The monks flee to Château-Thierry. the name of Saint Cenery first suggests the ecclesiastical history of the place, its surname[1] marks a chief feature in its secular history. The place is still Saint Cenery-le-Gerey. That is, it keeps the name of the famous house of Geroy, the name so dear to the heart of the monk of Saint Evroul.[2] For the monastery of Saint Cenery was but short-lived. When the wiking Hasting was laying waste the land, the monks of Saint Cenery fled away with the body of their patron, like that of Saint Cuthberht in our own land, to the safer resting-place of Château-Thierry in the land of Soissons.[3] As things now stand, the peninsula of Saint Cenery, with its church and the site of its castle, might suggest, as a lesser object suggests, a greater, the grouping of abbey and castle on that more renowned peninsula where the relics of Saint Cuthberht at last found shelter. The forsaken monastery was never restored. The holy place lost its holiness; over the tombs of the ancient monks arose a den of thieves, a special fortress of crime.[4] In other words, after a century and a half of desolation, a castle arose on the tempting site which was supplied by the neck of the peninsula.[5] Fragments of its masonry may still be*
- ↑ On surnames of places, see N. C. vol. v. p. 573.
- ↑ Ib. vol. ii. p. 233.
- ↑ Ord. Vit. 674 D. "Carolo Simplice regnante, dum Hastingus Danus cum gentilium phalange Neustriam depopulatus est, sanctum corpus a fidelibus in castrum Theodorici translatum est et dispersis monachis monasterium destructum." Yet at a later time (see Ord. Vit. 706 D) Saint Cenery still possessed an arm of the eponymous saint, though monks of Seez, not of Saint Cenery, were its keepers; and there is still a bone or fragment of a bone under the high altar of the parish church which claims to be a relic of him.
- ↑ Ib. "Sanguinarii prædones ibi speluncam latronum condiderunt," "scelesti habitatores," &c.
- ↑ Unless Orderic's words just quoted are mere rhetoric, we must infer that the site of the castle, and not the site of the present church, had been the site of the forsaken monastery. Well suited as the whole peninsula was for the purposes of a castle, the actual isthmus, where three small knolls
