Abbaye de Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives

Saint-Pierre-en-Auge

In 1011, Countess Lesceline, great-aunt of William the Conqueror, turned her own castle on the banks of the Dives into a monastery: a rare gesture, this woman of the high Norman aristocracy founding on her own lands a Benedictine community that she endowed richly and where she chose to rest at her death in 1057. The abbey church was consecrated in 1067, in the presence of the Conqueror himself, a year after Hastings — the abbey was then one of the great spiritual centres of ducal Normandy. A fire ravaged the Romanesque building in 1106; the rebuilding, begun two years later, stretched over more than a century and produced one of the finest examples of Norman Gothic, with its lantern tower and its asymmetrical facade towers. The choir holds a treasure: a 13th-century ceramic pavement strewn with fleurs-de-lis and fantastic beasts, crossed by a meridian line marked with the signs of the zodiac, one of the few preserved in France. Fortified during the Hundred Years' War and sold as national property at the Revolution, the abbey has kept one of the most complete monastic ensembles in Normandy — chapter house, cloister, conventual buildings. The abbey church, now a simple parish church, still watches over the thousand-year-old market halls where the market is held to this day: here, since Lesceline, prayer and trade have never parted.

Getting there : In the centre of the small town of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives (commune of Saint-Pierre-en-Auge), 3 rue Saint-Benoît; the abbey church, now the parish church, can be visited freely. A stone's throw away, the medieval market halls. Town-centre car parks.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound