Vendôme: The Flamboyant Façade of the Trinité and Its Romanesque Bell Tower

Required Activities

• Work across the west front of the Trinité, built from 1506 by Jean de Beauce with Gilles de Jarnay as his second and eighty men on the site, and find where the soft Rocheboyau stone it is cut from has weathered back and where it has held its edge

• Stand back far enough to take in the whole of the 80 m bell tower, raised around 1140 to 1150 so that the abbey could be seen from every side against the bishop's cathedral at Chartres, and compare its spire with photographs of Chartres' old south tower — scholars have argued that Vendôme's came first and the dating is too loose to settle it

• Follow the channels the Loir divides into at the entrance to the town and work out where the old island was, crossing by the porte Saint-Georges that the countess Marie de Luxembourg had rebuilt, then walk into the quartier Rochambeau — a quarter of the historic centre, made out of the abbey's own buildings when the cavalry moved in

• In the transept that Abbot Hamelin had raised, re-windowed and vaulted between 1203 and 1222, work out where the Holy Tear was shown — the relic Geoffroy Martel gave the abbey in 1047, which drew pilgrims here from as far as the Low Countries and was worth enough that the abbey's own treasurer was tried in 1413 for robbing its offertory box

• Find the Virgin and Child window, made under Abbot Geoffroi between 1093 and 1132 when the house had a hundred monks in it, and compare its drawing with the flamboyant glass four hundred years younger elsewhere in the church