Founded in the eleventh century, the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes followed the rule of Saint Augustine. Its monks were Joannist canons. Their duty consisted in celebrating mass within the monastery and in acting as curates in the forty parishes which belonged to the community in the dioceses of Soissons and of Meaux. Ninety canons remained encloistered; fifty priests served the parishes. Because of their holiness and their knowledge, the Joannists had acquired such renown during the Middle Ages that Cardinal Jean de Dormans confided to the monks of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes the direction of the college of Dormans-Beauvais founded by him at Paris. The gifts of kings, nobles and citizens gave the canons means wherewith to undertake the construction of a great church. About 1335 they laid the foundations of the nave and the towers. At the end of the fourteenth century the walls of the nave were finished, and the towers had risen to the level of the great rose window. The plunderings of the Abbé Remy d'Orbais, and later the wars of the Armagnacs and the Burgundians, interrupted the work, and it was not until about the end of the fifteenth century that the vaultings and the tiles were put in place. The two towers were not finished until later, the smaller in the last years of the fifteenth century, the greater in 1520. The construction of the church had occupied more than two hundred years. [22] In 1567, two years after the death of the last canon regular of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, the Protestants devastated the abbey: the library and the treasury were plundered, the stained glass and the statues were broken, the carvings were burned and the fountains demolished. The commendatory monks took little pains to repair the damages. At the beginning of the Revolution, there were no more than thirty monks in the monastery. They were expelled, and the nave of the church was used as a military bakeshop. There is a widely believed legend that the church was demolished during the Revolution. This is absolutely false. At this time, as the roofs were not well looked after, a bay of the vaulting fell; but, under the Consulate, the monument was still solid and a few repairs would have sufficed to preserve it. It was torn down by a bishop of Soissons, Msr. Leblanc de Beaulieu. It is a painful story. I have before me the administrative documents of this abominable destruction, documents which were brought to my attention by M. Max Sainsaulieu, the architect of the historic monuments of Soissons. These documents are instructive.