Notre Dame de Mantes

King William of England attacked Mantes in 1087 and razed the old Carolingian town to the ground (in the process sustaining a mortal injury that killed him soon after), prompting a rebuilding programme that lasted through the subsequent two centuries.

A Collegium dedicated to the Virgin had been founded at Mantes some time before 978, in which year the Countess of Blois bequeathed it several local villages and a considerable amount of farmland in her will.

Both towers had become dangerously unstable by the mid 19th century and were substantially rebuilt to a simpler design by the local architect Alphonse Durand (a student of Viollet le Duc's).

The Collegiate Church of Notre Dame dominates views of Mantes, particularly when approaching from the north or east, where it sits on a bluff above a bend in the River Seine.

From the exterior, its most distinctive features are the large round windows (oculi) at gallery level (see below), the cage-like flying buttresses and the general pock-marked appearance, caused by the unusually prominent putlog holes (left over from where the original builders attached their wooden scaffolding).

This suggests that the original design didn't feature flying buttresses but that these had been incorporated into the plan by the time that construction began on the upper levels (possibly inspired by developments at Paris Cathedral, some 30 km to the east).

The rose window above the central portal is quite an early 'centripetal' type in which the spoke-like colonnettes have their bases outwards and their capitals towards the centre, resulting in a rather awkward arrangement of the segments.

Unusually the glass panels are mounted flush with the inside wall, rather than being inserted into glazing slots - a system also found in the west rose at Notre Dame de Paris.