Colombiers - Saint-Maclou

Colombiers is a small village (pop. 300) in the former marshes of the Seugne river. Life must be hard here in medieval times. Saint-Maclou, the village´s parish church, was erected in the 12th century. It was the church of a priory, dependent from the Benedictian Abbaye Saint-Sauveur in Charroux. The church got altered and modified during the Gothic period (15th.), when it lost its once Romanesque portal.

The carved corbels and capitals all around the apse still exist. One of them has this couple.

Pope Benedict VIII tried to establish mandatory celibacy for priests and bishops in the 11th century, and it took a while, to spread the news. No priory would have dared to portray the "Bishop and his Wife" on a corbel a century later. So the title can only be "The Pious Knight and his Wife".