The word Malle is older than any record of it. Etymologists have argued for centuries about what it means - an extended plain, a border marker, a stopping place - but the likeliest origin is judicial. A Mallum was a general court session presided over by a Frankish count, the kind of open-air assembly where free men gathered to settle disputes and hear sentences. If that derivation is right, the village began as a place where people came specifically to be judged. The first written mention is from 1194, when the bishop of Cambrai donated the altar of Malle and Vorsele to the Chapter of Our Kind Lady of Antwerp. Originally Oostmalle, Westmalle, and Zoersel were one domain, part of the County of Toxandria. Half a century later they were split apart along a feudal border, and they would not be reunited for seven hundred years.

The history of the Campine villages in early modern Europe is the history of being in the way. Oostmalle and Westmalle sat on the road between everywhere, and almost continuously through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they were plundered, burned, or both. In 1542, troops of Maarten van Rossum destroyed Renesse Castle. The Eighty Years War devastated the region. By the 1580s only twenty-three families survived in Westmalle, hiding for four years inside Westmalle Castle while Spanish troops worked the countryside. Around 1620 Croatian soldiers of the Spanish army occupied the village - Krawaten in old Flemish, a word that became a synonym for marauder. The Dutch War of 1672-78 burned Westmalle almost completely to the ground. The plague kept coming back. A small chapel built in Salphen in 1626 sheltered plague refugees from Oostmalle who had nowhere else to go. The wars eventually stopped. The people who outlasted them rebuilt with the patience of those who had no choice.

In 1794, ten Trappist monks fleeing the French Revolution accepted an invitation from the bishop of Antwerp and settled in a Campine farm called Nooit Rust - never rest. They had been on their way to Canada. They stayed instead. The monastery was elevated to an abbey in 1836, and that same year the abbot Martinus Dom built a small brewery, because the rule of Abbé de Rancé allowed monks one local beverage with meals, and the local beverage was beer. On 10 December 1836 they served their first brew of Trappist beer at lunch. They brew it still, and the names on the bottles - Westmalle Dubbel, Westmalle Tripel - are recognized in beer cellars around the world. The Tripel, developed in the 1930s, more or less invented the style. Visitors to the abbey can sit at the café across the road and drink it within sight of the brewery.

Viscount Leonard Pierre Joseph du Bus de Gisignies built the Chapel of Our Lady of Perpetual Help on the Herentalsebaan in 1837. Almost a century later, in 1930, a local devotion led to the construction of a Lourdes cave at the chapel - a replica of the grotto where Bernadette Soubirous reported seeing the Virgin in 1858. It was inaugurated on 7 May 1933. Four years after that, sculptor Simon Gossens installed Stations of the Cross around it in remembrance of King Albert I of Belgium, who had died in a climbing accident in 1934. The chapel sits beside the road like any other roadside shrine in Catholic Europe, but if you stop and walk around the back, the small grotto opens into the trees. People still leave flowers there. People still come.

Modern Malle is a regional economic center with about 15,600 people, home to ETAP Lighting, Ecover, and a handful of other companies that have outgrown smaller towns. It has three churches - Saint Lawrence in Oostmalle, Saint Paul and Saint Martin in Westmalle - and the annual Salphenkermis, a village festival in honor of Saint Anthony in the small hamlet of Salphen where the plague-refuge chapel still stands. Forests bracket the town on three sides: Herenbos, Molenbos, Bruulbergen, Schrabbenbos, mostly pine plantations on the old Campine sand. From the air the abbey is the most striking thing - a walled rectangle of red roofs and a bell tower with a campanile on top, the brewery's modern equipment hidden inside walls older than Belgium itself. The beer the monks made on a small farm called Never Rest has traveled the world. Most of them have never left the abbey grounds.