Anglican in Burgundy

  Cîteaux This 1650 engraving shows how the great abbey of Cîteaux (Côte d'Or), mother house of the Cistercian Order which had such a big influence on the development of pre-Reformation England, looked a century before the French Revolution. The pictures below show the miserable concrete box that was erected to replace the destroyed abbey church in the latter part of the 20th century. To me it is a sad illustration of the loss of confidence in the Christian aesthetic tradition that has crept in from the 1960s onwards. I tried to pray in it, but, like Hamlet, had the feeling that "My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: words without thoughts never to Heaven go."

Chapaize This is the church of St Martin at Chapaize (Saône-et-Loire), one of the earliest surviving examples of Burgundian romanesque. It was built as a Benedictine priory church in the first half of the 11th century, and has wonderfully fat pillars supporting the walls of the nave: one can see the stylistic relationship with those in Norman Benedictine churches in England, in places like Tewkesbury Abbey or Gloucester Cathedral. At Chapaize, the impressive bell tower also dates from the 11th century: Evidently, English parishes were not the only ones to have had hunting parsons in the past, as the curé of Chapaize, Nicolas Genost de Laforest, in post from 1751 onwards, died in 1783 while out hunting on horseback with the local seigneur, the Comte de Montrevel.