The Notre-Dame du Vœu abbey is located in the town of Cherbourg-en-Cotentin, in the Manche department, in the immediate vicinity of the port complex.
It was founded in 1145 by Queen Mathilde, daughter of King Henry I of England and wife of the Count of Anjou Geoffroy Plantagenet. The abbey church was completed and consecrated at the end of the 12th century, as were the kitchens and the cellar. However, it was not until the first decades of the 13th century that the refectory and the chapter house were erected.
Thanks to donations from noble knights returning from the crusade, the monastery quickly acquired notoriety and prosperity, but during the Hundred Years War, the site was looted and burned.
The abbey church was rebuilt by Augustinian canons in 1464, then, from the 16th century, the regime of commendation (which placed it under the direction of civilians or soldiers) and the Wars of Religion were synonymous with decline.
The abbey was abolished by royal decree in 1774. The buildings were assigned to the governor of Normandy during the development works of the harbour: a residential hotel was erected on this occasion near the monastic buildings where Louis XVI was welcomed when he inspects the site.
After the Revolution, the site housed a hospital and then a barracks. While on part of the former site of the abbey, workers' housing was erected at the beginning of the 20th century, and previously, the portal of the Romanesque church had been discovered during works and then installed in a public garden., what remains of the monastery was partly burnt down by the Germans in 1944.
All the land and vestiges were bought by the municipality in 1961 in order to be rehabilitated. The refectory and the chapter house have been restored, as has the west gable of the abbey church. The old hotel of the 17th century is in the process of being. As for the abbey house, it now houses a small museum where the discoveries made during archaeological surveys in 1994 are exhibited in season, in particular the flat tomb of Brother Guillaume de Margueray (13th century). Information on +33 2 33 87 88 39.
