Qualla: Abbey of Saint Winnoc

Abbey of Saint Winnoc: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jean-Pol GRANDMONT, CC BY 4.0. Most of a monastery is gone now. The cloisters, the dormitories, the great Benedictine church rebuilt with Baroque generosity in the 1750s, the scriptorium, the abbot's lodgings - all of it dismantled and carted away after the French Revolution dissolved the house in 1798. But two brick towers still rise over the hilltop town of Bergues. They were not preserved out of piety. They were preserved because sailors out in the North Sea, navigating up the coast from Dunkirk and Calais, had been using them as daymarks for centuries - a pair of vertical lines on the horizon that meant Bergues, and from Bergues you could find home. The Revolution could close a monastery but it could not redraw a coastline. So the towers stayed. Today they are all that remain of one of medieval Flanders' richest abbeys.

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Image: Jean-Pol GRANDMONT | CC BY 4.0

Abbey of Saint Winnoc: A Welshman in Flanders

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Velvet, CC BY-SA 4.0. Saint Winnoc, after whom this abbey is named, was almost certainly a real person, though most of what survives about him is hagiography. He was a missionary monk - by the most common tradition, of Welsh or Breton origin - who came to seventh-century Flanders in the wake of the gr...

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Image: Velvet | CC BY-SA 4.0

Abbey of Saint Winnoc: Rich Off Pilgrims and Cloth

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GFreihalter, CC BY-SA 3.0. Medieval Bergues was a wealthy town on the great trade roads of Flanders, and the abbey of Saint Winnoc grew rich with it. Count Baldwin gave it land and tithes; it began minting its own coins; it held a yearly market at Wormhout; and, in a calculation any modern marketing execut...

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Image: GFreihalter | CC BY-SA 3.0

Abbey of Saint Winnoc: Fire, and Fire Again

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antonius Sanderus, Public domain. In 1083 fire destroyed the abbey. It took fifty years to rebuild. The new church was consecrated in 1133. In 1288 the monks began enlarging the choir, work that ran into the early fourteenth century. In 1558, during the religious wars of the Reformation, fire damaged the building...

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Image: Antonius Sanderus | Public domain

Abbey of Saint Winnoc: Daymarks Against the Sea

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marc Ryckaert (MJJR), CC BY 3.0. What was spared, and why, tells you something about how France worked at the end of the eighteenth century. The Pointed Tower - the medieval one, a beautiful Gothic structure - and the Square Tower of the abbey were not knocked down for stone. They stayed because the maritime aut...

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Image: Marc Ryckaert (MJJR) | CC BY 3.0