The Abbey Church
The Catholic Encyclopedia avers that "from the very start the abbey boasted of two churches, one in honour of St. Peter and the other in honour of the Blessed Virgin." The church of St Peter was demolished in the eighteenth century; the existing church dedicated to the Virgin pre-existed the founding of the monastery. After the ravages of the Normans, who penetrated via the Loire and burned the monastery buildings, which suffered a catastrophic fire in 1026, this became the great late eleventh-century Romanesque basilica, which occasioned the erection of a great tower, that was intended as the west front of the abbey church, which was completed in 1218. It was here that the Fleury Playbook was compiled, perhaps in dedication to the new church. The tower of Abbot Gauzlin, resting on fifty columns, forms a unique porch. The Carolingian style church is about three hundred feet long, its transept one hundred and forty feet. The choir of the church contains the tomb of a French monarch, Philip I of France, buried there in 1108. Of the mediaeval abbey's buildings, only this basilica survives in the modern monastery.
Read more about this topic: Fleury Abbey
Famous quotes containing the words abbey and/or church:
“The Abbey always reminds me of that old toast, “Above lofty timbers, the walls around are bare, echoing to our laughter, as though the dead were there.””
—Garrett Fort (1900–1945)
“It is the custom of the Roman Church which I unworthily serve with the help of God, to tolerate some things, to turn a blind eye to some, following the spirit of discretion rather than the rigid letter of the law.”
—Pope Gregory VII (c. 1020–1085)