Anglican in Burgundy

  Another connection between Burgundy and England lies in the early history of the royal and Cluniac foundation of Reading Abbey. The abbey was founded by King Henry I, and the community started with a group of monks from Cluny (plus some from its daughter house at Lewes Priory), under Hugh of Amiens as the first abbot, in 1121. Abbot Hugh was then elected as Archbishop of Rouen in King Henry's Duchy of Normandy in 1129, and it was he who ministered to the King as he lay dying of "a surfeit of lampreys" in Normandy in 1135: the king's body was embalmed at Rouen and brought back to be buried at Reading Abbey. Archbishop Hugh spent a lot of his time in England, and was at the Council of Oxford in 1139, summoned by Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester and himself also a former monk of Cluny. When the great abbey church at Reading was finally completed, it was longer than Westminster Abbey and comparable in size and grandeur with Gloucester or Ely. Reading Abbey church wa...

Morimond   The first photo shows the remains of the library of the Abbey of Morimond in the diocese of Langres, which straddled Burgundy and Champagne before the Revolution. Morimond was the fourth daughter of Cîteaux, and was founded by its English Abbot, St Stephen Harding. Another English connection, mentioned in the recent book Raised from the Ruins , by Jane Whitaker, is that it was Abbot Jean of Morimond who was instructed by the Cistercian General Chapter in 1449 to go to England and hold the first visitation of the Cistercian St Bernard's College (later to become St John's), Oxford. The abbey held substantial lands in Burgundy, including vineyards around Dijon and townhouses in Dijon itself. The abbey's former wine depot in Dijon:

  There are many links between the English Church and Burgundy. In the mediaeval period, the astonishing flourishing of the monastic life in Burgundy, particularly through the abbeys of Cluny and then Cîteaux, had an enormous effect on England, as they each established many daughter houses there. Abbot Pierre the Venerable of Cluny was aided in his reforms by King Stephen's brother Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester and Abbot of Glastonbury, in the 1120s-1150s. Henry had started out as a monk at Cluny, and is believed to have later briefly been prior of the Cluniac house at Montacute, Somerset. Henry stayed at Cluny on his way back from seeing Pope Eugenius III in Rome, 1148, and then spent more than two years in exile at Cluny after his brother King Stephen’s death in 1154. One of the four co-founders of Cîteaux, and its third abbot, St Stephen Harding, was an Englishman from Sherborne in Dorset; and the Abbey of Pontigny was a refuge for several key English ecclesiastics during...