Hasculphe's recumbent statue | ©Giogo / CC-BY-SAIn 1143, Hasculfe de Subligny, a Norman knight, founded a small chapel in the middle of the forest of La Lucerne… the future abbey!
His brother Richard, bishop of Avranches, recommended it. The tradition says those two ones were the grandsons of a man called Hugh the Wolf, William the Conqueror’s comrade in arms.
Hugh the Wolf? Lupus in Latin, but it doesn’t mean “wolf” at all! No, it means… “the Fat”!
Debauchery, women, robberies made his daily life. He used to live in Chester, England, and “became so fat in middle of his fertile lands that he couldn’t move at all”, wrote Orderic Vital.
You know what? The father of those two brothers, the home tutor of the young heir of the English throne, died with all the British upper crust on the Vessel called the Blanche-Nef, near Barfleur harbour…
Unusual fact: every year, in the night of November 24th, abbey bells sadly ring, in memory of the shipwreck of the Blanche Nef...