DEDICATION OF THE ABBEY OF OUR LADY OF BONPORT

FEAST DAY - MAY 18

DIOCESE OF EVREUX (1190)

   This abbey was founded by Richard Coeur de Lion, on the 11th of March, in the year 1190.” 

   The abbey of Our Lady of Bonport, or Notre-Dame de Bon Port, was founded on March 11th, 1190, by King Richard the Lion Heart, King of England and Duke of Normandy. According to legend, the king was in peril of his life on the river Seine when he made a vow that he would found a monastery on that side if he arrived safely (in French à Bonport) on the opposite bank of the river.

   The abbey was built shortly afterwards in that place in the north of France in the Haute-Normandy region with the help of many of the local lords. It had been damaged and restored several times throughout its history until its cloister and church were finally destroyed during the French Revolution. Our Lady of Bonport is one of the few remaining Cistercian abbeys in Normandy with monastic buildings from the Middle Ages, including a magnificent 13th century vaulted refectory.

   Before the devastation of the French Revolution, a fine rose-window in the church of the abbey of Bonport, and two specimens of painted glass from its windows, the one representing Angels holding musical instruments, supposed to be of the thirteenth century, the other containing a set of masculine and feminine heads of extraordinarily rich colour, probably executed about a century later, given by Willemin in his very beautiful Monumens Francais inedits. In the same work, two more interesting painted windows Pont-de-l’Arche; some boatmen and their wives in the Norman costume of the end of the sixteenth century, and a citizen of the town with his lady, praying before a fald-stool, bearing the date 1621 will also be found there.