Mounted on their little horses, and carrying baskets
and nets fastened to long poles, they go into the sea to catch
small fish and shrimps. It is strange to see them riding about
in the water, sometimes in bands, but more frequently alone or in
pairs; and this curious custom, which has been handed down from
father to son for generations, is peculiar to the part of the coast
which lies between La Panne and the borders of France.
Near Coxyde, and at the corner where the road from Furnes turns
in the direction of La Panne, is a piece of waste ground which
travellers on the Vicinal railway pass without notice. But here
once stood the famous Abbey of the Dunes.
[Illustration: COXYDE. A Shrimper on Horseback.]
In the first years of the twelfth century a pious hermit named
Lyger took up his abode in these solitary regions, built a dwelling
for himself, and settled down to spend his life in doing good works
and in the practice of religion. Soon, as others gathered round
him, his dwelling grew into a monastery, and at last, in the year
1122, the Abbey of the Dunes was founded. It was nearly half a
century before the great building, which is said to have been the
first structure of such a size built of brick in Flanders, was
completed; but when at last the work was done the Abbey was, by all
accounts, one of the most magnificent religious houses in Flanders,
consisting of a group of buildings with no less than 105 windows,
a rich and splendid church, so famous for its ornamental woodwork
that the carvings of the stalls were reproduced in the distant
Abbey of Melrose in Scotland, and a library which, as time went
on, became a storehouse of precious manuscripts and hundreds of
those wonderfully illustrated missals on which the monks of the
Middle Ages spent so many laborious hours.
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