Ebraldi, on the borders of Anjou, Poitou and Touraine, a few kilometres from the Loire. It was founded about 1100 by the wandering preacher Robert of Arbrissel, and grew within a generation into one of the largest and richest monastic complexes in France.
Two things make it unusual. It was a double monastery, housing both men and women, and the whole establishment — monks included — was governed by an abbess. And from the late twelfth century it served the Plantagenets as a dynastic burial church, which is why the tomb effigies of an English king, an English queen and a crusading king lie in Anjou rather than in England.
Robert of Arbrissel had been archpriest of Rennes and was driven from the diocese in 1095, after which he lived as a hermit and then as an itinerant preacher who attracted a large and socially mixed following — nobles, poor, and women whose place in the existing monastic world was uncertain. Fontevraud began as a way of settling that crowd.
The community was recognised by Pope Paschal II and the bishop of Angers in 1106, and the first permanent buildings went up between 1110 and 1119. The early arrangement, in which men and women lived together in the same community, drew disapproval and was reorganised into separate quarters; the monks thereafter lived in small priories, serving the nuns and remaining subject to the abbess.
Robert’s decision that the abbess should govern the whole order was deliberate and was fixed into the constitution of the house. Hersende of Champagne led the community first, and Petronilla of Chemillé was elected abbess in 1115 — a working head of a large religious corporation with priories to administer, endowments to manage, and monks under her authority.
The rule made Fontevraud attractive to aristocratic women, and it kept it in the hands of well-connected abbesses for the rest of its existence. That is the institutional reason it could serve a ruling dynasty: it was a house whose head was of the same social world as its patrons, and whose wealth and independence could be trusted to maintain their memory.
Henry II of England was buried at Fontevraud in 1189. Richard the Lionheart followed in 1199, buried at his father’s feet after his death at Châlus — his heart went to Rouen and his entrails stayed near where he fell, a division of the body between three places that was normal for rulers of his rank. Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had made the abbey her residence in her last years, was buried here in 1204, and Isabella of Angoulême, King John’s widow, later joined them.
What survives is the group of painted recumbent effigies, carved in tuffeau and still bearing traces of their colour. Eleanor’s is the one visitors remember: she is shown holding an open book, the only one of the four depicted reading. They are not portraits, and they were made to present a dynasty rather than to record faces, but as a group they are the most complete surviving statement of how the Angevin house wished to be seen after death.
In November 1789 the property of the church in France was declared national property, and the abbey was evacuated by decree on 17 August 1792. In 1804 the buildings were turned into a prison, and they served as one for more than a century and a half, eventually holding some two thousand inmates and acquiring a reputation as one of the harshest in France. The conversion gutted much of the interior; the prison is the reason the abbey survived as a structure at all and also the reason so little of its furnishing did.
The prison closed and the site passed to the French Ministry of Culture in 1963. Restoration followed, the Centre culturel de l’Ouest took it over in 1975, and the abbey reopened to the public in 1985. It is now part of the Loire Valley World Heritage listing. The Romanesque kitchen — an octagonal stone tower of chimneys, unlike anything else surviving in France — is, with the effigies, the building most people come for.