From Messines, Belgium to New York and back: National Archives today recovers lost medieval charter from Flemish Count Philip of Elzas

Today, a document from 1176 is solemnly handed over to the State Archives. It concerns a parchment charter from the Flemish count Philip van de Elzas to the abbey of Messines. The charter disappeared in 1914.

Belgian historians had found the parchment in the collections of the famous Metropolitan Museum in New York. They already suspected that it came from the abbey’s archive, which was lost during the First World War. This turned out to be the case after a thorough investigation. The Belgian government asked for it back and the museum was willing to do so.

Since 1057 there has been a Benedictine abbey in the town of Messines near Ypres. The counts of Flanders have donated numerous goods and privileges to the abbey for centuries. This was done with solemn charters in parchment, provided with the count’s seal.

In 1776 Empress Maria Theresia abolished the abbey and converted it into a boarding school for children of destitute soldiers who had fallen in battle or were disabled. This “Royal Asylum of Messines” took over the many properties of the abbey. Including the rich archive. When the French expropriated and sold all the monasteries in our regions some twenty years later, they left the goods of the Royal Institution alone. After all, it was no longer a monastery.

Thus the abbey archives remained in Messines… until the beginning of the First World War. On October 20, 1914, bloody fighting began between the approaching German troops and the British, who were defending the ridge around Messines. On October 30, the abbey caught fire due to a shelling. She burned down in three days.

Most of Messines’ inhabitants fled to nearby France. The few who remained had to leave shortly afterwards from the Germans. The cellars of the abbey were used as headquarters by the German army. It is remarkable that the German soldier Adolf Hitler then had to take messages from the headquarters to the front. The failed painter Hitler, by the way, would capture the ruins of the abbey in a painting.

Messines remained in the front area throughout the war and was completely destroyed. Apart from the church, the abbey was not rebuilt afterwards. The boarding school of the Royal Institution moved to another building in Lede (East Flanders).

But what happened to the precious archive? According to Johan Beun, an expert in the history of Messines, the archive, or at least part of it, has been brought to safety: ‘When some staff members of the Royal Institute returned after the war, they found that the archive room of the abbey had not been damaged by the fire. . But all the papers were gone. Opposite the abbey was a brewery,” says Beun. “The brewer later told my mother that he had stored the archive in his cellars. But I don’t know if that’s true.”

Anyway, the archive was completely gone but not destroyed. The German officer Kress von Kressenstein wrote shortly after the fire of the abbey building: “Not a single room of this vast, sprawling building was still intact, everything lay in ruins. In a small house, protruding from the rubble, I found several old documents with Gothic and Romanesque seals. I dug them up and took them with me as souvenirs. This must have been the archives or the library.”

Apparently many more German soldiers brought such “souvenirs” from Mesen. Often in good faith, because otherwise they would have been irretrievably lost. Less than a year after the disaster, a German state archive sent about twenty deeds to the National Archives in Belgium, which were “picked up by German soldiers in a battlefield in Flanders”. Other returns from Germany followed after the war. But many other finders have kept or sold their finds for themselves.

Johan Beun: “When it came to parchments with seals attached, the owners knew they were worth something, but ordinary papers, such as the abbey’s bills, may have been thrown away”. Precious documents indeed turned up here and there at antique dealers.

Hendrik Callewier of the State Archives in Bruges has been searching for years for the remaining archive documents, which have since spread across several countries: “We found the most recent charters in the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden”. Two of them belonged to the descendants of Kress von Kressenstein.

The charter in the Metropolitan Museum was from a German who had emigrated to the US. In total, about a fifth of the known archive documents have now surfaced.

In principle, anyone who owns such an archive item must return it to the Belgian State. After all, the documents belong to the Royal Institute of Messines, which is state property. “We can consider the missing pieces as spoils of war,” says Callewier. “It has happened a few times that records from Mesen have been offered for auction. In those cases, we prevented the sale from going ahead. and claimed them.”