1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/St Florentin

ST FLORENTIN, a town of north-central France, in the department of Yonne, 37 m. S.E. of Sens on the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway. Pop. (1906) 2303. It stands on a hill on the right bank of the Armance, half a mile from its confluence with the Armancon and the canal of Burgundy. In the highest part of the town stands the church, begun in the latter half of the 15th century, and though retaining the Gothic form, with great flying buttresses, is mainly in the Renaissance style. It is approached through a narrow alley up a steep flight of steps, and contains a fine Holy Sepulchre in bas-relief and a choir screen and stained glass of admirable Renaissance workmanship. The nave, left incomplete, was restored and finished between 1857 and 1862. The market-gardens of St Florentin produce large quantities of asparagus. The town stands on the site of the Roman military post Castrodunum, the scene of t.he martyrdom in the 3rd century of Saints Florentin and Hilaire, round whose tomb it grew up. The abbey established here in the 9th century afterwards became a priory of the abbey of St Germain at Auxerre. The town and its territory belonged, under the Merovingians, to Burgundy, and in later times to the counts of Champagne, from whom it passed to the kings of France. Louis XV. raised it from the rank of viscount to that of county and bestowed it on Louis Phelypeaux, afterwards Duc de la Vrillière.