Béguinages in Flanders
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How it came to be
The Beguines were unmarried or widowed women who devoted their lives to God without taking vows or leaving the world. In the early 13th century, large court béguinages emerged in the Low Countries where they lived together: houses around courtyards and a church, often with an infirmary and a bakery.
Walls or ditches set the béguinages apart from the town, and their gates closed at night but stood open by day. None of the first houses survive; brick and stone houses replaced them in the 16th and especially the 17th century. Numbers fell in the 18th century, and in the French period many béguinages lost their gates and their enclosed character.
Beguine life came to an end over the 19th and 20th centuries, and the movement in Flanders is now extinct. In 1998 thirteen béguinages, among them those of Bruges, Ghent, Leuven and Mechelen, were inscribed.
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