Vivat Rex


 

Vivat Rex!







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St Stephen Harding

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St Stephen Harding, depicted in 1125, in the Commentary of St Jerome on Jeremiah now in Dijon library, Bibl Dijon ms 130 fol 104      Stephen Harding (c.1060-1134) was an oblate of the Benedictine Sherborne Abbey in Dorset who left the monastic life and went on a pilgrimage to Rome. On the way back, he passed, like so many mediaeval Englishmen, through Burgundy, where he joined the community of monks at Molesme. Already known for their striving for a more literal observance of the Rule, Stephen was one of the group of monks who then left Molesme to start up the new community at Cîteaux, under Alberic as abbot. Stephen became prior and then abbot in succession to Alberic, and was referred to in the  Exordium magnum Cisterciense  (of 1190-1210)  as having been the "dux et signifer" of the whole Cistercian movement. St Stephen wrote two of the key early Cistercian documents, the Exordium Parvum , detailing the history of the first beginnings of the order, and...
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Reading Abbey

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  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...
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La Ferté

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  La Ferté      The abbaye de La Ferté at Saint-Ambreuil (Saône-et-Loire) provides a link between Burgundy, Hampshire and Carlisle.       Beaulieu Abbey in Hampshire was founded by King John in 1204, as Cîteaux's first daughter house in England, with some 30 founding monks sent out direct from Burgundy. The Abbot of La Ferté, first daughter of Cîteaux, had been sent himself with the founding monks the previous year by the Abbot of Cîteaux, with the idea of originally starting the house at Faringdon in Berkshire, but it was decided instead to set up the monastery at Beaulieu. Beaulieu Abbey went on to establish daughter houses of its own at Netley (1239), then later Hayles, Newenham, and St Mary Graces, London.      The picture below shows what is now the church at Beaulieu, but which was the Cistercian monastic refectory: the steps in the wall led up to the pulpitum from which the readings at mealtimes took place.    ...
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