Sleeping in the leper house

 

You need a password before they will open the impressive solid wooden gates to allow you to drive into the grounds of L’Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud.  The old Leper house now operates as a very smart hotel and that is where we stayed the second time in Chinon. 

https://www.medart.pitt.edu/image/France/fontevrault-new/fontvrlt-tombs.html

In the nave of the white stone abbey there are what I first thought were coffins but later discovered were effigies depicting Henry II, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, (always Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn in my mind!) I think the other two were Richard the Lionheart and his wife Berengavia.

The rooms are small since they were designed for monks and patients but are wonderfully “dressed” as they say these days. Medieval tapestries, hangings and furniture, but with comfortable beds and a tiny, but modern bathroom!

We ate in the cloister, where linen cloths covered round tables surrounding le petite jardin. I dined on sandre, or sondre, which still remains something of a mystery as the word, depending on whom you ask, translates variously as pike, eel or perch, which I know are three very distinctly different fish; but it was delicious in a light butter sauce. And I slept well. No ghosts at all, royal, leprous, fishy or normal.

Slighted

When the king ordered castles to be slighted, he wanted them razed to the ground, but sometimes the task was too much and the demolition gang took down only part of the walls. Before the castle could be used defensibly, it had to be restored.
Knights came back from the crusades with ideas about buildings, ideas they’d seen first hand in the Holy Land.
In Romanesque castles and churches, windows were built with rounded arches and passages were roofed with barrel-vaults or groined vaults. Pointed arches suddenly appeared, and Gothic was here to stay. A pointed arch was found to be far more flexible architecturally, and led to rib-vaulting, first used in Durham Cathedral before 1133.
Castles became circular in shape, because the right-angled corner of the old square keeps was all too easy to undermine, and defenders could only see straight ahead through the narrow window slits. Circular castles, with towers that commanded views of all parts made defence easier, and attack harder. Castles built in Henry II’s reign incorporated these new ideas, and often added in small kitchens for making sauces and keeping food hot. Big outdoor timber kitchens still coped with the roasts and the bulk of the cooking.

The pic is Elsdon Bastle House, now a private dwelling.