Charlieu Abbey

[1] Its patrons were Ratbertus, bishop of Valence, and his brother Edward, in a place they called Carus Locus ("dear place"),[2] and dedicated to Saint Stephen and Saint Fortunatus, patron of Valence, with his co-martyrs Felix and Achilles.Pencil towers no more than two meters in diameter encircled the corners of its façade and its apsidal east end, which had a semi-subterranean ambulatory; semi-circular buttresses strengthened the walls at intervals.The community of Charlieu refused the Cluniac reforms of the seventeenth century, and on 19 March 1787, letters patent suppressed the abbey.On 9 September 1792 a Revolutionary mob broke into the abbey's muniments room and made a bonfire of all its records.In 1795 the abbey church was sold for the value of its building materials, in two lots, of which one, comprising the narthex and westernmost bay, still stand today as a ruin; the eastern end was razed.