The ravages of time – in particular the 1789 Revolution – have destroyed most of the great monastic buildings of the Cistercian order of monks, whose rigorous insistence on simplicity and manual labour under their most influential twelfth-century leader, St Bernard, was a revolutionary response to the worldliness and luxury of the Benedictine abbots of Cluny. The only places in Burgundy where you can get an idea of how Cistercian ideas translated into bricks and mortar are at Pontigny and Fontenay.PONTIGNY lies 18km northeast of Auxerre, and its beautifully preserved twelfth-century abbey church stands on the edge of the village, where its functional mass rises from the meadows. There's no tower, no stained glass and no statuary to distract from its austere, harmonious lines, though the effect is marred by the seventeenth-century choir that occupies much of the nave. Begun in the early 1100s and finished in the late, it spans the transition between the old Romanesque and the new Gothic, and was much copied in the country round about – in Chablis, for example. Three Englishmen played a major role in the abbey's early history, all of them archbishops of Canterbury: Thomas Becket took refuge from Henry II in the abbey in 1164, Stephen Langton similarly lay low here during an argument over his eligibility for the primacy, and Edmund Rich retired here in 1240 after unsuccessfully trying to stand up to Henry III. The abbey was also the origin of a tourist attraction with which a nearby village is more often associated: the famous Chablis wine. It was the monks of Pontigny who originally developed and refined the variety, and the village and its unassuming neighbouring hamlets are better places to sample the wine than in the expensive bars of Chablis itself. There's a simple hotel-restaurant in Pontigny: the Relais de Pontigny on the N77 (tel 03.86.47.96.74; under €30), but, with more cash, it's better to go for the comfortable Relais St-Vincent, 14 Grande-Rue in nearby Ligny-le-Chatel, 4km along the D91 (tel 03.86.47.53.38, fax 03.86.47.54.16; €40–55; restaurant from €11). Ligny also has a campsite by the Serein off the D8 Auxerre road (mid-May to Sept).
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