The crypt was probably built in the ninth or tenth century, and rebuilt by the Abbé Rambart towards the end of the eleventh. The church above was started by the same abbot, but was never finished according to the original plan, for the west front is a hurried piece of construction evidently intended to serve until some future date when the Abbey banking account should be in a sufficiently flourishing state to give an imposing finish to the building.
The tower of the Monastery, which gives it the appearance of a fortress, was built in the middle of the fourteenth century, and possesses all the characteristics of the most advanced military architecture of the period. Its walls are built of smaller blocks of stone than is usual in similar buildings of that time. The great hall on the ground floor was used by the inhabitants of the Monastery as a storehouse, containing also a cistern into which the water was collected from the roofs, the overflow finding its way into exterior reservoirs.
The most modern part of the Monastery is to-day in the hands of private owners, but in such a dilapidated condition that it is almost unsafe to venture among its tottering walls. These buildings, erected during a period of the institution’s greatest prosperity, suffered more at the Revolution than the older parts of the Abbey. If the florid eighteenth-century buildings were all removed, they would be little loss to the place from an architectural point of view, for their features strike a discordant note among the simple early Gothic surroundings.
The cloisters of Montmajour are not very unlike those of St. Trophimus at Arles, and if the pillars and capitals of the arcade are less interesting in detail than those of the more famous cloisters, they have a more pleasing and less confusing effect in the mass. Round the walls there are several very beautiful tombs with a variety of early styles of arched canopies—pointed, round, and inflected.
Amongst these is the tomb of Geoffrey VI., a Count of Provence, who died in 1063. He was a generous patron and friend to the Monastery, and in the eleventh century conceded, along with other rights, the privilege of claiming the first sturgeon which should be caught in the river between Mourrade de Bourques and the sea. This typically feudal privilege was, until the Revolution, enforced more by way of custom latterly, and a great procession of holiday-making fishermen, with bands playing and banners flying, accompanied by innumerable sightseers, came on rafts and in boats to the Abbey with their offering. Masses were celebrated for the soul of the good Count, a handsome pourboire given to the fishermen, the sturgeon cooked and placed upon the already groaning
board of the epicurean brothers, and everybody was contented and happy.