ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the evidence for the houses of Cistercian nuns founded by Queen Blanche of Castile in northern France, at Maubuisson near Pontoise and le Lys near Melun. It looks at documents for several other such early thirteenth-century foundations for Cistercian nuns in northern France, including those at Lieu-Notre-Dame de Romorantin and les Clairets and Saint-Antoine-des-Champs just outside the medieval walls of the city of Paris itself. The chapter argues that Cistercians most often settled in places that were already cleared and cultivated, where they instituted grange agriculture by a considerable investment in reassembling fragmented landholdings. The documents for the nuns elucidate aspects of Cistercian forest management that at least in northern France were probably practiced more generally among Cistercians in the thirteenth century. The Cistercian nuns of the great abbey of Saint-Antoine-des-Champs just outside Paris would appear from the properties considered in their cartularies as having taken little interest in forest acquisition.
