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Such an arrangement was common in later double monasteries. Another famous C6 monastery in Gaul now supposed to have been double was that of S. Rhadagund at Poitiers about 566. S. Rhadagund was married to King Clothair against her will, and their life together was a series of quarrels.
He must have stood in some official relation to Rhadagund, for such freedom of intercourse to be possible; and if his verses sometimes suggest the courtier rather than the monk, it must be remembered that they are the work of a poet who had first been a friend of princes and was among the most fashionable men of letters of his day in Ravenna; and that they are addressed to a woman who was, after all, a queen.
He says that he will work day and night for Rhadagund, draw the water, tend the vines and the garden, cook, wash dishes, anything, rather than that she should do the heavy and menial work of the house. He begs the abbess Agnes to talk often of him with the sisters that he may feel more really that she is his mother.
In 587 Rhadagund died and Bishop Gregory of Tours tells how greatly she was mourned by the whole community, and how some 200 women crowded round her bier, bewailing their loss. One of them, the nun Baudonivia, several years afterwards, cannot, she says, even speak of the death of Rhadagund without being choked with sobs.
So, on an estate which she owned at Poitiers, she founded a nunnery dedicated to the Holy Name, and, probably at the same time, the house for men, separated from the convent by the town wall and dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was in S. Mary's that Rhadagund was buried and after her death, her name was added to the dedication.
Beside this evidence of association between the two houses, the only other is the correspondence of Rhadagund and the Abbess Agnes with the poet Fortunatus, who was probably a monk of S. Mary's.
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