The history of the Order of Tiron (or Tyron) begins more than 900 years ago, in the wood of the Perche, near the Thironne’s creek, where Bernard of Abbeville, or Bernard of Tiron (1046-1117) founded his monastery. 

Before the current location, of which foundation charter was signed in 1114, thanks to the support  of the Perche’s Count, Rotrou III and his friend, the bishop Yves from Chartres, a first monastery                  was built in 1109 near the pond of Sainte Anne, where a chapel of this name marked the Order’s location.

Soon, a crowd of believers reached the Order’s founder, who hired each of them according to their profession : iron workers, carpenters, blacksmiths, sculptors, goldsmiths, paintors, bricklayers, winegrowers and cultivators. This is how the Order of Tiron was born, thanks to worker monks  who believed in the strict rule wrote by Saint Benedict. Fast, their reputation became such good David the 1^st, king of Scotland and his brother-in-law, Henry the 1^st, king of England (whose son-in-law was Rotrou III, Count of the Perche), invited the “grey monks” to come to Scotland, to built some of the most important abbeys of the country. The king of France himself, Louis VII the Young, made a pilgrimage in 1130. For two centuries, the Order of Tiron, closed to the royalty and the greatests lords of the time knew an apogee, with more than one hundred of priories and among twenty  abbeys in the North-West part of France, in England, in Ireland and in Scotland.