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Coat of arms
The heraldry of GEMBLOUX is the sable shield (a black background in heraldry) with three silver keys surmounted by the earl's 13-pearl crown. This shows the Gembloux was established as an earldom towards the middle of the 16th century. Starting from then, the prelate of GEMBLOUX's Benedictine abbey was granted the title of abbot-earl.
The abbot was the lord of the Gembloux region when the king of the Germans, Otton I, granted a charter in 946 to Guibert, the founder of the abbey.
This document was, however, partially forged and more than likely created by the monk Sigebert (1030-112) to increase the privileges granted to the abbey. He may even have changed the date of the charter, because some historians now claim the monastery was established later on, towards 983.
No-one knows where the heraldry originated. It was long thought that the heraldry's three keys were a reference to the gates in the urban ramparts built in the middle of the 12th century. There were four large gates : the AL CROIX gate (at the top of the Grand'Rue), the Chien Noir gate (at the crossroads of the street with the same name, rue Docq and rue St. Adèle), the gate in Trau also called the St. Nicolas gate or de la Vallée gate (at the end of rue Léopold, opposite rue Théo Toussaint) and the Wérimolin gate (rue Notre-Dame, opposite place de Orneau).
In the "Remonstrations" the aldermen Antoine MASSART and Henry MINET issued in 1594 to complain about the condition of GEMBLOUX in the aftermath of the religious wars, a reference is even made to a fifth gate, specifying a "gate in rue des Broux ". Broux was part of the town located outside the ramparts, at the site of the rue Albert and rue Docq in the part leading to St. Guibert square.
So the theory that the keys in the coat of arms refer to the gates in the ramparts is incorrect.
Since the end of the Second World War stain glass windows in the Faculty cloister have featured the coats of arms of 35 abbots. The coat of arms of abbot Arnould de Chastre (1268-1300) shows three silver keys. As for whether these three keys were included in the Chastre family's heraldry and whether they were adopted as the coats of arms for the Gembloux region, no-one has yet come up with any answer.
