File:Epitaph of Empress Matilda, Rouen Cathedral.jpg

English: This plaque has the epitaph of the Empress Matilda (c. 1102-1167) in Rouen Cathedral.

Empress Matilda, daughter of King Henry I of England, wife of first Holy Roman Emperor Heinrich V then Count Geoffrey of Anjou, and mother of King Henry II of England, died in 1167. She was buried at the monastery of Bec-Hellouin at her request. Matilda's tomb at Bec was damaged in the thirteenth century and destroyed in the fifteenth by the English army. Her remains were identified and reburied in Bec in the seventeenth century but again destroyed by the Napoleonic forces destroying Bec. In the mid-nineteenth century her remains were found and reinterred at Rouen Cathedral where they remain in a chapel to the north of the high altar, marked by this plaque.

The transcribed plaque reads:

'Ortu magna, viro maior, sed maxima partu, Hic iacet Henrici filia, sponsa, parens

Mathildis filia Henrici I Regis Anglorum et Normanniae Ducis, uxor Henrici V Caesaris, mater Henrici II patris Ricardi Cor-Leonis Dicti

Ossa euis in sanctuario veteris ecclesiae monasterii Beccersis AD MDCCCXLVI reperta, Rothomatum translatia, hic reposita sunt anno dni [domini] MDCCCLXXI

RIP'