Abbaye de Clairlieu: A Former Cistercian Abbey in France
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 5
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Medieval
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Duchy of Lorraine, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Monastery
On this page13 sections
History
Abbaye de Clairlieu was a former Cistercian abbey at Villers-lès-Nancy, France, founded in the twelfth century by a community belonging to a reform movement within Western monasticism that emphasized communal discipline, manual work, and restrained architecture. Dedicated to the Virgin Mary, it became an important sanctuary of the Duchy of Lorraine. Construction began in 1160 in a deep ravine near the Haye Forest, and the complex continued to develop until the beginning of the thirteenth century.
Foundation at Clairlieu
Around 1150, Gérard II, Count of Vaudémont, brought the monk Vidric and other religious from Bithaine to establish a Cistercian community at Ferrière, near Chaligny. Bithaine was the community’s mother abbey, the house from which its founding monks had come, within the wider lineage of Morimond. The monks extracted iron for domestic use at Ferrière, but local hostility, economic competition, and disputes between the Count of Vaudémont and the Duke of Lorraine led them to leave.
On 1 May 1159, Mathieu I, Duke of Lorraine, granted the monks a large area of pasture at a place then called Ameuleu or Amerlieu. He renamed it Clarus locus, meaning Clairlieu. Building began the following year, and the monks appear to have settled permanently by 1164. The first community comprised twelve monks and twelve lay brothers, members of the order who generally carried out agricultural and practical work while observing its religious discipline. Vidric led the community until 1165.
Privileges and medieval prosperity
Papal protection was granted by a bull of Lucius III in 1182 and renewed by Celestine III. In the following century, Innocent IV confirmed the privileges of Lorraine’s Cistercian abbeys in disputes over encroachments by the dean of Saint-Gengoult in Toul. Clairlieu also accumulated substantial territorial and economic resources. Its holdings included mills, granges, vineyards, woodland, houses in Nancy, and the Gimels farm. The abbey exercised seigneurial authority over Villers and possessed the Hôtel de Clairlieu in Nancy.
The Great Mills of Nancy were granted to the abbey at its foundation. Jacques of Lorraine, Bishop of Metz, and his brother Renaut, Count of Castres, temporarily took them, but Duke Ferry III returned them in 1257. The group included an intra-mural mill, an extra-mural mill, the mill of Neuveville, and the mill of Barambreux, and several surrounding settlements were required to use them. In 1193, Gauthier of Nancy entered the community and gave Clairlieu three houses in Nancy, his property within the town’s jurisdiction, two vineyards at Laxou, his share of the Saulxures woodland, and property at Remoncourt. The abbey’s dependencies included the granges of Gimées, now Gimeys, Nouveau-Lieu, Hagnévillers, Bédon, and La Foret.
War, commendam, and rebuilding
From 1354 onward, warfare disrupted Clairlieu. Burgundian forces damaged or ruined its buildings during the second siege of Nancy led by Charles the Bold. Further wars caused heavy destruction, and the abbey was rebuilt almost identically from 1485. It was destroyed again during the wars of the seventeenth century.
In 1541 Clairlieu entered the regime of commendam. Under this arrangement, the office of abbot and its revenues could be assigned to a commendatory abbot who was not necessarily the head of the resident community. Henri de Haraucourt, a monk of Saint-Èvre in Toul, was the first to hold the office, followed by Anne and René du Châtelet and then Cardinal Charles of Lorraine, son of Duke Charles III. Charles relinquished the office in favour of the chapter of the new Primatial Church founded by his father. Clairlieu’s revenues were assigned to that church, while the monks recovered the right to elect their own abbot. Charles III ratified the arrangement on 7 August 1604.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century decline
Jean Martin, a doctor of theology, was elected abbot by the monks and governed Clairlieu from 1604 to 1631. In 1606 he established a printing workshop with the printer Jean Savine. The workshop remained at the abbey until 1610, when it moved to the Hôtel de Clairlieu in Nancy, which belonged to the abbey.
War, plague, foreign domination, and uncertainty over the abbey’s governance weakened the community. A seventeenth-century attempt to renew its religious life failed. After Lorraine was returned to Duke Léopold in 1698, a sovereign-court decree of 10 March restored Dom Pierre IV Charlot to the abbacy; Dom Bonnet had held the office in his place. Despite support from the duke and his successor, Clairlieu had fallen into poverty by 1756. A dormitory was added on the upper floor in 1709, but the abbey was dissolved and demolished during the French Revolution in 1791. Shortly before demolition, the architect Poirot described the buildings and enclosing walls as very old and largely in extremely poor condition.
Archaeological rediscovery
Excavations led by Étienne Louis and Professor Pierre Pégeot, with the Association of the Friends of the History of Villers-lès-Nancy and the Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs, took place principally from 1980 to 1988. At the beginning of the work, the remains lay buried. The excavations established the abbey’s location and made it possible to draw a plan because the complex had changed little between its foundation and demolition. The exposed areas included the chevet, transept, first two bays of the nave, chapter house, and refectory, and the positions of the buildings were later marked at ground level. Excavation evidence also points to an earlier Roman-period construction and an ironworking installation on the site. Clairlieu was assigned number 323 in the Janauschek catalogue of Cistercian houses.
Remains
Abbaye de Clairlieu stood in a deep ravine near the Haye Forest. A stream once fed a pond at the entrance to the Clairlieu district, while the monastery’s water supply came directly from the Sance stream. The abbey was arranged around a rectangular cloister court measuring approximately 20 by 21 metres, with monastic buildings around it. The complex was built largely of dressed stone, and archaeological work revealed the eastern church, the principal conventual rooms, and parts of the surrounding arrangement.
Abbey church
The church was an early Cistercian building oriented from east to west and shaped as a Latin cross extending from southeast to northwest. It had three naves and a flat-ended chevet, the eastern termination of the church. The central nave reached 14 metres at the vault keystone and stood twice as high as the side aisles, which were separated from it by massive rectangular piers. The choir had two sections and was about 50 centimetres higher than the transept, the cross-arm intersecting the nave. Two chapels opened from each side of the transept, creating four chapels in all.
The monks’ choir occupied the central nave and contained choir stalls and woodwork. The choir areas used by the monks and the infirm were floored with planks. Seven steps led into the church from outside, and three more connected it with the cloister. Earlier descriptions give the church a total length of approximately 27 metres, while measurements taken after excavation give approximately 46 metres.
The dressed-stone church retained fragments of rectangular bases with simple mouldings, columns, archivolts and voussoirs, cornices, capitals, and rounded or lenticular rose arches. These elements indicate a substantial Romanesque building, a medieval style characterized by heavy masonry, rounded arches, and strong piers. The church had two doors, one made of iron. It contained the tombs of Duke Mathieu I, regarded as the founder, and his wife Berthe, together with monuments associated with prominent Lorraine families.
Monastic buildings
Cloister court
The rectangular cloister court measured about 20 by 21 metres. A cloister is a covered walkway surrounding an open courtyard. The original arrangement probably used simple arcades and large corner piers, but the cloister was completely rebuilt between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Chapter house and monks’ building
The long monks’ building contained a small, shallow, vaulted chapter house with two frontal supports, a monks’ room, and a dormitory on the upper floor. The chapter house was the room where the community met for administrative business and heard its rule. A refectory, or monks’ dining hall, stood north of this building. A prison adjoined the monastic complex, and a printing workshop was noted there in the eighteenth century.
Former calefactory
The former calefactory, a heated communal room, was converted into a kitchen between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. A monumental fireplace was installed during that period. It is the part of the abbey specifically described as surviving.
Waterworks and outer grounds
The latrines stood behind the refectory and were served by a collecting sewer that was later used as a rubbish dump. Gardens, dependencies, and workshops extended farther north. Outside the enclosure, a dovecote stood in the middle of a large water-filled ditch and was reached by a small boat or nacelle. The abbey’s wider agricultural organization included numerous granges, monastic farm estates used to support the community and its lands.
