Qualla: Ten Putte Abbey

Ten Putte Abbey: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donarreiskoffer, CC BY-SA 4.0. Walk into the courtyard of Ten Putte Abbey, eight kilometres south of Ostend, and the first thing you see is a well. It used to be a pond. On a summer night in 1070, two servants of a nobleman named Bertulf of Gistel led his young wife to that pond at the edge of his estate, choked her to death, and threw her body into the water. Her name was Godelieve. She was perhaps twenty-five years old, married against her will to a man who hated her on sight, and she had spent the four years of her marriage in conditions that today we would describe as captivity. The well in the courtyard marks the spot. The monastery around it has stood, in one form or another, for nine hundred years. The women who still come on pilgrimage every July do not all come as tourists.

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Image: Donarreiskoffer | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ten Putte Abbey: Godelieve

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:LimoWreck, CC BY-SA 3.0. What is known of Godelieve - the Flemish form of Godelina, sometimes Godeleva - comes mostly from a Latin life written by a monk named Drogo, perhaps thirty years after her death. The outline is brutal and consistent. She was the daughter of a French nobleman, raised piously, mar...

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Image: User:LimoWreck | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ten Putte Abbey: Edith and the Pond

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Q. Keysers, CC BY-SA 3.0. The first abbey was founded sometime between 1137 and 1171 to mark the place where Godelieve died. The traditional story is that the founder was Edith, said to be Godelieve's daughter by Bertulf's later second marriage - born blind, the legend goes, until she washed her eyes with...

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Image: Q. Keysers | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ten Putte Abbey: Ruin and Return

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donarreiskoffer, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ten Putte's history after that is mostly a history of survival. On 12 October 1578, during the religious wars of the late sixteenth century, a band of irregulars - probably Calvinist Geuzen - attacked the abbey and left it in ruins. Only the fourteenth-century tower was left stan...

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Image: Donarreiskoffer | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ten Putte Abbey: Patroness of Women in Hard Marriages

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MarkusMark, CC BY-SA 3.0. Godelieve's iconography is unusual. She is shown, almost always, with a rope around her neck - the instrument of her own murder. Her feast day, 6 July, is observed in West Flanders with processions and pilgrimages of women, many of them not casual visitors. Over centuries she has...

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Image: MarkusMark | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ten Putte Abbey: What the Visitor Sees

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arcalino, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ten Putte is open to visitors at posted hours. You can see the pond turned well in the courtyard, the small dungeon where the saint is said to have been kept, the chapel of the miracle in which Edith - blind from birth, the story still insists - first opened her eyes. There is a ...

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Image: Arcalino | CC BY-SA 3.0