It is located on the outskirts of the city of Le Mans, on the left bank of the Huisne, adjoining the town of Yvré-l'Évêque.

The surviving buildings came close to destruction on several occasions, but their preservation was finally assured in 1958 by the General Council of the Sarthe department.

Her husband, King Richard the Lionheart, had succumbed to his wounds in a crossbow battle at Châlus in Haute-Vienne.

Certain local government figures, collaborating with her mother-in-law, Eleanor of Aquitaine, or brother-in-law, John Lackland, constantly waged battle with the Queen, trying to steal the land granted to her by the French king Philip Augustus.

Saint-Benoit rules maintained that an abbey built outside the city limits should respect the obligations of spiritual sanctuary.

However, the Queen elected to have the abbey built between the town and forest, at the city limits of Le Mans.

Both history and legend suggest that this abbey may also have been built to redeem the fortunes of Plantagenet Kings.

Four years after construction began, the Bishop of Le Mans Geoffroy de Laval placed the monastery under the patronage of both Notre-Dame and Saint John the Baptiste.

In March 1365, in the middle of the Hundred Years' War, the people of Le Mans burned the building of their own accord.

As the monks had left the abbey, the inhabitants feared that enemy troops would seize the building and use it as a base from which to attack the town.

However, the following year the bourgeois of Le Mans decided to completely rebuild the damaged parts of the church.

In July 1940, the German Wehrmacht turned the abbey into a "Frontlager" to house French officer POWs who were taken after the armistice in the region of the Sarthe.

After the war, the elected politicians of the Sarthe and Mayenne regions voted unanimously to buy back and restore the abbey which had been a monastic retreat for half a millennium.

In 1960, Pierre Térouanne found a wholly intact female skeleton in the basement of the chapter house.

Charles Albert Shotard, specially brought over from England, had to intervene and enforce that the tomb be respected.

The Queen's tomb was again displaced in 1920 when it was moved back to the northern transept in order to make room for a monument for the priests of the diocese who died for France.

It would be 1970 before the Queen's tomb would finally be brought back to the chapter house at the Abbaye de l'Epau.