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Monastery / hospiceOrne

Abbaye de Saint-Évroult, la maison d'Orderic Vital

Saint-Evroult-Notre-Dame-du-Bois

Dimensions
In the pays d'Ouche, near the sources of the Charentonne, some twenty kilometres south-west of L'Aigle; the ruins occupy the bottom of a wooded valley, beside a pond, at the entrance to the village
Period
Hermitage of Saint Évroult, in the 6th or the 7th century depending on the authors; restoration from 1050 by Guillaume Giroie and his nephews Robert and Hugues de Grandmesnil; Orderic Vitalis a monk there from 1085 until his death around 1142; abbey church rebuilt at the end of the 11th century and then in the 13th, completed at the beginning of the 14th; abandoned after 1790; remains listed as a historic monument
What stands there
The ruins of the abbey where an English monk wrote, in thirteen books, the true history of the Normans

Évroult, a hermit of whom it is not known whether he lived in the 6th or the 7th century, left his name to a monastery of the pays d'Ouche that the invasions had reduced to nothing. In 1050, two families of the minor Norman nobility, the Giroie and the Grandmesnil, raised it up again: Guillaume Giroie and his nephews Robert and Hugues de Grandmesnil installed monks there and made it, within a few decades, one of the most lettered houses in the duchy. It was there that in 1085 a father from Orléans, a clerk in the service of the Montgommery family, brought his ten-year-old son, born in England of an English mother: the child was called Orderic, he would be called Vitalis, and he would never leave the valley again. Librarian, master of the scriptorium, he began around 1095 the annals of the house, completed the chronicle of William of Jumièges, then wrote from 1114 to 1141 the Historia ecclesiastica, thirteen books that run from the birth of Christ to his own time and that remain the richest and freest source on the Normans: it is he who tells of the death of William at Rouen, the servants stripping the chamber, the body bursting in the sarcophagus at Caen, and he too who says what the English peasants suffered. He died around 1142. Of the abbey, rebuilt in the 13th century and abandoned at the Revolution, there remain the façade, sections of the choir and the portico of the conventual buildings, in the grass.

Wikipédia — Abbaye de Saint-Évroult ↗

Further reading

Getting there : By the D 13 from L'Aigle or the D 14 from Gacé; car park at the entrance to the site. The ruins are freely accessible all year round; the interpretation space, free of charge, set up in the entrance buildings, is open every day from May to October and at weekends the rest of the year. A monument to Orderic Vitalis stands in the enclosure; paths lead to the chapel of Saint-Hubert and to the source of the Charentonne. Allow an hour.

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

See it on the map OpenStreetMap Directions

Ambient sound

Abbaye de Saint-Évroult, la maison d'Orderic Vital
Giogo · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

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In the same department

All places — Orne (12).