The Life of Blessed Bernard of Tiron life of Blessed Bernard of Tiron

CHAPTER 9 Monastery Built on the Thironne River. Favors Granted by Count Rotrou

CHAPTER 9 Monastery Built on the Thironne River. Favors Granted by Count Rotrou 77. At that time, so that Bernard, soldier of Christ, would not lack toil and tribulation to combat, the monks of SaintDenis said that they were entitled to the tithes and burial fees! of the very tract that Count Rotrou had given to him. This malicious claim forced him to abandon the buildings that his disciples had constructed so laboriously and to seek another site where he might be allowed to dwell. Therefore he went to the above-mentioned Ivo, the venerable bishop of the celebrated cathedral of Chartres, dedicated in honor of Holy and Ever-Virgin Mary,2 and to the canons at that time, and he asked them to give 1. Monasteries both paid and were owed tithes. Local inhabitants paid tithes on their domestic production to the overlord or to a monastery. If they owed tithes to Tiron, the monastery's income was reduced when the tithes were paid to SaintDenis . In addition, persons who cleared and cultivated wasteland eventually owed noval tithes on the new land under production. See Giles Constable, Monastic Tithes, ftom their Origins to the Twelfth Century, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, new series, 10 (Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry Press, 1964), 105-6. In II29, Saint-Denis turned over the tithe on Old Tiron to Tiron Abbey (Merlet, Cartulaire de Tiron, r:r39-40, no. II8). Some ofthese tithes seem to be noval tithes on fields, vineyards, and a garden or wheat field cleared and planted by Bernard's disciples at Tiron-Brunelles. If Saint-Denis imposed both noval tithes and burial fees during an epidemic and famine, the financial strain might well have forced Bernard to move his fuundation out ofthe parish ofBrunelles into the adjacent parish ofGardais. 2. Chartres has been a pilgrimage center for the veneration of Mary since the seventh century. him a very small portion of a farm that they owned, contiguous to his little property, on which he might found his monastery. The canons owned a hamlet named Gardais adjacent to the little tract that the count had given to the man ofGod. The canons received the servant of God with due veneration, listened to him with kindness and good will, and, in their noble magnificence and generous munificence, granted him more land than he had requested. Once the donation was made, they drew up the charter3 and sent Lord Geoffrey, a cathedral canon and the provost of that property, with some other persons, to inspect the tract.4 After they came to the aforesaid farm alongside the stream called the Thironne, as the cathedral chapter had decreed, they gave him the tract he had requested to build the workrooms of his monastery, in freehold5 as they themselves had held it. 78. At that time, a matron born of royal lineage named Adela , countess of Blois,6 made several offers to the holy Bernard of broader expanses of land on which to build his monastery and 3. A charter dated February 3, 1II4, confirms that the chapter at Chartres granted Bernard a carucate of land in the parish of Gardais (Merlet, Cartulaire de Tiron, 1:1-2, no. I). In 1II4 Rotrou gave Tiron-Gardais a cemetery, which was consecrated by Ivo of Chartres with a statement that the monastery was under his protection (ibid., 13-14, no. 2). A duplicate is in the letters of Ivo, bishop of Chartres (PL 162:028JA-D, no. 283). 4. Beck (Saint-Bernard, 400, n. e) notes that Canon Geoffrey II of Uves held the provostship of Fontenay-sur-Eure, ofwhich the parish of Gardais was a dependency . The property was contiguous to the first foundation at the swamp that was the source of the Thironne River but extended to the east toward the hamlet of Gardais and lay outside the boundary ofthe parish of Brunelles. 5. Tiron Abbey had title to the land for an indeterminate duration and held it in free tenure, owing the overlord certain free services. 6. Adela, the third daughter of William the Conqueror, duke of Normandy, born after her father became king of England and hence of royal blood, was married to Stephen-Henry, count ofBlois and Chartres, in ro84. Pious, literary, and an excellent administrator, upon her husband's death in II02 during the First Crusade she acted as regent during the minoriry of his successor, her second son, Thibaut. In II22 Adela entered the convent ofMarcigny, where she...