L’abbaye Saint-Médard de Soissons du milieu du vie au milieu du xie siècle. Les premiers siècles d’une puissance, religieuse, politique et économique

Abstract

At the end of the 550s, King Clotaire I founded the Saint-Médard basilica at the gates of Soissons, the capital of his kingdom. The building raised over the tomb of Saint-Médard, bishop of Vermand/Saint-Quentin, who had been buried there by royal order, was intended to be a tomb for the king in imitation to the Saints-Apôtres, the mausoleum that Clovis I had founded outside the walls of Paris close by the tomb of St Genevieve. Saint-Médard was henceforth a protector of the Frankish monarchs, and was all the closer to them as Soissons and the Soissonais were often home to the centre, or certain political centres, of the kingdom. This royal proximity explains why the basilica was transformed into a monastery required to pray for the king and the kingdom in the mid-7th century. It also explains the building’s history during the early Middle Ages and its regular involvement, through either its estates or its abbots, in political matters, as well as the establishment by the Carolingians of an ‘irregular’ lay abbacy which the Hebertians and their descendants held from the early 10th century onwards. Their control of the abbey lasted beyond the monastic reform of the late 10th century and until their eviction from it in the mid-11th century for the benefit of the King.