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Origin and history

The Saint-Sauveur Abbey of Anchin, founded in 1079 on a marshy island of Pecquencourt (North), was a high Benedictine place of the 11th-XIIIth centuries. According to legend, its creation results from the reconciliation between two enemy lords, Sohier de Loos and Gautier de Montigny, guided by a common dream towards the island of Gordaine, where a hermit of the eighth century would have lived. The abbey, dedicated to the Savior, was endowed by Anselm II of Bouchain and Gérard II, bishop of Cambrai, then consecrated in 1086.

In the Middle Ages, Anchin became an intellectual and artistic home, hosting a studio of copyists and a school of illumination led by Gossuin, a disciple of Bernard de Clairvaux. In 1182, Baudouin V de Hainaut launched the construction of a new abbey church (105 m long), consecrated in 1250. The abbey also played an educational role in founding in 1562 the college of Anchin in Douai, entrusted to the Jesuits until 1764.

The French Revolution marked its end: declared national in 1790, it was sold in 1792 to François-Joseph Tassart and demolished. His treasures were scattered: the Retable d'Anchin (1511) is now at the Musée de Douai, his organ of 1732 transferred to the Collège Saint-Pierre, and his medieval manuscripts preserved in the municipal library. The remains, recorded in 1990, recall its past radiance.

The island of Anchin (or Aquicinctum), girded by the marshes of the Scarpe, was also home to local legends, such as that of the tournament of 1096 gathering 300 knights for the inauguration of the monastery. Saint Gordaine, hermit of the eighth century, would have built a church there before being buried in Douai. A fountain and a spring in Montigny-en-Ostrevent perpetuate its memory, celebrated every October 16.

At its peak, the abbey had extensive estates and generated 300,000 pounds of rent, offering its last abbot, Cardinal Henri Benoît Stuart, an annual income of 93,000 pounds. Its abolition in 1790 symbolized the end of the religious institutions of the Ancien Régime in the region, then marked by the nascent industrialization and political upheavals.

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