He was count of Anjou and of Maine. He was duke of Normandy. He married the daughter of Henry I of England. His name was Geoffrey the Bel (or: the Fair), known as Plantagenêt. He was the first to bear the name and was to pass it on to his descendants.

The broom is the flower of Anjou. Is it in memory of that why Geoffrey (picture right, museum of Le Mans) wore a branch of flowering broom in his hat? Geoffrey had a sister, Mathilde of Anjou. At the age of fourteen, she became the widow of the heir to the throne of England who disappeared at sea off Gatteville, in Normandy. That day, in the tragic shipwreck of the 'White Ship', Henry I Beaucler (left), king of England and son of William the Conqueror, lost his family.
[(the Norman conquest) & (The Bayeux Tapestry primary source for the battle of Hastings, William the Conqueror, Harold II and the Norman conquest)].

There only remained his very young daughter-in-law, Mathilde of Anjou, she was obliged to go to Fontevraud and take the veil. Twenty years later, she succeeded Pétronille as abbess.

Another Mathilde also escaped the shipwreck, the daughter of Henry I. It was she, Empress Mathilde, named in memory of her first marriage with the emperor of Germany, heiress to the throne of England, that Geoffrey Plantagenêt marries in 1127. And, when Geoffrey died on September 7, 1151, the astonishing career of a very young man, his son Henry II Plantagenêt (king of England in 1154) started. A year later, he married Eleanor of Aquitaine, repudiated by the king of France Louis VII for infidelity.

This had immense consequences that were to mark three centuries of history. Initially, Henry II Plantagenêt (left), by this marriage, acquired all of South-west France without a blow. The power of the Plantagenêts extended from England to the Pyrenees, an immense stretch of land which encircled the king of France, cutting him off from the sea. Henry then made Fontevraud the spiritual centre of this immense empire. And to prove it, the first visit by Eleanor of Aquitaine as a young bride, was to Mathilde of Anjou, abbess of Fontevraud, Henrys own aunt. The next time Henry and Eleanor visited was before they crossed the English Channel to receive the crown of England on December 19, 1154.

Blood Ran From The Nose Of The Deceased...

All his life, Henry II (left) was to feel strongly attached to Fontevraud, even after the death of his aunt on May 21, 1155. He entrusted his two youngest children to the abbey, Jeanne, who left in 1177 to marry Guillaume II, king of Sicily and John 'Lackland', the '(in)famous' king of England from 1199 to 1216 but who lost all his French strongholds.

Much has been said about the tragic disappearance of Henry II in Chinon on July 6, 1189. He died in a climate of hatred from his two sons, Richard 'the Lionheart' and John 'Lackland' (right). On his death-bed in 1189, Henry II of England assigned St. Mary's of Fontevraud as his burial-place. How did the burial go at Fontevraud...?

While Richard the Lionheart (left) ran to pay a last homage to his father, a chronicler, Benoit of Peterborough, wrote that at the sight of his son, blood started to run from the nose of the deceased, an expression, no doubt, of his indignation. Ten years later, it was Richard's turn to die. Richard, before being killed, in April 1199, under the walls of Châlus, in Limousin, had expressed the desire to be buried beside his father. At his dying-hour he ordered his remains to be carried to Fontevraud Abbey and buried there. His heart was transferred to Rouen and his entrails to the Abbey of Charroux, near Poitiers. Richard was followed in death in 1199 by his sister Jeanne.

RICHARD THE LIONHEART'S EPITAPH

Châlus, in Poitou, guards her Duke's entrails.
His body Fontevraud in marble shrines.
The Normans boast the King's unconquered heart.
Three countries thus the glorious ashes share
Of King too great to rest in one alone.

A Queen Who Died In The Robes Of The Fontevraud Order...

Her Majesty Eleanor of Aquitaine (left), Queen of France and England, Duchess of Aquitaine, Countess of Poitou and other demesnes, was aging and had been at Fontevraud for five years. Her repeated mournings had worn her down. Political dramas, marital disagreements milestoned her life. She played Richard against his father, encouraged uprisings against her husband who held her captive twelve long years in Chinon then in England.

She still supported John against the French King Philippe Auguste... but all her life, she remained faithful to Fontevraud which she covered with donations. In 1194, when she was over seventy, she retired into her dear abbey. In the spring of 1204 (March 31), the queen died (in St. Magdalene's in the said Abbey) in the robes of the Fontevraud order.

Tribulations Of The Four Gisants...

The attachment of the Anjou dynasty to the abbey helped develop the site. It was thanks to the Plantagenêts that the Saint Lazarus priory was rebuilt, with its flat apse church for this small community in charge of lepers. It also enabled reconstruction of the Saint Mary Magdalene priory reserved for reformed girls and the rebuilding of the church of the Saint-Jean-de l'Habit brothers. Fontevraud quite naturally became the necropolis of the Plantagenêt dynasty when Henry II was buried there in 1189. The collapse of the Plantagenêt empire on the continent had just started and the treaty of Paris in 1250 put an end to the ambitions of Plantagenêts on their French possessions. This Anjou necropolis was to continue receiving its sons and its daughters - the "Kings' Cemetery", under the transept crossing of the Abbey church, is the resting-place of at least eight kings, princes or princesses of England. In the same crypt were gold urns containing the hearts of other English princes or princesses, among them John Lackland, who died in England in 1216, his third wife Isabella of Angouleme and his son Henry III, who died in 1272.

Until the French revolution, a mausoleum in an old vault at the entry of the choir sheltered the royal tombs since 1638. Nowadays, only a few remains of painted decoration have resisted time with names, shields and heraldic arms.The 'gisants' (recumbent figures) formerly lay on the tombstones of the princes and princesses whose features they represented and now face the main altar, under the abbey nave.

So much meandering before arriving there! In the 17th century, Abbess Jeanne-Baptiste de Bourbon ordered them to be grouped in a single large funeral monument - unfortunately damaged at the Revolution - resting against the huge northwest pillar of the transept square. These polychrome effigies date from the early 13th century, the one of Henry II being even of the late 12th. They are carved out of a solid block of soft limestone ("tuffeau"), with the exception of that of Isabella, which is of wood. These are very fine pieces of craftsmanship, the equal of which would be hard to find at this period. Originally, there were six of them, but the two effigies of Johanna of England (Jeanne d'Angleterre), sister of Richard, and of her son Raymond VII, Count of Toulouse, represented kneeling in prayer, were destroyed during the Revolution.

Luckily, the four royal statues escaped the destruction of the Revolution. After this, they were moved from place to place within the abbey (then a state prison). In 1810, a historian discovering them among the ruins had the idea of transferring them to the Romanesque kitchens in the Evraud Tower. The project was refused. They even spent some time in Paris to be repainted, between 1846 and 1849. Several times the British government tried to have them transferred to Westminster Abbey. The prefect refused. In 1866, Napoleon III offered them to Queen Victoria, but had to withdraw his offer because of the protests of the French. In 1930, when the floor of the nave was repaired they finally returned, after more than seven centuries of wandering, to the centre of the nave...

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