Aître Saint-Maclou
A haunting medieval plague cemetery and charnel house whose timbered galleries are carved with skulls, crossbones and the tools of the gravedigger. Opened in 1348 to receive victims of the Black Death, it is one of the last surviving cemetery galleries in France.
About this place
The Aître Saint-Maclou is a rare survival from the age of the plague. It was opened in 1348, during the Black Death, when the Great Plague killed roughly three quarters of this parish and the small churchyard beside Saint-Maclou could no longer cope with the dead. As the cemetery filled over the following centuries, the old bones were exhumed and stored in wooden galleries raised around the courtyard between 1526 and 1533, forming an open air ossuary. Those timbered galleries are carved with a grim catalogue of mortality, skulls and crossed bones, shovels, picks and coffins, and a long frieze of the danse macabre in which skeletons lead the living away. Later used as a school, the buildings today house Rouen's school of fine arts, and the whole site was restored and reopened to the public in the summer of 2020.
Key facts
- 1348 year — The Great Plague struck Rouen and killed about three quarters of the parish
- 1533 year — The carved ossuary galleries were completed, built from 1526 onward
- 4 galleries — Timber galleries frame the courtyard, three of them raised as a charnel house
📍 Rue Martainville, 76000, Rouen