Adela Capet, Adèle of France or Adela of Flanders, known also as Adela the Holy or Adela of Messines; was born in 1009. She was the second daughter of Robert II, the Pious, and Constance of Arles. As dowry to her future husband, she received from his father the title of Countess of Corbie.

She was a member of the House of Capet, the rulers of France. As the wife of Baldwin V, she was Countess of Flanders from 1036 to 1067.

She married first 1027 Richard III Duke of Normandy who lived from 997  until 1027. They never had children. As a widow, she remarried in 1028 in Paris to Baldwin V of Flanders.

Adèle’s influence lay mainly in her family connections. On the death of her brother, Henry I of France, the guardianship of his seven-year-old son Philip I fell jointly on his widow, Ann of Kiev, and on his brother-in-law, Adela´s husband, so that from 1060 to 1067, they were Regents of France.

When Adela´s third son, Robert the Frisian, was to invade Flanders in 1071 to become the new Count - at that time the Count was Adela´s grandson, Arnulf III - she asked Phillip I to stop him. Phillip sent troops in order to to aid Arnulf, being among the forces sent by the king a contingent of ten Norman knights led by William FitzOsborn. Robert's forces attacked Arnulf's numerically superior army at Cassel before it could organize, and Arnulf himself was killed along with William FitzOsborn. The overwhelming triumph of Robert made Phillip invest him with Flanders, making the peace. A year later, Phillip married Robert´s step-daughter, Bertha of Holland, and in 1074, Phillip restored the seigneurie of Corbie to the crown.

Adèle had an especially great interest in Baldwin V’s church-reform politics and was behind her husband’s founding of several collegiate churches. Directly or indirectly, she was responsible for establishing the Colleges of Aire in 1049, Lille in 1050 and Harelbeke in 1064) as well as the abbeys of Messines  in 1057 and Ename in1063. After Baldwin’s death in 1067, she went to Rome, took the nun’s veil from the hands of Pope Alexander II and retreated to the Benedictine convent of Messines, near Ypres. There she died on 8th September 1079