Abbey of Saint Wandrille

Wandrille, being of the royal family of Austrasia, held a high position in the court of his kinsman Dagobert I, but wishing to devote his life to God, he retired to the abbey of Montfaucon-d'Argonne, in Champagne, in 629.

In 648 he returned to Normandy and established the monastery of Fontenelle,[2] using the Rule of Saint Columbanus, which he had known at Bobbio; the deed of gift of the land is dated 1 March 649.

After more than a century in temporary accommodation at Chartres, Boulogne, Saint-Omer and Ghent, the community was at length brought back to Fontenelle by Abbot Maynard in 966 and a restoration of the buildings was again undertaken.

One of the most notable of its early copyists was Harduin (Haduin), a mathematician (died 811) who wrote with his own hand four copies of the Gospels, one of Paul the Apostle's Epistles, a psalter, three sacramentaries, and many other volumes of homilies and lives of the saints, besides numerous mathematical works.

The Capitularia regum Francorum, a collection of royal capitularies, was compiled under Abbot Ansegisus in the 9th century, who also commissioned a chronicle of the abbey, the Gesta abbatum Fontanellensium.

In 1631 the central tower of the church suddenly fell, ruining all the adjacent parts, but fortunately without injuring the beautiful cloisters or the conventual buildings.

It was just at this time that the newly formed Congregation of Saint Maur was reviving the monasticism of France, and the commendatory abbot Ferdinand de Neufville invited them to take over the abbey and do for it what he himself was unable to accomplish.

Not only did they restore the damaged portion of the church, but they added new wings and gateways and also built a great chapter-hall for the meetings of the general chapter of the Maurist congregation.

The church was partially demolished, but the rest of the buildings served for some time as a factory and later passed into the possession of the de Stacpoole family, to be turned to domestic uses.

George Stanislaus, 3rd Duke de Stacpoole, who had become a priest and a domestic prelate of the pope, and who lived at Fontenelle until his death in 1896, restored the entire property to the French Benedictines (Solesmes Congregation), and a colony of monks from Ligugé Abbey settled there in 1893, under Joseph Pothier as superior.