Clairvaux Abbey (Clara Vallis in Latin) is a Cistercian monastery in Ville-sous-la-Ferté, 15 km from Bar-sur-Aube, in the Aube département in northeastern France.
With a view to being admitted to the Cistercian Order he visited St. Bernard at Clairvaux in 1152.
The monastery was founded in 1232 as a daughter-house of Zirc Abbey in Hungary, of the filiation of Clairvaux.
He assigned a Cistercian colony from Clairvaux to the abbey, with Peter Bernard of Paganelli as their abbot, who five years later became Pope Eugene III.
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It was itself a subsidiary of Clairvaux Abbey, Ville-sous-la-Ferté, although the funding monks originally arrived from the Danish Esrum Abbey in Zealand.
In 1280 he offered the general chapter of the Cistercian order to found a college (studium) for Cistercians at Oxford, and the chapter accepted the offer, and decreed that the college should have the same privileges as the college of St. Bernard at Paris, and that it should be under the Abbot of Thame, as the other was under the Abbot of Clairvaux.
There are four houses, named after the home towns of some well known saints: Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Anthony of Padua, Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.
It was the first daughter-house founded by Clairvaux Abbey, one of the four Cistercian primary abbeys, and was established north of the head of navigation of the Marne at Saint-Dizier by Bernard of Clairvaux in 1118, on isolated woodland given by Hugh de Vitry, which the monks drained.