Qualla: Ronse

Ronse: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit FrDr, CC BY-SA 4.0. There is a French expression about Ronse that is still quoted today: Saint Hermes cures the area's madmen but keeps the Ronse dwellers as they are. It sounds like a joke about a sleepy town, and it is. But it also captures a thousand years of unusual history. From the eleventh century onward, families across France and the Low Countries brought relatives suffering from what we now call mental illness to this Flemish hill town, leading them on foot or in carts to the crypt where the bones of a third-century Roman saint were kept. The pilgrimage built Ronse. The pilgrimage emptied other towns of their afflicted. And the people of Ronse, by general agreement, remained as eccentric as ever.

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Image: FrDr | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ronse: A Saint's Bones Arrive at the Border

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LimoWreck, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ronse sits on what is still one of the most stubborn linguistic frontiers in Europe, the line where Dutch-speaking Flanders meets French-speaking Wallonia. The town's urban center took shape in the seventh century when Saint Amand - one of the great evangelists of the early Frank...

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Image: LimoWreck | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ronse: The Cure for Madness

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Saber68, CC BY-SA 3.0. By the high Middle Ages Saint Hermes had become known as the patron of those suffering from mental illness - a category that in medieval Europe covered everything from epilepsy and developmental disability to depression, dementia, and what we now call psychosis. The treatment was...

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Image: Saber68 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ronse: Linen, Fire, and Calvinist Refugees

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Saber68, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ronse's other long career was as a textile town. From the late Middle Ages onward it produced linen and later cotton on a serious scale. The town suffered the cycles every Flemish weaving city suffered: French troops sacked it in 1478, Calvinist sympathies took hold in the sixtee...

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Image: Saber68 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ronse: What Ronse Still Holds

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:LimoWreck, CC BY 2.5. The thirteenth-century Romanesque crypt under the basilica of Saint Hermes is the obvious anchor, but Ronse rewards visitors with a denser hand of small things. The Bommels carnival in January, which takes place on the Saturday before the first Monday after Epiphany, is the first...

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Image: User:LimoWreck | CC BY 2.5