Ferrières Abbey

Represented in the famous Monasticon Gallicanum, it seems clear that the abbey (despite a tradition based on the Acts of Saint Savinian and a forged charter of Clovis I, dated 508) was founded in about 630 by Columbanus, an Irish monk.

One of these, preserved at the Vatican library (Reg.1573), recalls the memory of Aldric of Le Mans (d. 836), Abbot of Ferrières before he became Archbishop of Sens.

The Carolingian kings Louis III and his brother Carloman held their joint coronation at the abbey in 879, and were later buried there.

Among the last names in the imperfect list of the abbots of Ferrières is that of Louis de Blanchefort, who in the 15th century almost entirely restored the abbey after it was burnt down by the English in the Hundred Years' War.

Odet de Coligny (abroad by then, and abbot of the abbey until shortly beforehand) only intervened to stop this after three days when his own financial interests in the benefice seemed threatened.

After suffering this and other severe damage during the Wars of Religion, Ferrières was rebuilt in the 17th century by the prior Guillaume Morin, but then disappeared with all the ancient abbeys at the time of the French Revolution, and its treasures and library were ruined and scattered.

The volume of the nave was doubled by a unique second nave to its left, destroyed in 1739 by the collapse of the crossing tower - one can also sees the great arcades linking the two, whose bases (laid out today in bricks) alternated between one big column and two doubled smaller ones (as at the collegiate church of Champeaux, at Saint-Martin de Champeaux; the doubling-up and the decoration betray the influence of Sens Cathedral).

The glass-windows of the apse date back to the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th, ordered by Louis of Blancafort or his successor Pierre de Martigny (1518-1527).