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Half an hour by train, or 30km down the N2, southwest of Laon, SOISSONS can lay claim to a long and highly strategic history. Before the Romans arrived it was already a town, and in 486 AD it was here that the Romans suffered one of their most decisive defeats at the hands of Clovis the Frank, making Soissons one of the first real centres of the Frankish kingdom. Napoleon, too, considered it a crucial military base, a judgement borne out this century in extensive war damage. The town boasts the fine, if little-sung, Cathedrale Notre-Dame - thirteenth century for the most part with majestic glass and vaulting - at the west end of the main square, place F.-Marquigny. More impressive still is the ruined Abbaye de St-Jean-des-Vignes , to the south of the cathedral down rue Panleu and then right down rue St Jean. The facade of the tremendous Gothic abbey church rises sheer and grand, impervious to the now empty space behind it. The rest of the abbey complex, save for remnants of a cloister and refectory (Mon-Sat 9am-12.30pm & 1.30-6pm, Sun 10am-12.30pm & 1.30pm-7pm; free), was dismantled in 1804. Near the abbaye is the impressive eighteenth-century Hotel de Ville with its grand stone gate.
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