Bernay Abbey

[3] When Judith married Richard II of Normany, she received a dowry of her father's lands in Cotentin, Cinglais and Lieuvin.

He also made the new monastery a satellite of Fécamp Abbey, resumed construction and put the Italian architect Guillaume de Volpiano in charge of the building work.

After his trip back to Italy around 995, he studied the plans for Dijon Abbey and amended them in collaboration with Upper Italian workers and master masons who were going to work in Burgundy and Normandy.

He also gave his uncle Onfroy de Vieilles important lands in Saint-Évroult and Beaumont-le-Roger previously owned by Bernay Abbey.

[4] In 1563, Gaspard II de Coligny sacked the abbey and looted its treasures and archives and it was further damaged by the rural Gauthier uprising in 1589.

The abbey church was in a very bad state by 1963, when a restoration commenced by the town of Bernay and France's national 'Monuments historiques'.

[1] Built at a time when the duchy had not yet really discovered in its way, the Bernay Abbey represents an almost isolated attempt, prepared by a single surviving precedent, the Saint-Pierre church of the Jumièges Abbey, as a little bit premature work of talented minds and evidence of innovative traits decisive for Norman architecture: the adoption of the stepped bedside, composite stacks and the passageway at the upper level of the transept arm is.

Most of the solutions of the architectural or decorative details appear without obvious ancestry and without obvious posterity, perhaps they were Burgundian imports, which were badly assimilated, but with a local rooting of traditions born at the end of the Merovingian period on the soil of the future Normandy, preserved and deepened under the Carolingians and having managed to survive the ravages of the Vikings.