Saint Godelieve of Gistel

Saint Godelieve of Gistel was a young noblewoman who, after her marriage to the lord of Gistel in Flanders, suffered many wrongs from her husband and his mother, and was finally strangled by two of his servants on her husband’s orders. The Roman Martyrology commemorates her as a martyr on July 30. On that day in 1084 her remains were solemnly raised.

She came from a noble family in the region of Boulogne-sur-Mer. The year of her birth is not certain: sources give dates from about 1045 to 1052. The oldest testimony about her is the Life written around 1084 by Drogo, a monk of the abbey of Saint Winnoc at Bergues, her contemporary, who could still listen to witnesses. The text is regarded as factual and restrained. A later legend added many stories of miracles to it. According to tradition, even as a girl she cared for the poor.

Her parents gave her in marriage to Bertolf, a nobleman of Gistel. Bertolf’s mother was hostile to her from the start and turned her son against her, and he withdrew from his wife right after the wedding. Godelieve was kept in isolation and given very little food, mostly bread and water. When the harassment and slander grew worse, she fled to her father’s house. Her father asked the count of Flanders and the bishop of Noyon and Tournai for help. Bertolf had to take his wife back and promise to treat her properly, and so Godelieve returned to Gistel.

The change proved to be only a pretense. In July 1070, while Bertolf was away, two of his servants, Lambert and Hacca, lured her out of the house at night and strangled her. Then they plunged her body into water and laid it back in her bed, so that her death would look natural. The pretense could not be kept up, however, and soon people began to venerate Godelieve as a martyr. Her Life shows a young woman who, despite the wrongs she suffered, persevered in prayer and in love for the poor.

Drogo describes miracles attributed to her intercession, among them healings through the water into which her body had been plunged. Bishop Radbod II of Noyon and Tournai ordered her life to be examined, and on July 30, 1084, in the church at Gistel, he solemnly raised her remains to the honor of the altars. At that time such an act by a bishop was equivalent to a canonization.

A later tradition relates that Bertolf’s blind daughter from his second marriage, Edith, regained her sight through Godelieve’s intercession, and that Bertolf himself was converted, went on pilgrimage, and ended his life as a monk at Bergues. In the twelfth century an abbey of Benedictine nuns, Ten Putte, meaning “At the Well,” was founded on the site of the crime. The saint’s relics rest in the parish church of Gistel. In Flanders her feast falls on July 6, and in Gistel a procession in her honor is held on the first Sunday after July 5. Her intercession is sought in diseases of the throat and eyes and in marital and family difficulties.