Saint-Omer

• 1. Introduction

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  Saint-Omer sits in the Pas-de-Calais department of northern France, 68 kilometres west-northwest of Lille, and its name carries more than a thousand years of layered history. In November 2014, a librarian in this mid-sized French commune made a discovery that stunned the scholarly world: a previously unknown Shakespeare First Folio had been sitting undisturbed on the shelves of the town's public library for roughly 200 years. Its first 30 pages were missing, and on the first surviving page someone had written the name "Neville." That single word would eventually point scholars toward a trail of Catholic exile, English Jesuit education, and the long reach of the town's most celebrated institution.

  Saint-Omer is not simply a quiet northern French town that got lucky with a library find. It is a place that has been fought over, occupied, besieged, and rebuilt since the 7th century, a town whose geographic position made it a perpetual battleground between French, Flemish, English, and Spanish powers. It trained founding fathers of the United States. It sheltered a World War II hero who lost a prosthetic leg over its skies. And its wetlands outside the city walls remain among the last cultivated marshes in France, now a UNESCO heritage site known as the Marais Audomarois. What made this spot, hemmed in by canals and marshes in the far north of France, so contested, so cosmopolitan, and so consequential?

• 2. Origins and the Abbey Wars

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  Audomar, the bishop of Thérouanne, founded the Abbey of Saint Bertin in the 7th century, and the town that grew up around the monasteries took his name. Written records first mention the settlement under the name Sithiu in that same century. Notre-Dame abbey grew as an offshoot of Saint Bertin, and almost immediately the two houses fell into rivalry.

  That rivalry was not a minor institutional squabble. It lasted until the French Revolution, spanning more than a millennium. The conflict turned especially bitter in 1559, when Saint-Omer became a bishopric and Notre-Dame was elevated to the rank of cathedral, giving it formal precedence over the older abbey. The tension between two institutions sharing the same small city, each claiming spiritual authority, shaped the town's character long before any army arrived at its gates.

  The Vikings did not wait for institutional drama to find Saint-Omer interesting. They laid the place to waste around 860 and again around 880. Within a decade, the town and monastery had raised fortified walls. That resilience would prove necessary: Saint-Omer sat on the contested borders between the territories of France, Flanders, England, and Spain, and for most of its history it endured sieges and military invasions as a near-permanent condition of civic life. In 932 Arnulf of Flanders conquered the County of Artois, and Saint-Omer became part of the County of Flanders for the next three centuries.

• 3. Battles, Sieges, and a Statue

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  Philip I and the teenage Count Arnulf III of Flanders were defeated at Saint-Omer in 1071 by Arnulf's own uncle, Robert the Frisian, who then ruled as Count of Flanders until his death in 1093. The episode captures something characteristic about the town: political power here was almost always decided by force, and loyalties shifted with each military outcome.

  In 1127 the town received a communal charter from Count William Clito, becoming the first settlement in West Flanders to hold city rights. That distinction was brief. Saint-Omer lost its leading position in the textile industry to Bruges, and in 1212 Philip II of France captured Joan, daughter of Count Baldwin I, along with her husband Ferdinand, Count of Flanders, forcing them to sign the Treaty of Pont-à-Vendin, which ceded Artois to France. Ferdinand allied with Emperor Otto IV and John, King of England, and fought Philip II at Bouvines, but lost. Despite political separation from Flanders for the next 170 years, the city kept its place in the Flemish economic network.

  From 1384 the town passed through the Burgundian Netherlands, then from 1482 the Habsburg Netherlands, and from 1581 to 1678 the Spanish Netherlands. French attacks between 1551 and 1596 all failed. Cardinal Richelieu led an assault in 1638, and another came in 1647. Finally, in 1677, a seventeen-day siege forced the town to surrender to Louis XIV. The Peace of Nijmegen in the fall of 1678 permanently sealed France's annexation.

  In 1711 the Duke of Marlborough laid siege again, and the town neared collapse through famine. A woman named Jacqueline Robin risked her life to smuggle provisions inside. In 1884 the town erected a large statue of her in front of the cathedral in recognition. That statue disappeared during the German occupation of World War II, taken away to be melted down; it was the chief statue in Saint-Omer until 1942, and its absence remains a marker of what the occupation cost the city.

• 4. The English Jesuit College

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  After England's Protestant Reformation imposed penal laws against Catholic education, an English Jesuit named Robert Persons founded the College of Saint Omer in 1593 to give English Roman Catholics somewhere to study. The college operated in the town until 1762, when it moved to Bruges, then to Liège in 1773, and finally to Stonyhurst in Lancashire in 1794.

  The list of former students is remarkable. John Carroll, born on the 8th of January 1735, studied at the college and went on to become the first Catholic bishop in the United States, heading the diocese of Baltimore, and he founded Georgetown University. His brother Daniel Carroll, born on the 22nd of July 1730 in Upper Marlboro, studied there too; he became one of only two Catholics to sign the United States Constitution. Their cousin Charles Carroll of Carrollton, born on the 19th of September 1737, also attended and went further: he was the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence.

  The Shakespeare First Folio found in the public library in 2014 may carry a thread back to this same institution. The name "Neville" written on the first surviving page pointed experts toward Edward Scarisbrick, who had fled England because of anti-Catholic repression and attended Saint-Omer College. Eric Rasmussen, a professor at the University of Nevada and one of the world's foremost authorities on Shakespeare, confirmed the folio's authenticity; he happened to be in London when the find was made. The only other known First Folio in France sits in the National Library in Paris. The Saint-Omer copy had lain undisturbed in the library for two centuries before anyone noticed what it was.

• 5. Two World Wars Above the Town

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  On the 8th of October 1914, the British Royal Flying Corps arrived in Saint-Omer and set up a headquarters at the aerodrome next to the local race course. For the four years that followed, Saint-Omer served as the central hub for all RFC field operations. Most squadrons used it as a transit camp on their way to other locations, but the base grew steadily in logistical importance. No. IX Squadron RAF was formed at Saint-Omer on the 14th of December 1914, and No. 16 Squadron RAF followed on the 10th of February 1915; many RAF squadrons today trace their founding to this period.

  During World War II the Luftwaffe took over the same airfield. Douglas Bader, the RAF ace who had lost both legs before the war and flew with artificial limbs, parachuted from his Spitfire during an aerial battle over France and came down near Saint-Omer. He was taken to a Luftwaffe hospital in the town for initial treatment. When he bailed out, one of his prosthetic legs had been left behind in the aircraft. The RAF flew a special mission to drop a replacement leg during a bombing raid, an episode that became one of the more unusual stories of the air war.

  The town's surroundings also figured in a darker chapter of the war. The area was selected as a launch site for V-2 rockets. The blockhouse at Éperlecques and the underground complex of La Coupole were both built for this purpose and are now open to the public.

• 6. The Town's Built Fabric

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  Vauban, the great military engineer of Louis XIV's reign, improved Saint-Omer's fortifications in the 17th century. Those walls were demolished in the final decade of the 19th century and replaced by boulevards. One section of the ramparts on the western side of the town survived intact and was converted into a park, the jardin public.

  The old cathedral was built almost entirely in the 13th and 14th centuries. A heavy square tower above the west portal was finished in 1499. Inside the cathedral stands a colossal 13th-century statue of Christ seated between the Virgin Mary and Saint John, originally from the cathedral of Thérouanne and given to Saint-Omer by the Emperor Charles V. The chapel in the transept holds a 12th-century wooden figure of the Virgin that has long been the destination of pilgrimages. The cathedral also houses a Cavaillé-Coll organ that remains playable.

  Of the church of Saint Bertin, which was built between 1326 and 1520 on the site of earlier churches, only some arches and a tall tower remain standing in a public garden. The former Merovingian king Childeric III retired here to end his days. The town hall was constructed from materials salvaged from the Saint Bertin abbey itself, and it holds a picture gallery, a collection of records, and a theatre. The public library's rare books section keeps one of only three French copies of the 42-line Gutenberg Bible, which came from the library of the Abbey of Saint Bertin.

• 7. Wetlands, Glass, and Cauliflower

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  Outside the city's walls lie the wetlands called le marais, one of the last cultivated marshes remaining in France. The Marais Audomarois is listed as a UNESCO heritage site. Its mild climate and fertile soil allow year-round agricultural production, and cauliflower grown there is exported throughout Europe. Carrots, endive, and watercress are other crops for which the area is known.

  For much of the 20th century the economy of Saint-Omer depended heavily on a single enterprise: Arc International, a glassmaker based in the neighbouring town of Arques. That concentration has shifted over the past fifty years. Major employers now include Alphaglass, Brasserie de Saint-Omer, Les Fromageurs de Saint Omer, and the Bonduelle food company, among others. As of 2020, the town counted 2,147 enterprises, with steady growth in new business creation over the preceding decade.

  The canalised section of the river Aa begins at Saint-Omer and reaches the North Sea at Gravelines. Below the town's walls, the Aa connects with the Neufossé Canal, which ends at the river Lys. On that canal, near the town, stands the Ascenseur des Fontinettes, a hydraulic lift that once raised and lowered canal boats over a height of 12 metres to and from the Aa. A large lock replaced it in 1967, but the original structure still stands as a piece of industrial heritage. Not far from the marshes, at the edge of the forest of Clairmarais, are the ruins of an abbey founded in 1140 by Thierry of Alsace; Thomas Becket sought refuge there in 1165.