A Convent's Relic Outlives the Convent

The community at Argenteuil that first received the Holy Tunic was a royal Benedictine convent, associated in tradition with a daughter of Charlemagne as abbess, and the gift of the tunic around the year 800 is presented by the church as arriving through the emperor's channel to the Holy Land relics that Byzantine diplomacy and pilgrimage had made available to Western rulers in that period. The convent's own institutional history did not survive intact into the modern era: like many French religious houses, it was suppressed and its buildings largely destroyed during the French Revolution, and the tunic itself was hidden by local parishioners rather than displayed through that period, reportedly buried in a garden to protect it from revolutionary seizure and desecration.

The present Basilica of Saint-Denys is substantially a nineteenth century building, reflecting the loss of the medieval convent structures rather than continuous occupation of the original site, and its status as keeper of the tunic today rests on parish and diocesan custody rather than on any surviving monastic community. This makes Argenteuil's relic history unusually discontinuous even by the standards of medieval relics, since the object survived a period when the institution meant to guard it effectively ceased to exist.