Fortune Like the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page B

elsewhere, and, at her coronation in May 1152, she was already planning the first English abbey on the Fontevraud model.
    Synchronism is a strange phenomenon, with an intrinsic power which often leads to the irresistible belief that certain things are meant. Thus it was for Eleanor, who first received pressure from Fontevraud to adopt this fledgling community at Hawkenlye in the name of the mother house – for was this not most suitable, Fontevraud also being dedicated to the Blessed Virgin? – at the very time when, just crowned Henry II’s Queen, she had the power to do so.
    Hawkenlye Abbey was spectacular; both Eleanor and the Fontevraud community saw to that. The abbey church and the nuns’ house, up on top of the ridge, were designed by a French architect and built by French stonemasons; the pièce de résistance of the master mason was the tympanum over the church’s main doors. In common with many of his fellow craftsmen, he requested, and was granted, permission to adopt the theme of the Last Judgement; few who gazed upon his creation remained unmoved by its power.
    In the centre of the domed space sat Christ in majesty, pierced hand raised, expression a combination of sorrow and severity. The blessed ones advanced towards him on his right, the Holy Virgin Mary leading them, St Peter ushering them gently along from the rear, sun, moon and stars above them bathing them in the heavenly light of righteousness. Angels blowing trumpets played a fanfare, as if welcoming the good to the eternal reward of being in the presence of God.
    On Christ’s left were the damned.
    If the promised joys of heaven were not sufficient to persuade the sinful to mend their ways, then surely the picture of hell as depicted in the Hawkenlye tympanum would have done the trick. Satan’s kingdom, in the eye of the master mason, was a place of unbelievable torment, with a particular torture, chosen for its appropriateness, reserved for each of the Seven Deadly Sins. Pride was personified by a king, naked but for his crown, being forced to walk on burning coals by two demons with pitchforks; Lust by a curvaceous woman whose breasts were being gnawed by rats whilst serpents slithered into her groin. Gluttony, rotund and fat-buttocked, was upturned into a barrel of excrement; Anger, face contorted with rage and agony, had his skull prised open and his brains sucked out by hunchbacked devils. Envy and Avarice, too busy coveting the worthless riches of others to look behind them, were on the point of being flayed alive by a quartet of demons with ropes and sharp knives in their long-taloned hands. Sloth, fast asleep on a pile of faggots, was bound by a fanged devil while another put flames to his pyre.
    Tactfully, the Abbey’s founders also employed local workmen alongside the imported Frenchmen. English woodcarvers, working with sound English oak, beautified the abbey church interior with their craft, and, kept under lock and key in the Treasury, was an English-made carving in walrus ivory of the dead Christ supported by Joseph of Arimathea, said to have been a secret gift from Eleanor herself. The shrine down in the vale also received loving attention, and even the simple lodgings of the nuns and monks were made adequately comfortable.
    The new abbey was to be headed by an abbess.
    There was considerable opposition to this novel concept, not least from the monks in the vale. But the precedent had been set, and set, moreover, in the community at Fontevraud. Founded by the Breton reformer Robert d’Arbrissel, who, among other revolutionary ideas, believed in the supremacy of women, Fontevraud had fought for and won its right to appoint an abbess almost a hundred years previously. And d’Arbrissel had been proved right; were not women, because of their experience in raising children and running homes, far better organisers than men? Should it, then, have surprised anyone that the same skills required for a noblewoman in charge of her