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Biography

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Adela of France, also known as Adèle of France, Adela of Flanders, and Adela of Messines, was a Capetian princess of the eleventh century. She was a daughter of King Robert II of France, called Robert the Pious, and of Constance of Arles, and thus a sister of King Henry I of France and of Robert I, Duke of Burgundy. Born in the kingdom of France in the early eleventh century, she was married in 1028 to Baldwin, the heir of Baldwin IV, Count of Flanders. The marriage sealed a reconciliation between the French crown and the counts of Flanders after earlier conflict and brought a royal bride into one of the most powerful principalities of northern Francia. When Baldwin IV died in 1035, her husband succeeded as Baldwin V, and Adela became countess of Flanders.

As countess she was associated with the governance and the religious patronage of Flanders during a period of economic growth and monastic reform. Baldwin V was among the leading princes of the age: he expanded Flemish influence, intervened in the affairs of the French kingdom, and, after the death of Adela's brother Henry I in 1060, served as guardian of the young King Philip I of France, Adela's nephew. Adela herself is recorded as a founder and benefactress of churches. She and her husband established or richly endowed the collegiate church of Saint-Pierre at Aire-sur-la-Lys. Their most notable foundation was the Benedictine abbey of Notre-Dame at Messines (Mesen), near Ypres, created for noble nuns and provided with lands and privileges in the third quarter of the eleventh century. Through such gifts Adela participated in the contemporary movement of aristocratic piety that planted Benedictine houses across Flanders and northern France.

Adela and Baldwin V had children who stood at the center of northwestern European politics. Their son Baldwin succeeded in Flanders as Baldwin VI and, by marriage to Richilde, also ruled Hainaut. Their daughter Matilda married William, Duke of Normandy, and after 1066 was queen of England as the wife of William the Conqueror; through Matilda, Adela became grandmother of the English kings William II and Henry I and of Adela of Blois, mother of King Stephen of England. Another son, Robert, later called Robert the Frisian, seized the county of Flanders in 1071 after a succession war that followed Baldwin VI's death, defeating his nephew Arnulf III at Cassel. These alliances made the blood of Adela of France flow into the royal houses of England and into many princely families of France and the Empire.

After Baldwin V died in 1067, Adela left public life. She received the Benedictine habit and retired to the abbey of Messines, the house she had founded, where she lived as a nun for the remainder of her life. She died at Messines on 8 January 1079 and was buried in the abbey church. Later tradition in Flanders remembered her as a holy foundress, sometimes under the name Adela the Holy or Saint Adela of Messines. Her cult was local, tied to the abbey and to the region of Ypres, and does not appear to have been the object of a formal papal canonization of the kind later required by the Roman Church. The abbey of Messines preserved her memory as foundress until the community's later history in the early modern period.

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