Corbie is a
commune of the
Somme department in
Picardie in northern
France.
Geography
The small town is situated up river from
Amiens, in the département of
Somme and is the main town of the
canton of Corbie. It lies in the valley of the
River Somme, at the confluence of the River Ancre. The town is bisected by the
Canal de la
Somme.
shows it in its context. The town is to the left and the
fenny
Somme valley winds down to it from the right. The
chalk of the
Upper Cretaceous plateau shows pale in the fields. The River Ancre flows down from the north-east. The
A29 is shown under construction snaking across the chalk in the southern part of the picture. The fainter, straight line just to its north is the road N29. It passes through
Villers-Bretonneux, the village just south of Corbie.
History
Corbie Abbey
The town of Corbie grew up round
Corbie Abbey, founded in 657 or 660 by the queen regent
Bathilde, with a founding community of monks from
Luxeuil Abbey in the
Franche-Comté.
Its
scriptorium came to be one of the centres of work of manuscript illumination when the art was still fairly new in western Europe. In this early,
Merovingian, period the work of Corbie was innovative in that it showed pictures of people, for example,
Saint Jerome. It was also the place of creation, in about 780, of the influential
Caroline minuscule script.
The contents of its library are known from catalogues of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In 1638,
Cardinal Richelieu ordered the transfer of the library's books to the library at
Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which was dispersed at the end of the eighteenth century.
Town
In 1234
Floris IV, Count of Holland, died at a
tournament held here. In 1475 the town was taken by
Louis XI. The
Spanish took it on 15 August 1636 but were ousted in November by Richelieu and
Louis XIII of France after a siege of three months.
In 1918 Corbie was on the margin of the battlefield of
Villers-Bretonneux at which the
First Battle of the Somme (1918) of the
Spring Offensive came to a climax.
Sights
- Church of la Neuville; at the north-west end of the town
Personalities
Twin towns
See also
