‘Divine inspiration made me wish to visit the holy convent of the nuns of Fontevrault.’
A charter of queen Eleanor
‘O God, O my God, hear me also a widow.’
The Book of Judith
The foremost authority on Eleanor’s letters and charters, Dr Richardson, has shown that there is little documentary trace of her life between June 1194 and April 1199. In fact she had retired to her favourite religious house, the abbey of Fontevrault, near Chinon on the borders of Touraine and Anjou. Here she had come in moments of peace during the past, and now she returned, instead of going back to Poitiers. Here she plainly hoped to die. Her relationship with Fontevrault, on the banks of the river Vienne, reveals an unexpected and attractive side to the queen mother. It is the key to much of her personality in middle and old age.
The abbey had come into being almost by accident. Towards the end of the eleventh century a wandering preacher from Britanny, Robert of Arbrissel, established a little community on a patch of land near a fountain — i.e. Fontevrault — building huts and a chapel. Men and women lived apart, the former cultivating the land, the latter leading a life of contemplative prayer. Meanwhile Robert himself continued his wandering and preaching, mainly in Anjou and Poitou. His chief concern was to be ‘above all a guide and a comfort to all who were desolate or who had gone astray’, according to his earliest biographer, Baudry of Bourgueil. Robert was such an attractive personality and his sermons were so inspiring that he drew more and more people to his community, especially ‘the poor, the sick, the incestuous, concubines, lepers, the weak and the aged’. It was a time when many new monastic orders were emerging. What made Fontevrault unusual was the number of women who joined it.
Robert did not care where they came from. At Rouen he converted an entire brothel whose inmates followed him home. So large did his community become that he had to divide it, setting up other settlements. Fontevrault itself contained 300 women, as well as the men. Robert found many rich benefactors and was therefore able to build a great abbey at Fontevrault and dependent priories. He gave his flock a rule based on that of St Benedict, but with startling innovations. Each house was to be a double community of men and women — monks, lay brethren and nuns — although Robert regarded the latter as the most important. The head of the new order was to be a nun, the abbess of Fontevrault. She had to be a widow, because widows were both chaste and maternal and were accustomed to handling people and to running houses and managing property. The heads of the priories were also to be nuns. The rule made the monks and lay brothers completely subject to the abbess and her prioresses.
When Robert lay dying in 1116 he said: ‘What I have built, I built for the sake of the nuns. I gave everything for them — my life, my ministry and my disciples.’ He wanted to help all female victims of society, especially those who had been ill treated by men. Moreover he wished to provide a refuge not only for poor women and prostitutes, but for great ladies as well. In his day, marriage to a high-born woman was the quickest way to rank and fortune and the surest means of building a dynasty, as queen Eleanor knew only too well. Men married heiresses and then cast them off to marry richer ones, which was why so many marriages were within forbidden degrees of consanguinity, which could be used later as grounds for divorce. And wives had no redress or escape if their husbands beat them or installed concubines.
From the beginning, Robert separated his nuns into separate groups — lepers and prostitutes obviously required different treatment. The ladies, too, lived apart. They could become nuns, bringing their maids to be lay sisters, or they could simply live in the abbey in their own apartments; in either case they were able to retain something of their rank and status. In the words of a modern American historian, Amy Kelly, at Fontevrault ‘the hierarchies of the world were there respected, the commitment dowries regal, the dignities high, the preferments honourable’. In addition Robert ensured that the abbey should enjoy the highest social prestige and wield considerable influence by insisting that the abbess herself should belong to some great noble family. Indeed the second abbess was no less a personage than Matilda of Anjou, widow of William Atheling, the son of king Henry I of England, who had been drowned in the White Ship. Eleanor, who came to know her well, refers to her in documents as ‘my aunt’.
Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter-in-law, Isabella of Angoulême: from a mural of about 1200 (discovered in 1964) in the Chapel of Sainte-Radegonde at Chinon. Cliché Doloire.
Fontevrault – the twelfth-century kitchen and refectory. Photo Giraudon.
Battered and ill-used wives from all over France flocked to this haven where they could recover their self-respect and dignity. Here they found sympathy and spiritual comfort. Among them were the two wives of Eleanor’s grandfather, William IX, who fled to Fontevrault because of his outrageous behaviour. Another was Bertrada of Montfort, countess of Anjou and mistress of king Philip of France (the grandfather of Louis VII), who became a nun there and died from her austerities.
The new order’s contribution was revolutionary in an age that had hitherto regarded women as being almost as evil as the devil himself; St Bernard once wrote that ‘to live with a woman without danger is more difficult than raising the dead to life’, and regarded noblewomen as the worst of all; he actually called his own sister ‘a clod of dung’. One has only to look at the serpentine temptresses of Romanesque carvings to realize how widespread was this fear and disgusted contempt among pious Christians of the period. In contrast Fontevrault consciously appealed to the scriptural example of the Virgin Mary and St John who took her into his house in obedience to the words of Jesus from the cross: ‘Woman, behold thy son!’ and, to John, ‘Behold thy mother.’ Symbolically, the churches of the order’s nuns were always dedicated to Our Lady and the oratories of the order’s monks to St John.
Even in the twelfth century Fontevrault was widely recognized as playing an important part in improving the status of women and in defending their rights. Its whole inspiration publicly proclaimed their individuality and their value as human beings. Indeed the abbess or domina was probably intended by Robert to provide a religious counterpart to the lady or domna of the troubadours. Hitherto even mistresses had been seen as no more than sexual objects. Some literary historians (e.g. Reto Bezzola) credit no less cynical a hedonist than William IX with being converted to a new concept of womanhood by the example of Fontevrault; his early verse is sensual to the point of grossness, but in a later poem he has discovered the fascination of an unattainable Beatrice, too exalted to be possessed.
Understandably, the order of Fontevrault became extremely popular. Ultimately it possessed one hundred dependent priories in France, together with three in England, which owed their foundation to Eleanor’s encouragement. Most of their nuns came from aristocratic families. Even in the eighteenth century Louis XV sent his daughters to Fontevrault to be educated. As Miss Kelly says, the mother abbey was an asylum for ‘ladies of rank whose worldly destinies were at an end, or the turbulent or merely inconvenient relicts of kings and princes and high barons, or the superfluity of princesses that embarrassed noble houses’.
The ideals that inspired Fontevrault must have appealed deeply to Eleanor after her own experience of men. She too had been exploited and cast off. She had many friends and relatives among the nuns and would have known all about the abbey and its concept of a new and independent woman from a very early age. As has been seen, she endowed it as early as 1146, before she went on crusade.
Furthermore, despite the frivolity of her early years and the misgivings of St Bernard and certain chroniclers, Eleanor was undoubtedly a devout Christian. It was not just that she approved of Fontevrault as a haven for her sex. She was plainly impressed by the fervency of its nuns and monks, by the discipline of its two strictly segregated cloisters; a monk could not enter the cloister of the nuns even to give a dying woman the last sacraments, and to be annointed she had to be carried into the abbey church. It is clear that Eleanor placed a high value on the prayers of the community.
In 1168, when her son John was only one year old, she entrusted him to Fontevrault to be brought up by the nuns. It was probably at her instigation that Henry II endowed the abbey so generously. Fontevrault appears to have become one of his own favourite religious houses, and indeed he was to be buried there.
From 1152 onwards Eleanor herself gave Fontevrault some new gift at almost every crisis or important event of her life. In that year, immediately after her marriage to Henry, she declared in a charter: ‘Divine inspiration made me wish to visit the holy convent of the nuns of Fontevrault, and by God’s grace I have been able to do so. God has brought me to Fontevrault. I have crossed the threshold of the sisters and there, with deep emotion, I have approved, conceded and confirmed everything that my father and my forebears have ever given to the church of Fontevrault.’ In 1170, when Richard was consecrated count of Poitiers, she endowed the abbey, and again in 1185 (perhaps to mark her partial reconciliation with Henry). She did so yet again in 1199, on the same day that her son was buried there, asking the nuns to pray for ‘the soul of her very dear lord, king Richard’.
Furthermore, during that unhappy year of 1199, one of her own daughters became a nun at Fontevrault. This was Joanna of Toulouse, who was worn out by the infidelities of count Raymond and by the rebellions of his turbulent subjects. Attempts to dissuade the countess were in vain, although she was pregnant. She was so ill that she could scarcely take her vows, and she soon died. Her child was born posthumously, but it also died. The queen mother buried them in the abbey.
Eleanor herself had entered Fontevrault in 1194, shortly after king Richard’s return from captivity, though not as a nun. Presumably it was able to offer her suitably regal accommodation; most great abbeys of the period were accustomed to entertaining royal guests. Moreover it was ‘an excellent listening post’, being near Chinon, which was the administrative centre of Touraine and Anjou and in the heart of the Angevin empire in France. From here she could easily keep an eye on the political situation and supervise her seneschals, castellans and stewards. Protected from the exhausting demands of public life, she could hold a quiet and intimate female court; by now she probably had little interest in men apart from Richard, who was often at Chinon and could come to see her frequently. The queen mother seems to have been on close terms with all the abbesses. Above all, it was an excellent place for an aged lady to prepare her soul for death. Occasionally she emerged, but she always returned to this last home.
At the Revolution the abbey was sacked, and the bones of the Plantagenets were dug up and scattered, and the building was turned into a prison. In the 1960s, however, the prisoners were removed from Fontevrault so that a thorough restoration could be made. It is a rambling complex of buildings, part of which dates from the sixteenth century or later, and much of it is undistinguished. But even today Eleanor would recognize the church and the kitchen. The first is a glorious Romanesque temple, consecrated in 1119, with a high and truly regal nave flanked by magnificent columns and lit by four great cupolas. The kitchen is one of the strangest edifices to survive from the twelfth century. In shape it is a double octagon, crowned by a vast central chimney surrounded by twenty lesser chimneys. The size gives some idea of how enormous the abbey must have been in its prime: this kitchen provided food not only for the community but for guests and travellers as well, sometimes feeding nearly a thousand people.