Beersel Castle

Beersel sat on the frontier of the Duchy of Brabant with the County of Hainaut, south-west of Brussels and close to Halle. A fortified residence on the site is attested as early as 1292, and in 1300 Godefroid of Hellebeke, the first known Seigneur of Beersel and seneschal of the duchy, obtained permission from Jean II, Duke of Brabant, to raise a fortification beside his residence.

In 1356, during the War of the Brabant Succession, soldiers of the County of Flanders under Louis of Male besieged the first castle, took it and sacked it. Rebuilding began in 1357 on a circular enceinte with three large towers and one small one, in brick — an unusual material for such a building at the time.

The lordship had passed during the fourteenth century to the Seigneurs of Wittem, who held it for seven generations, to the end of the sixteenth century. In 1391 Jan II van Witthem, seneschal under Duchess Joanna of Brabant and her husband Wenceslas of Luxembourg, won recognition of his seigneurial rights over Brussels and its surroundings, and with the help of a Brussels militia took nearby Gaasbeek Castle, where the murderers of Everaard t'Serclaes had taken refuge.

His descendant Henry III of Wittem sided with Maximilian I during the revolts of 1483–1492, against a Brussels that supported the rebellion. In 1488 the townsmen wrecked his house in the Voldersstraat and marched on Beersel with heavy guns under Philip of Cleves. Henry's son Philip of Wittem held the place: the Burgundian court chronicler Jean Molinet describes the besiegers driven off after repeated batteries and a fierce assault, abandoning weapons as they went. Because raids from the castle kept disrupting the city's supplies, the militias came back in 1489. This second siege battered the walls with cannon and the garrison surrendered after several days, the damage falling worst on the southern side; the captain, Willem van Ramilly, was hanged with several of his soldiers on the Grand Place in Brussels.

Maximilian then besieged Brussels, which capitulated under exhaustion and plague. Beersel was returned to the Seigneur of Wittem, and the peace of Danebroek obliged the city to pay for rebuilding Henry's town house and repairing the castle at its own expense. That restoration, begun in 1491, rebuilt the three main towers to take cannon. On 26 May 1491 Henry of Wittem was made a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece for his loyalty, and was later chamberlain to Emperor Charles V.

Henry died in 1515; his son Philip succeeded him and died in 1523. With the death of Philip's grandson Jan II in 1591 the male line of Wittem ended, and through the marriage of his daughter Ernestina the castle and lordship passed to the dukes of Arenberg. The military obsolescence of castles had already made Beersel a private residence during the sixteenth century; the Fathers of Zevenborren lived in it from 1581 to 1606, and a restoration in 1617 gave the towers and ramparts tiled roofs. It was never remodelled into a country pleasure-house as others were.

The castle stood empty from 1796 and decayed. A cotton works installed in 1818 under King William I made little of it; part of the building was then pulled down and the rest left to fall, the roofs collapsing for want of repair as the property passed through a series of Belgian noble families. Victor Hugo visited in 1877 and wrote a short poem on the solitary manor lying in the valley, a stone falling from its battlements with every hour of the day.

In 1928 the derelict castle was given to the League of Friends of Beersel Castle. Work ran from 1928 to 1939 under Raymond Pelgrims de Bigard, assisted by Brother Herman of the Sint-Lucas school and the architect Ignace Van den Hulst, and returned the three towers and part of the ramparts to their appearance after 1617. The residential building and the eastern face had deteriorated badly and were not included, and only the foundations remain.

The site was placed on the register of protected landscapes in March 1934 and listed as a protected monument in August 1943. Since 1948 it has belonged to the Royal Association of Historic Residences and Gardens in Belgium, which leases it to the municipality of Beersel. A further restoration opened with archaeological survey in 2008 and continued after the Flemish government approved its subsidy in March 2011, running to 2012. The castle is open to the public and is reckoned one of Belgium's best-preserved.