Abbaye Notre-Dame du Nid-au-Merle: A Former Double Monastery in France
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.2
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Medieval
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Duchy of Brittany, French
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Fortified Monastery
On this page19 sections
History
Abbaye Notre-Dame du Nid-au-Merle is a former double monastery in France, located at Saint-Sulpice-la-Forêt. Raoul de La Futaie founded it in 1112 while leading a religious community already established in the forest, and its surviving church preserves an unusual example of twelfth-century Breton Romanesque architecture. The institution later became known as Saint-Sulpice-des-Bois and gave its name to Saint-Sulpice-la-Forêt.
Foundation in the forest
Raoul de La Futaie had previously been a companion of Robert d’Arbrissel, the medieval religious leader associated with the foundation of the Fontevraud community. Geoffroy Gastineau and the hermit Aubert are also identified with the abbey’s foundation. Raoul probably did not remain at the monastery permanently after establishing it.
Tradition connects Raoul and Aubert with an earlier hermitage in the forest. The memory of that association survives in the Croix and Saint-Raoul Fountain, near the ruins of the former Chapel of Saint-Denis-de-la-Forêt. Ermengarde, the wife of Alain Fergent, may have supported the new abbey as a benefactress.
The monastery followed the model of a double monastery, in which separate communities of women and men shared one foundation while maintaining distinct living areas and duties. The nuns managed the temporal affairs of the institution, while the monks, called condonats, directed its spiritual life and celebrated the religious offices. Both communities were subject to the abbess.
This arrangement imposed strict boundaries between the two communities. Priests did not enter the nuns’ residential area, even to administer the last sacraments. When a nun was dying, she was taken to the choir of the church to receive them.
Names and early abbesses
Twelfth-century texts initially called the institution Saint-Sulpice. The name referred to Sulpice the Pious, a bishop of Bourges venerated as a saint. A letter from 1127 has led to the proposal that Notre-Dame du Nid-de-Merle was the monastery’s earliest name. It later became Saint-Sulpice-des-Bois, while Saint-Sulpice-la-Forêt became the name of the surrounding settlement.
Marie de Blois is traditionally regarded as the first abbess, with a tenure dated from 1112 to 1159. She was identified as a daughter of Stephen of England, although the details of her later career remain uncertain. She is said to have travelled to England with seven nuns and entered the monastery at Stratford at Bow in Middlesex. Her parents then reportedly established Lillechurch, also called Lilleherche, at present-day Higham in Kent, as a dependency of Notre-Dame du Nid-au-Merle. She is also said to have become abbess of Romsey, where Mathieu d’Alsace allegedly abducted her.
The recorded succession of abbesses continues from Marie I de Blois through a long line of women who governed the institution between the twelfth century and the French Revolution. Among them were Ameline d’Écosse, Amice de Dinan, Perrine des Granges, Gillette de Talie, Andrée Belloneau, Jacqueline d’Harcourt, Gabrielle and Antoinette de Morais de Brézolles, and Marguerite d’Angennes de Rambouillet. The later abbesses included Marguerite de Morais de Brézolles, Angélique-Renée de La Forest d’Armaillé du Boisgélin, Olive Claude-Eléonore de Lesquen de La Villemeneust, Madeleine Elisabeth de Bouchard d’Esparbès de Lussan d’Aubeterre, Madeleine Clotilde de La Bourdonnaye de Clermont, and Marie Angélique-Henriette Le Maistre de La Garlaye, who was the last abbess.
Authority and expansion
The abbess was directly subject to the Holy See rather than to the bishop of Rennes. Within less than fifty years of the foundation, approximately thirty dependent priories had been established in Brittany, Anjou, Maine, Poitou, and England. This network extended the abbey’s religious and administrative influence well beyond the original forest community.
The abbey also exercised extensive local authority. It possessed high-justice rights, an audience court, prisons, and a four-post gallows. Its economic and administrative holdings included market halls, a tithe barn for storing agricultural dues, mills, and a large dovecote. The Saint-Martin de Tours Priory of La Bouëxière was among its possessions.
Decline and dissolution
The abbey entered a period of decline after Brittany was incorporated into France. Its difficulties included fires in 1556, 1651, and 1701, a plague outbreak in 1583, destruction during the Wars of Religion in 1595, a storm in 1616, and famine in 1661. The male monastery may have been suppressed during the seventeenth century, although the date is uncertain.
Marguerite d’Angennes, abbess from 1609 to 1662, was the best-known abbess of the later period. Her portrait is preserved in the council room of the town hall at Saint-Sulpice-la-Forêt.
By the time of the French Revolution, the community had fallen from more than fifty-eight nuns to twenty-six members: the abbess, sixteen noble nuns, eight non-noble lay sisters, and one novice. Two chaplains, twenty-four servants, and thirteen boarders were also attached to the establishment, bringing the total population to sixty-five people.
The nuns left the abbey on 13 October 1792. Its lands and possessions were confiscated and sold as national property on 16 August 1796. The complex was later pillaged and demolished in stages between 1835 and 1902.
Survival and protection
In 1853, the church was described as almost entirely demolished by a property owner who had little sympathy for archaeological remains, although some private buildings survived. A section of the complex restored at the beginning of the fifteenth century was associated with an inscription naming Abbess Gillette de Tulle. Further restoration was undertaken by the then owner, M. Evain.
The surviving remains entered the register of historic monuments on 15 December 1926, apart from parts that later received separate classifications. The Notre-Dame-sur-l’Eau Chapel was classified on 26 May 1992. The remains of the abbey church, including its capitals and the ground corresponding to the church and cloister footprint, were classified in 1993, with a rectification in 1994.
The abbey also entered literary history. A chapter of Le Marquis de Fayolle, Gérard de Nerval’s unfinished novel, is set at the site.
Remains
The former monastery occupied a large enclosed property of fifty journals, surrounded by high walls. The abbey church stood near the center of the principal complex. North of it, the main conventual building extended toward the kitchens, with the infirmary to the west. The nuns’ cloister lay northwest of the church, while the laborers’ court, their refectory, the bakehouse, and the visitors’ pavilion occupied the western side. The abbess’s apartments closed the complex to the south in continuation of the church. Farther south stood the banal mill, a mill whose use formed part of the local institutional jurisdiction, together with farm buildings.
Abbey church
Romanesque transept
The principal surviving part of the abbey church is its twelfth-century transept in the southeast of the complex. The church may date from the middle of the twelfth century, perhaps during the period of Conan IV, the twelfth-century duke of Brittany. Its Romanesque masonry is made mainly from sandstone, schist, and granite, much of it original.
The original nave measured 33 metres in length. After the 1616 hurricane ruined it, the nave was reduced by half. A new western wall was built in 1617, and much of the south wall was reconstructed. The section of the original south wall nearest the transept is the part that survives.
The transept is formed from three equal squares: a central crossing and two arms, each ending in a chapel. Two passages berrichons, architectural passages connecting the nave with transept chapels without passing through the central crossing, link the nave to the side chapels. The crossing was enclosed by partitions and reserved for the nuns. These passages are described as the only examples in Brittany apart from the one at Tremblay.
Crossing and capitals
Four substantial round arches with double archivolts, ornamental bands following the curves of the arches, survive at the crossing. They supported the former bell tower. Their carefully fitted wedge-shaped stones, or voussoirs, alternate between granite and schist. The arches rest on four square piers, each strengthened at the corners by columns.
The corner columns indicate that the church originally had a vault. The corbels associated with a former floor are later additions rather than original elements. Eight column capitals retain varied decoration, including crochets, human figures, water leaves, billettes, and Greek-key patterns. Their upper slabs, or abaci, extend across the piers to form a cornice that links the capitals and encircles the combined piers and columns. This arrangement is uncommon.
Sanctuary and painted decoration
The sanctuary was divided into two parts. The vaulted choir proper was occupied by the nuns, while the apse containing the altar has disappeared. Both small subsidiary apses, or apsidioles, are entirely original.
Traces of several colors remain in the north transept, including the doorway of the stair turret and the apsidiole. The surviving decoration includes black bands, green foliage, and red flowers with five petals.
Saint-Raoul Chapel
The south transept arm was dedicated to Saint James during the Middle Ages. It retains almost all its walls and all its openings, although its southern Romanesque window was replaced by a Gothic opening in the fifteenth century.
The arm continues into a slightly longer and narrower building that belonged to the original plan. This former vaulted structure had a lean-to roof and served as a funerary chapel known as the Saint-Raoul Chapel. It can be entered from the south transept, allowing pilgrims to reach the relics without passing through the nuns’ choir. A similar chapel once extended from the north transept and probably served as the burial place of the abbesses.
Albert Le Grand, a Breton Dominican writer of saints’ lives, stated that he had seen the remains of Raoul de La Futaie and Aubert in the chapel. Excavations uncovered two empty built sarcophagi, with the feet oriented eastward, surrounded by numerous coins dating from the twelfth to the eighteenth century. The chapel now provides hibernation shelter for five bat species, including the greater mouse-eared bat.
Conventual and service buildings
Infirmary and cloister wing
The infirmary dates from 1628 and underwent alterations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It now houses the headquarters of the Papillons Blancs association and a medico-educational institute. The west wing of the nuns’ cloister and the visitors’ pavilion date from the seventeenth century, preserving parts of the later conventual arrangement.
Gatehouse, hall, and mill
The gatehouse dates from 1423, while the mill was built around 1400. The seventeenth-century hall is described as one of the oldest earth-built monuments in the Rennes basin. These structures formed part of the economic and administrative side of the abbey, alongside the market halls, tithe barn, and farm buildings that once supported the enclosed foundation.
Notre-Dame-sur-l’Eau Chapel
The Notre-Dame-sur-l’Eau Chapel is mentioned in 1146 and was rebuilt around 1447. It was also called Sainte-Marie-sur-l’Étang and, at times, the ducal chapel. The building survives as a separate element of the former abbey complex.
Separate male monastery and devotional object
La Butte-aux-Moines
The male monastery stood separately at La Butte-aux-Moines, approximately 200 metres from the principal complex. It formed a large square surrounded by a moat. The site has been levelled and can now be discerned only from the air.
Virgin and Child statuette
The abbey’s miraculous statuette is a wooden Virgin and Child approximately eight centimetres high. It was formerly topped by a small diadem and probably dates from the late fifteenth century. The nuns carried it away when they left the abbey in 1792, and it is now preserved in the parish church of Saint-Sulpice-la-Forêt. The fate of the earlier statuette associated with the foundation legend is uncertain.
