[citation needed] The municipality comprises the city of Ypres/Ieper and the villages of Boezinge, Brielen, Dikkebus, Elverdinge, Hollebeke, Sint-Jan, Vlamertinge, Voormezele, Zillebeke, and Zuidschote.

[3] During the Middle Ages, Ypres was a prosperous Flemish city with a population of 40,000 in 1200 AD,[4][5][6][7] renowned for its linen trade with England, which was mentioned in the Canterbury Tales.

As the third largest city in the County of Flanders (after Ghent and Bruges), Ypres played an important role in the history of the textile industry.

Also during this time cats, then the symbol of the devil and witchcraft, were thrown off Cloth Hall, possibly because of the belief that this would get rid of evil demons.

During the Norwich Crusade, led by the English bishop Henry le Despenser, Ypres was besieged from May to August 1383, until French relief forces arrived.

[8] In 1850, the Ypresian Age of the Eocene Epoch was named on the basis of geology in the region by Belgian geologist André Hubert Dumont.

Major works were completed at the end of the 17th century by the French military engineer Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban.

To counterattack, British, French, and allied forces made costly advances from the Ypres Salient into the German lines on the surrounding hills.

After months of fighting, this battle resulted in nearly half a million casualties to all sides, and only a few miles of ground won by Allied forces.

[10] The same style of deliberate mispronunciation was applied to other Flemish place names in the Ypres area for the benefit of British troops, such as Wytschaete becoming "White Sheet" and Ploegsteert becoming "Plug Street".

[13] Historian Mark Connelly states that in the 1920s, British veterans set up the Ypres League and made the city the symbol of all that they believed Britain was fighting for and gave it a holy aura in their minds.

The Ypres League sought to transform the horrors of trench warfare into a spiritual quest in which British and imperial troops were purified by their sacrifice.

There is not a single stone which has not sheltered scores of loyal young hearts, whose one impulse and desire was to fight and, if need be, to die for England.

[17] By early September 1920, the decision had been made by the British Government that the Menin Gate and its immediate surroundings would be used as a memorial,[18] by which time, the Belgians had already begun to rebuild the area.

The Cloth Hall today is home to In Flanders Fields Museum, dedicated to Ypres's role in the First World War and named for the poem by John McCrae.

The Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing[23] commemorates those soldiers of the British Commonwealth – with the exception of Newfoundland and New Zealand – who fell in the Ypres Salient during the First World War before 16 August 1917 and who have no known grave.

United Kingdom and New Zealand servicemen who died after that date are named on the memorial at Tyne Cot, a site which marks the farthest point reached by Commonwealth forces in Belgium until nearly the end of the war.

[25] The memorial's location is especially poignant, as it lies on the eastward route from the town, which Entente soldiers would have taken heading towards the fighting – many never to return.

During the Second World War the ceremony was prohibited by the occupying German forces, but was resumed on the very evening of liberation – 6 September 1944 – notwithstanding the heavy fighting still underway in other parts of the town.

In 2017, for the 100th anniversary memorial services of the Third Battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele, in a joint effort by the Belgian, Flemish and Australian governments, the lions were temporarily returned to the Menin Gate.

Saint George's Memorial Church commemorates the British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the five battles fought for Ypres during First World War.