Avranches Cathedral: The Romanesque Cathedral of Saint Andrew in France
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History
Avranches Cathedral was a Roman Catholic cathedral dedicated to Saint Andrew in Avranches, France, and served as the seat of the Bishop of Avranches until the diocese was suppressed in 1790. Its principal rebuilding began in the early eleventh century in the Romanesque period, and the church was consecrated in 1121. The cathedral stood within the town’s walls on a promontory northwest of the old town and remained an important religious and educational centre until its destruction in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
Early Christian and Norman foundations
The location and date of Avranches’s first Christian church remain uncertain. Saint-André, Saint-Saturnin, and Saint-Gervais-Saint-Protais have all been proposed as possible sites. A tradition regarded Saint-Gervais as older than Saint-André and therefore as the first cathedral. One interpretation places an early Christian place of worship there in the final years of the fourth century. Later tradition connected the church with Charlemagne’s visit to Avranches and with the formal entry procession of the town’s bishops.
Viking raids during the ninth century caused the cathedral to be abandoned. Bishop Norgod, who held the see approximately from 990 to 1017, was the first bishop to reoccupy it, but the scale of the destruction discouraged him from remaining. He soon withdrew to Mont-Saint-Michel.
The cathedral is first documented in 1025, when reconstruction began under Bishop Maugis, who served approximately from 1022 to 1026. Duke Richard II of Normandy supported the undertaking financially and politically, while Maugis was its principal promoter. The bishop died soon after work began and was buried in the northwestern tower. Construction continued for almost a century, possibly in two campaigns. Bishop Hugues, approximately 1028–1060, carried the work forward, and the principal parts were completed during his episcopate.
On 17 September 1121, Bishop Turgis consecrated the cathedral in the presence of Henry I of England. The chapter’s theological school was highly regarded during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Lanfranc of Pavia and Anselm of Aosta, both monks of Bec, taught or distinguished themselves at Avranches before later becoming archbishops of Canterbury.
Penitence, warfare, and rebuilding
On 22 May 1172, Henry II of England performed public penance at the cathedral for the murder of Thomas Becket, the archbishop of Canterbury, who had been killed in 1170 after a conflict with the king. Henry knelt before papal legates on a stone at the cathedral’s northern entrance as part of his public reconciliation with the Church. The cathedral acquired the nickname Belle-Andrine, and a seventeenth-century funerary slab and chains later marked the place associated with the ceremony.
The cathedral’s exposed position made it vulnerable to repeated attacks and required continuing consolidation. It was damaged after Henry V landed at Touques in 1417. During the siege of Avranches in April 1450, artillery struck the town’s fortifications, the episcopal palace, and the cathedral. The damage was severe and led to extensive rebuilding.
Avranches was besieged again from November 1591 to February 1592. Governor Odoard de Péricard and his brother, Bishop François de Péricard, supported the Catholic League and refused to recognize Henry IV. Royal artillery bombardment eventually forced the town to capitulate and caused further damage to the cathedral, which again required repair.
Decline and destruction
In 1679, Louis XIV appointed Charles Le Bourgeois grand dean of the cathedral. His brother Louis Le Bourgeois, also a cathedral dean, was a scholar and poet known as the Abbot of Héauville. He wrote a catechism in songs for the Dauphin. By the eighteenth century, however, the cathedral was in very poor condition. Its towers were reportedly ruined in many places, despite the exceptional strength of their original construction.
After the suppression of the diocese, the church became a parish church. Under the 1801 Concordat, the Diocese of Avranches was not restored but was incorporated into the Diocese of Coutances to form the Diocese of Coutances and Avranches. The constitutional priest Rioult de Montbray, appointed parish priest of Avranches on 2 October 1791, then made alterations that weakened the building. On 9 April 1794 he removed the stone rood screen, a partition separating the choir from the nave, and cut into the column bases to improve the congregation’s view of services.
The choir was already deteriorated, and the 60,000 livres collected for its restoration were seized by the state. The removal of the rood screen, which probably had a structural function, allowed the choir vaults to spread and partly collapse on 11 April 1794. Revolutionary legislation also led to the removal of the lead roofing, allowing water to penetrate the damaged building. The cathedral remained in ruins for the rest of the French Revolution.
The structure continued to deteriorate while the municipality awaited repair funds. It collapsed during a night in April 1796. On 21 April 1802, the municipal council ordered the demolition of the last walls of the nave and the clock tower for safety reasons. The two Romanesque facade towers still stood in 1810. Mayor Tesnière de Brémesnil sought government assistance to restore them, while their geodetic value helped preserve them temporarily. The installation of a Chappe aerial telegraph, an optical communication system using elevated stations, on the north tower also delayed their destruction. A municipal decision condemned both towers in 1812, and the last surviving cathedral pillar was demolished in 1835.
Archaeological investigation and later setting
Partial excavations of the nave and forecourt between 1972 and 1977 revealed a first church dating from the fourth or fifth centuries and clarified the succession of Carolingian and Romanesque buildings. The former cathedral site is now occupied by Square Thomas Becket, the present-day sub-prefecture, and the Place Daniel-Huet area. The place associated with Henry II’s penance is marked in the square by a funerary slab bearing a modern inscription.
Remains
Romanesque plan and western entrance
Avranches Cathedral was built chiefly of granite and had a predominantly Romanesque character, with later Gothic additions and alterations. Its early Romanesque fabric included a six-bay nave, paired towers flanking the western entrance portal, and fifteen pillars along each side of the building. Aisles extended beside both the nave and choir, while a two-bay narthex, or entrance vestibule, preceded the western entrance. The organ stood beside this entrance, and one aisle provided access to eight chapels, four on each side.
The principal entrance was on the north side, through a double-bay porch facing the rood screen. A chapel dedicated to Saint John occupied the corresponding position on the opposite side. The cathedral contained nineteen chapels in all. At the entrance, the altar of the Holy Cross stood on the left and the altar of Saint Denis on the right, while the high altar in the choir was dedicated to Saint Andrew.
Choir, chapels, and associated buildings
The five-bay choir was constructed between 1100 and 1121 and followed the model of the Romanesque choir at Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey. It extended eastward into a five-sided apse encircled by an ambulatory, a passage running around the choir and providing access to chapels. Three chapels with apses alternated with two intervening square chapels. A southern passage led towards the canons’ cloister.
The choir, ambulatory, radiating chapels, and clock tower were completed around the beginning of the twelfth century. The clock tower carried a sharply pointed spire, and two large square towers also formed part of the cathedral’s composition. Around the church stood the canons’ cloister, which served as a cemetery and as a passage between the cathedral and synod hall, together with the Chapel of the Dead, the large synod hall, and the episcopal palace. A private passage connected the bishop’s residence with the cathedral through the axial chapel.
Gothic additions and surviving objects
Thirteenth-century Gothic work added the northern double-bay porch, arches, and windows to the nave. Gothic architecture introduced pointed arches, larger windows, and more vertically articulated structures than the massive masonry and rounded arches of the Romanesque church. Side chapels, the southern transept, and the chapter house, the meeting room of the cathedral chapter, were added between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
The cathedral’s furnishings and architectural elements were dispersed after its destruction. A white marble altar was reconstructed in the Basilica of Saint-Gervais, and seventeenth-century choir stalls are now in the choir of Saint-Quentin-sur-le-Homme Church. The Historial d’Avranches preserves a nineteenth-century cut-cardboard model of the cathedral, sculpted decorative elements, and the painting Avranches in 1649, an oil on canvas by Charles Fouqué based on a seventeenth-century work by Nicolas Gravier.
A twelfth-century granite capital is displayed at the Scriptorial. Other architectural elements and a wooden statue are held at the municipal museum of Avranches, including a Gothic limestone element. Notre-Dame-des-Champs Church houses eighteenth-century polychrome wooden statues of Saint Anne and Saint Andrew. These surviving objects and fragments provide material links to the cathedral’s Romanesque structure, Gothic additions, furnishings, and religious decoration.
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