aristocracy in the Paris region, his own role in this process, and the king’s special
devotion to St. Denis. He also wrote two works concerning his administration of the
monastery’s lands and the building and consecration of the new church. A small number
of his charters and letters survive, and his image and his words are preserved in several
places in the church of his abbey.
Suger was born of a modest knightly family probably not too far from Saint-Denis and
was given as an oblate to the abbey. During his early years, he seems to have realized
how the abbey had lost prestige, power, and wealth since the time of Charlemagne and
Charles the Bald; how the reciprocal devotion of saint and king had been a strength to
both; and how the church’s small size and decayed furnishings no longer served the needs
of the monks or the crowds of pilgrims coming there. Throughout his long life and
particularly during his abbacy, it was his purpose to remedy these three lacks.
Suger tells us how as a youth he used to look at the abbey’s muniments and how he
was aware not only of its lost domains, but also how through mismanagement it was
receiving much less revenue than it should. The first portion of his book on the
administration of the abbey, De rebus in administratione sua gestis, described how he
carefully and painstakingly tried to recover what was owed to the abbey and to increase
its revenues. For example, increases came from getting more revenues from the town of
Saint-Denis or acquiring a wealthy priory like Argenteuil,
Suger’s chalice, Saint-Denis. Courtesy
of the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.
but they also came from clearing forests, planting new crops and vines, settling new
inhabitants on the land, enforcing ancient rights against the encroachments of local lords,
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1698