The Story of Brussels
by Ernest Gilliat-Smith · English · Gutenberg #44314 · 657,220 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Story of Brussels
Author: Ernest Gilliat-Smith
Illustrator: Guy Gilliat-Smith
Katharine Kimball
Release date: November 30, 2013 [eBook #44314]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF BRUSSELS ***
[A transcriber's note is after the text.]
_The Story of Brussels_
_The Mediæval Town Series_
ASSISI.* By LINA DUFF GORDON.
[_4th Edition._
BRUGES.+ By ERNEST GILLIAT-SMITH.
[_3rd Edition._
BRUSSELS.+ By ERNEST GILLIAT-SMITH.
CAIRO.+ By STANLEY LANE-POOLE.
CAMBRIDGE.+ By CHARLES W. STUBBS, D.D.
CHARTRES.+ By CECIL HEADLAM.
CONSTANTINOPLE.* By WILLIAM H. HUTTON.
[_2nd Edition._
EDINBURGH.+ By OLIPHANT SMEATON.
FERRARA.+ By ELLA NOYES.
FLORENCE.+ By EDMUND G. GARDNER.
[_8th Edition._
LONDON.+ By HENRY B. WHEATLEY.
[_2nd Edition._
MOSCOW.* By WIRT GERRARE.
[_2nd Edition._
NUREMBERG.* By CECIL HEADLAM.
[_4th Edition._
PERUGIA.* By MARGARET SYMONDS and
LINA DUFF GORDON. [_5th Edition._
PRAGUE.* By COUNT LUTZOW.
ROME.+ By NORWOOD YOUNG.
[_4th Edition._
ROUEN.+ By THEODORE A. COOK.
[_2nd Edition._
SEVILLE.+ By WALTER M. GALLICHAN.
SIENA.+ By EDMUND G. GARDNER.
[_2nd Edition._
TOLEDO.* By HANNAH LYNCH.
[_2nd Edition._
VERONA.+ By ALETHEA WIEL.
[_2nd Edition._
VENICE.+ By THOMAS OKEY.
_The prices of these (*) are 3s. 6d. net in cloth, 4s. 6d. net in
leather; these (+) 4s. 6d. net in cloth, 5s. 6d. net in leather._
[Illustration: GEORGE ZELLE, PHYSICIAN. Painted by Bernard van Orley,
Brussels, 1519.]
_The Story of_ Brussels
_by Ernest Gilliat-Smith_
_Illustrated by Katharine Kimball
and Guy Gilliat-Smith_
[Illustration: Monogram]
_London: J. M. Dent & Co.
Aldine House, 29 and 30 Bedford Street
Covent Garden, W.C. * * 1906_
_All Rights Reserved_
PREFACE
Probably there is no quarter of Europe more thickly studded with
mediæval towns than that embraced by the Flemish provinces of
Belgium--the old Duchy of Brabant and the old County of Flanders.
Curious places they are, some of them, little changed from what they
were at the close of the fourteen hundreds; and some of them, so
modernised that hardly anything is left to prove their identity but
their geographical position and their names.
All of these cities, however, have this in common, and this it is which
makes them so interesting: we know something of their general history,
and something too of the intimate lives of the men and the women who
inhabited them, five hundred years ago--how they were lodged and
clothed, what they drank and ate, the way in which their food was
dressed and their tables served, something of their distractions and
their business pursuits, how they loved and hated, what they thought of
this world, and what of the next.
These things are set forth by three distinct classes of contemporary
witnesses:--Pictures, a host of them, minutely detailed, with almost
photographic accuracy; furniture of every description--ecclesiastical,
domestic, personal; written documents of various kinds--chronicles,
private letters, books of devotion, guild registers, town accounts. Many
of these have been carefully examined, and a very considerable number of
them printed; also, especially in recent years, some of the most
accredited Belgian historians have busied themselves by writing
monographs of their native towns, or treatises on their ancient
municipal institutions: notably Pirenne, Vander Linden, Wauters, Henne,
Piot, Van Even. From their works and from other sources, ancient and
modern, I have gathered the material for my Story of Mediæval Brussels,
in the following pages, and which necessarily includes, for the two
cities were intimately connected, a considerable portion of the Story of
Mediæval Louvain. To this I have added some notes on Brabant painters
and pictures, and also on Brabant architecture, with descriptions of the
chief mediæval monuments in Brussels and in the neighbouring towns, and
such information as I have been able to obtain concerning the great
masons who built them.
Constrained by the narrow limits of this volume to curtail and compress,
I have been content to set down facts, clearly I hope and coherently,
but for the most part without comment or criticism.
Intended as it is for the general reader, I have done my utmost, and my
first care has been, to make this pocket-book readable. I cannot venture
to hope that I have escaped all error; but I think that upon the whole I
have been able to outline a sufficiently faithful sketch, which I trust
may be of some service to those into whose hands it may fall.
E. G.-S.
BRUGES, _February 1906_.
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I _In the Days before Brussels was Built_ 1
CHAPTER II _The Norsemen and Louvain_ 8
CHAPTER III _The House of Long Col_ 13
CHAPTER IV _The Making of the Duchy of Brabant_ 22
CHAPTER V _The Rise of Brussels and Louvain_ 31
CHAPTER VI _The Serfs of St. Peter_ 41
CHAPTER VII _The Greater and the Lesser Folk_ 47
CHAPTER VIII _The Coelveren and the Blankarden_ 58
CHAPTER IX _Peter Coutherele_ 67
CHAPTER X _The Peace of 1383_ 86
CHAPTER XI _Reform_ versus _Revolution_ 95
CHAPTER XII _Everard T'Serclaes_ 106
CHAPTER XIII _Liberty at Last_ 118
CHAPTER XIV _The Trials of Jacqueline_ 163
CHAPTER XV _Buildings and Builders_ 171
CHAPTER XVI _Buildings and Builders (continued)_ 256
CHAPTER XVII _Pictures and Painters_ 330
CHAPTER XVIII _Conclusion_ 358
INDEX 377
GENEALOGICAL TABLES
PAGE
_I. Table of the House of Long Col_ _facing_ 19
_II. Table of the Counts of Louvain_ _facing_ 30
_III. Table of the Dukes of Brabant from_ _facing_ 66
_Godfrey I. to John III._
_IV. Table of the Dukes of Brabant from_ _facing_ 120
_John III. to Philip II._
_V. Table of the Dukes of Brabant from_ _facing_ 359
_Philip II. to Philip III._
_VI. Table of the Dukes of Brabant from_ _follows_ 375
_Philip III. to Francis_
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
_Portrait of George Zelle, Physician,_ _Frontispiece_
_by Bernard van Orley (photogravure)_
_Heading*_ 1
_The Abbey Church, Forest+_ 5
_By the Dyle, at Mechlin+_ 7
_The Subterranean Church of St. Guy at Anderlecht*_ 37
_At Mechlin*_ 40
_Saint Peter's, Louvain*_ 43
_Cloth Hall, Louvain*_ 52
_Tailpiece+_ 57
_The Old Castle of Everard T'Serclaes at Ternath+_ 116
_Notre-Dame de Hal from Chapel behind North Transept*_ 123
_The Town Hall, Brussels+_ 147
_Old Houses near Saint Gudule's+_ 149
_Tailpiece+_ 162
_The Old Church of Saint Nicholas, Rue au Beurre+_ 176
_Le Tour Noire+_ 183
_Saint Rumbold's Cathedral*_ 199
_Notre-Dame au-delà de la Dyle+_ 202
_La Maison du Roi+_ 203
_Eglise Sainte-Gudule Pilastre Sculpté*_ 207
_The Steen of Antwerp*_ 209
_Quai de l'Avoine, Malines+_ 211
_From the Béguinage, Louvain*_ 236
_Saint Catherine's, Brussels+_ 245
_Rouge Cloître*_ 248
_Guild Houses in the Grand' Place, Brussels+_ 258
_Notre-Dame du Sablon+_ 261
_Notre-Dame de la Chapelle+_ 265
_Notre-Dame au-delà de la Dyle+_ 268
_Saint Michel et Sainte Gudule+_ 271
_Sainte Gudule--The Lady Chapel+_ 281
_St. Peter's, Louvain, Chapel of St. Charles*_ 295
_Interior of Mechlin Cathedral+_ 301
_Mechlin Cathedral+_ 303
_De Dijle te Mechelen*_ 307
_Notre-Dame de Hal Baptistery Gates*_ 311
_Hôtel de Ville, Louvain+_ 321
_Tête de Femme en Pleurs, attributed to_ _facing_ 333
_Roger Van Der Weyden, Brussels Gallery_
_'Pièta', attributed to Roger Van Der Weyden,_ _facing_ 335
_Brussels Gallery_
_'The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus' by_ _facing_ 339
_Dierick Boudts, at Saint Peter's, Louvain_
_The Wings of the Saint Anne Triptych by_ _facing_ 347
_Quentin Metsys, in the Brussels Gallery (shut)_
_The Wings of the Saint Anne Triptych by_ _facing_ 348
_Quentin Metsys, in the Brussels Gallery (open)_
_The Central Panel of the Saint Anne Triptych by_ _facing_ 350
_Quentin Metsys, in the Brussels Gallery_
_From S. Rombold's, Malines*_ 357
_At Mechlin+_ 361
_By the Dyle at Mechlin+_ 364
_Guild Halls in the Market-Place at Brussels+_ 369
_Notre-Dame d'Hanswyck, Malines+_ 372
_Saints Pierre et Paul, Malines+_ 373
_La Porte de Hal, Brussels+_ 374
_Tailpiece+_ 375
_Plan of Brussels_ _follows_ 375
Those illustrations marked * are by G. GILLIAT-SMITH.
Do. do. + are by KATHARINE KIMBALL.
[Illustration: Brussels]
The Story of Brussels
CHAPTER I
_In the Days before Brussels was Built_
The beginning of the story of Brussels, like the beginning of the
stories of most of the mediæval towns of Northern Europe, is shrouded in
mystery. Set at the time of its origin in a land of marsh and wood, it
probably takes its name, like so many German cities, from the natural
configuration of its site and the nature of the settlement from which it
was gradually evolved--_Bruk Sel_, the manor in the marsh. So, too, the
neighbouring towns:--Antwerp, at wharf; Tervueren, by the river Vuer;
Schaerbeek, by the heath stream; Aerschot, the home by the water; and
the sister city, the city whose history is so intricately woven with the
history of the capital of Belgium that it is impossible to disentangle
them, Looven, the wooded hill alongside the fen; and the province in
which all these places are situated: Brabant, from _Brac_, uncultivated,
barren, wild, and _Bant_, the frontier land.
The fierce tribes whom Cæsar found in this part of Gaul gloried in the
tradition of their German origin, but it is not to them that the towns
and villages and hamlets of Brabant owe their German names. The Nervii
and the Treveri, like the despised and hated Celts who surrounded them,
were compelled at last to submit to Rome's legions and to learn the
Roman tongue; they learnt it so well that when later on a whirlwind of
barbarism swept Latin civilisation from Northern Europe they had
altogether forgotten their own. Driven for the most part south into
those provinces which we now call Liége and Hainault and Namur, to this
day their descendants speak the time-honoured language of Rome, and to
this day German is the tongue of the offspring of the men who ousted
them. It was the Salic Franks, then, who, for the most part, were the
builders of the cities of Brabant, and they it was who gave them their
rough German names.
In the dark, troublous times which witnessed the birth of the new
civilisation and the making of the new towns, two figures stand out
pre-eminent--the figure of the hero, of whom later on, and the figure of
the saint. The bishop in his embroidered cope, who never failed to throw
the mantle of his protection about the downtrodden and the oppressed,
nor to vindicate the sacredness of the marriage vow and the sacredness
of human life: at his menace of retribution the half-tamed German chief
quailed as at the threat of a sorcerer, if he dared violate this man's
domain maybe he would stumble on the threshold and break his neck, or
perchance a worse thing might happen to him; the monk in his tattered
cowl, who going forth day by day from his hovel in the wilderness
gradually brought the land once more under tillage, or patiently sitting
at home in his cell, little by little gathered up what fragments
remained of human knowledge, and so saved what could be saved of human
culture; the consecrated virgin whose whole life proclaimed to a people,
who knew nothing of these things, the beauty of chastity and the beauty
of humility and the sweetness of self-denial; the layman whose heart had
been touched by the fire of Divine love, sometimes a son of the people,
sometimes the scion of a noble house, and who, attaching himself, often
in a menial capacity, to some church or religious establishment, had one
object in life--to serve God and His poor. Such were the women and such
were the men who in those dark and violent days poured some drops of
sweetness into the bitter chalice of existence; they were the chief
agents and the choicest and most perfect flowers of that great
institution which we call Christianity. Incalculable were the benefits
which they conferred on the human race, and the greatest of them all,
even from a human point of view, was this--to a people sitting in
darkness and in the shadow of death they brought back hope. In an age
when, for the vast majority of mankind, the sum of human happiness was
so slender, they reinspired men with the wish to live, or at all events
with the courage to endure existence, conjuring up before their
despairing eyes, 'a glorious pavilion of gold at the end of life's muddy
lane,' a vision of eternal beatitude which the weakest and the vilest of
them might one day enjoy. Thus Taine, epitomised, speaking of Europe
generally.[1]
[1] _l'Ancien Régime_, livre 1^er, ch. i. § 1.
Profane and fierce were the men of Brabant, 'infinitos prædones, vulgo
dictus Brabantiones, qui nec Deum diligunt nec viam veritatis cognoscere
volunt,' as Aimoin has it, at the close of the ten hundreds; but for all
that they had their heroes, and amongst them, too, were saints. Men like
that mighty hunter, Hubert, Bishop of Liége (706-727), the apostle to
whose untiring zeal Brabant in great measure owed her conversion to the
Christian faith, and who, in the days of his stormy youth, before he met
the stag with the cross between its horns, and turned devout, dwelt in a
castle at a place called Tervueren, on the fringe of that mysterious
forest of Soignes, which still overshadows Brussels, and which still,
the peasant folk will tell you, he loves and protects: here he received
holy orders, here he sang his first Mass, here, worn out with travail
and fever, he died, with the fall of the leaf, in the year 727: no trace
of his villa remains, but St. Hubert's Chapel, in the royal park of
Tervueren, is said to mark its site, and on one of the walls of the
parish church hard by, there still hangs an old ivory hunting horn,
which once belonged, tradition says, to the huntsman's patron saint. Men
like 'that impious robber Adhilck,' lord of Hesbaye, surnamed the
Fierce, one of Charlemagne's ancestors, who, touched by the preaching of
Saint-Amand, shaved off his beard, took a new name, Bavo, which means
the mild, and changed, too, his manner of life, distributed all his
goods to the poor, went and hid himself in the woods of Beyla, there did
penance for seven years in the trunk of a hollow tree, which all that
time was covered with leaves and flowers, and at last withdrew to the
monastery which Amand had founded at Ghent, where he died in the odour
of sanctity, tended in his last moments by his friend Domlinus, a hermit
from the distant forest of Thor, whom, because Bavo desired to bid him
farewell, an angel conducted to his bedside. Presently they built a
church in his honour, and St. Bavo became the patron of Ghent. Men like
Rombold, the son of an Irish chief, who left his father's court and his
native land to become an evangelist, and wandering about Brabant,
preaching and teaching wherever he went, at last founded, on the banks
of the Dyle, a monastery, where he presently fell a victim to his zeal
and won the crown of martyrdom, and around which gradually grew up the
city we now call Mechlin; or women, like Pepin of Landen's daughter
Gertrude, who founded the Abbey of Nivelles and the town which clusters
round it; or her niece and disciple Gudila, who led the life of a
recluse in the castle of Ham by Alost, and whose bones three hundred
years after her death were translated to Brussels, and presently laid up
in the church which now bears her name; or poor little Halene, slain by
her own father, a Pagan chief, because she became a Christian, and whose
tomb you may still see in the old church of Forest, hard by Brussels.
[Illustration: THE ABBEY CHURCH, FOREST.]
Of these heroic men and women we know hardly anything for certain save
their names. They lived in that age of legend and mystery during which
Paganism was making its last stand against the victorious onslaught of
the new faith. If their actions were recorded by contemporary writers,
the manuscripts were destroyed by the barbarian hordes who scourged the
land in the course of the nine hundreds--and the biographies of later
writers, compiled as they must have been from hearsay evidence, and
after ample time had elapsed for the legends to grow, are little more
than a fascinating texture of folklore and myth--naïve and beautiful
fairy tales, of which the most that can be said of them is that,
perhaps, they are founded on fact.
But if there are no authentic chronicles of the lives of the early
saints of Brabant, we know that their lives were not lived in vain; the
bountiful harvest which was reaped by after generations bears witness to
the excellence of the seed which these men had sown, and to the care and
the diligence with which they and their successors had tended it; and
after all the ecclesiastical seal of canonisation has been in most
cases, especially in these early days, the outcome rather than the cause
of popular devotion. As Taine shrewdly notes, man is too envious and too
egoistical to lavish gratitude where none is due, and the estimation in
which they were held by the people is sufficient proof of their sterling
worth. We see them pale, shadowy, vague, like the white cloud which
hovered over the battlefield of Louvain, but the victors saw in that
white cloud, 'la benoite vierge Marie et Saint Lambert avec Monsieur
Saint Pierre semblant de vouloir secourir le peuple Chrétien,' and so
heartened were they by the vision that they put to flight the Pagan
host, and no less fruitful in results are the forgotten lives and the
forgotten labours of those great pioneers of civilisation who to-day are
for us but as beautiful phantoms.
[Illustration: BY THE DYLE, AT MECHLIN.]
CHAPTER II
_The Norsemen and Louvain_
The victory of Louvain (Sept. 10, 891) marks an epoch in the history of
Brabant. The Danes under Rolf the Ganger, who later on became first Duke
of Normandy, were utterly routed, and though they succeeded in rallying
their forces and for a few months continued their devastations in the
Ardennes, Brabant at least was free of them, and after the storming of
'a certain stronghold newly constructed upon an exceeding high mountain
whither a vast multitude of them had taken refuge,' the Pagan host was
disbanded and as if by enchantment melted away.
Perhaps the peasants, descendants of men who had been driven to the
font, had at first lent assistance to the invaders, and that now at last
convinced that Thor was not mighty enough to withstand Christ they had
withdrawn their co-operation.
For well-nigh a century the storm had raged and the brunt of its fury
had fallen on the Church, for it was not greed alone which had driven
forth these fierce pirates from their homes in the north, but, and in
the first place perhaps, a fiery zeal for their time-honoured traditions
and their time-honoured faith: they would have rebuilt their broken
altars and brought back the old gods to the lands from which they had
been banished.
It was toward the close of the year 880 that the Danes, who had ere this
made themselves masters of Holland and Friesland, for the first time
visited Brabant. Coming up the Scheldt in their long black boats, they
presently ascended the Dyle as far as 'a place called Lovon,' as a
contemporary writer has it, where the river ceases to be navigable. This
is the first time that Louvain is mentioned in history; it was then what
its name signifies--forest and fen. Here they made camp on a little
island formed by two branches of the stream, and the site of the future
capital of Brabant became their headquarters. From thence they issued
daily, and the usual consequences followed--churches and monasteries
went up in flames, altars were cast down, and those who served them
tortured and slain; whilst the most cherished objects of Christian
worship were profaned and trampled in the dust.
In the vast diocese of Liége, which embraced at this time the whole
country between the Meuse and the Dyle, hardly a sacred building was
left standing. At Mechlin, the only one of the five great towns of
Brabant which had as yet begun to exist, there was not a church but was
reduced to ashes. So, too, further afield at Tongres, St. Trond,
Maestricht, where the Danes had another camp. In the episcopal city
itself they fired the church and the monastery of St. Caprais, and cut
the throats of the monks. The monks of St. Peter's fared worse: they
were nailed by their heads to the walls of their cloister, and there
left to die. The Cathedral of St. Lambert, too, was invaded, rifled for
treasure, and then burnt to the ground; and a host of other sanctuaries
shared a like fate. As for Francon, the bishop, though after events
showed that he was in reality no coward, when he heard that the Danes
were approaching, he packed up his relics and his treasures, and made
for Huy, on the banks of the Meuse between Liége and Namur, where there
was an impregnable fortress.
At first, indeed, very little resistance seems to have been made; at all
events, there was no organised and concerted action, and in some cases
no opposition whatever was offered. Panic laid hold of whole
populations, and not only clerks and monks, but stalwart knights and
sturdy burghers, turned tail and fled. Presently, Charles the Fat was
summoned from Italy in order to prevent, if might be, the complete
demoralisation of the people; but though in due course that weak and
vacillating monarch arrived with the largest army that had ever been
seen in the Pays de Liége, he showed himself utterly unable to cope with
the situation, and it was not till the advent of his successor, Arnulph
I., that matters began to mend. In 884, after more than one engagement,
in which his troops had not been worsted, Charles had made terms with
the Norsemen, and the invading host had withdrawn; but the following
spring saw their long black boats once more on the Dyle, soon the
marauders were again encamped 'in the place called Lovon,' and soon they
were again vexing the surrounding country. But for some reason or other
the natives now seem to have plucked up their courage. In the
skirmishes, which were of almost daily occurrence, they were sometimes
able to hold their own; and when presently the Emperor Arnulph appeared
at the head of an army of Germans, so great was the enthusiasm of the
urban populations that crowds of townsfolk flocked to his
standard--Francon of Liége amongst the rest, and his example was
followed by a host of monks and not a few of his canons. 'He was the
first of our bishops to draw the sword,' notes an old Liége chronicler;
but when the excitement was over and the battle had been won, Francon's
conscience pricked him, and he sent messengers to Rome begging to be
relieved of his episcopal functions. 'It were not meet,' he said, 'that
hands stained with blood should have the administration of holy things.'
Great was the joy of the men of Lotharingia at the triumph of Louvain,
and King Arnulph ordained that on the first day of October 'solemn
litanies should be chanted by way of thanksgiving, and he himself and
his whole army joined in the procession, singing praises to God who had
given them the victory.'
Though cities had been pillaged and the country laid waste, though heaps
of ashes and tottering walls were all that remained of the monuments
with which Charlemagne and his successors had adorned the cradle of
their race, though art and culture had been well-nigh wiped out, the
Church laid low and the State shattered almost beyond hope of repair,
there was one body of men in the old kingdom of Lotharingia whose
interests had been singularly favoured by the coming of the Danes--the
great lay proprietors. Thrifty men who for years past by purchase, by
marriage, by promises of protection, by means of loans in times of
stress, by hook or by crook, by fair means sometimes, and sometimes by
foul, had been gradually gathering into their own hands the freehold
tenements of their weaker brethren; strong men who, instead of turning
tail when Hungarian or Dane threatened them, bared their breasts to the
foe, and with their swords in their hands defended alike their own
property and the property of their neighbours; astute men, who knew very
well, from personal experience, what an exceedingly profitable pastime
it sometimes is to fish in troubled waters. For them the coming of the
Danes had been almost a godsend; at all events, a blessing in disguise;
and their departure left them free to reap the rich harvest which these
rude northerners had unwittingly sown--to obtain, that is, a vast
increase of their landed estates and a no less vast increase of
privileges, immunities, authority, and of political and social prestige.
In the first place they had little difficulty in making themselves
masters, in fact if not in name, of the abbey lands. Many of the monks
had been slain or had fled, and so fearful were the remnant that
remained of further depredation that they were glad enough to hand over
the administration of their estates to the only men who were strong
enough to defend them. Thus, by the close of the eight hundreds almost
all the monastic domains of Lotharingia had in reality become the
property of laymen who, as the monks' _avoués_ or stewards, took up
their abode in their cloisters, received and expended their revenues,
became participators in their rights and immunities, and exercised
jurisdiction in their name over their vassals and dependants.
To obtain control of the secular clergy was a matter no less easy of
accomplishment, for although the cathedral chapters still retained the
right to choose their own bishops, so great was the power and influence
of the landowners that they had become practically irresistible, and
were almost always able to secure the election of their own nominees,
and thus were enabled, through them, to rule the Church.
But this was not all, such of them as were invested with civil authority
now began to exercise it in their own names, and the emperors, whose
power and prestige had long ago been impaired by the fratricidal strife
of the children of Louis the Mild, had been so enfeebled by the recent
invasions that they were unable to offer any effectual resistance. Thus
were laid on the ruins of Imperialism the foundations of that feudal
system which was destined later on to play so great a part in the
civilisation of Europe.
CHAPTER III
_The House of Long Col_
Foremost among the landowners, who at this time were laying the
foundations of dynasties, was Régnier au Long Col, the great ancestor of
the Counts of Hainault and of the Counts of Brussels and Louvain, the
man to whom all the sovereigns of Brabant, from Lambert Longbeard to
Francis II., traced their descent:[2] the son of one Count Giselbert,
who, in the middle of the eight hundreds, had made his fortune by
carrying off a daughter of the Emperor Lothaire, he was the owner of
vast estates in Hainault, in Hesbaye, in Ardennes, and lay-abbot to boot
of three great monastic domains. Of the vassals and serfs who dwelt on
his lands some, then, were Teutons and some were Celts, and he himself,
who spoke the language of each race, was perhaps unable to say to which
stock he belonged, and herein lay his strength: he was a man whose
nationality was merged in the great feudal chief.
[2] The reigning sovereign of Belgium, King Leopold II., is a descendant
of Régnier au Long Col. (_See_ Genealogical Table VI.)
Such a one could alone command the confidence of the mixed race which
inhabited Lotharingia, and when presently the Emperor Arnulph set up a
German king in the person of his illegitimate son, Zwentibold (895), and
Régnier unfurled the standard of revolt, the discontented feudal lords
to a man rallied round him.
A stranger in a strange land, without the means to purchase the goodwill
and support of the native chiefs, since their fathers had already
received in bribes the whole of the royal domains, from the first the
new sovereign had to fight for his throne, and from the first the issue
of the conflict was a foregone conclusion. Zwentibold fell in an obscure
skirmish on August 13, 900, and Régnier became virtual ruler of
Lotharingia, and though he had no legal sanction for the authority which
he exercised, before his death he had so consolidated his power that
when that event took place (915) his son Giselbert stepped quietly into
his shoes, and presently the reigning Emperor Henry I. acknowledged him
Duke and gave him the hand of his daughter Gerberge, and with it, by way
of dowry, large estates, including among other tenements, the castles of
Brussels and Louvain. If Henry believed that he had thereby definitely
bound his redoubtable vassal to the imperial house, he little knew with
whom he had to deal. A contemporary chronicler has left us his portrait,
and it is not a flattering one. 'Giselbert,' he tells us, 'was small of
stature but strongly built, always in movement, and with eyes so keen
and so shifty that no man knew their colour. Eaten up with ambition,
audacious, crafty, false, he cared not what means he took to compass his
ends.' The goal that he was striving for was, in all probability, a
royal crown: the darling wish of his heart was to re-establish the
kingdom of Lotharingia. His whole life had hitherto been one long course
of treachery and intrigue, and though after his marriage he kept faith
with Henry, when that prince died he soon showed that he was still the
same Giselbert as of yore; in spite of an oath of allegiance, and in
spite of his imperial wife, he proved himself as false to Otho the
Great, the son of his benefactor, as he had been in former days to
Rodolphe of Burgundy and to Charles the Simple of France.
Of this last act of treason the outcome was death. Surprised by the
imperial forces at Andernach, on the Rhine, and hemmed in on all sides,
he made his horse plunge into the water, hoping to reach the further
bank and so make his escape, but the current was too strong for him, and
horse and rider were swept away. Thus died Duke Giselbert (939), and at
his death the star of his house for a while waned. His only son, an
infant whom Otho placed under ward, died shortly afterwards, and though
his nephew, Régnier III. of Hainault, seized his widow's dower, he was
not strong enough to grasp the reins of government, and presently the
Emperor Otho conferred the duchy on Conrad the Red, a native of
Franconia, who, like his predecessor, was allied by marriage to the
imperial house (944). Conrad was an energetic and capable man, but rude,
passionate, vindictive, and, as the issue showed, untrustworthy. At
first, however, all went well: the new duke rigidly enforced order, any
attempt at rebellion he crushed with an iron hand, and for some ten
years the land had peace; and then, having taken it into his head that
Otho had treated him badly, he himself turned rebel. Whereat Régnier of
Hainault, and the rest who had experienced Conrad's lash, taking heart,
banded together against him and drove him from their midst (953). If
Régnier believed that the Emperor would recompense his services by
restoring him to the throne of his ancestors, he was doomed to signal
disappointment. Otho was in no way deceived by the specious loyalty of
his Lotharingian vassals. He knew very well that, in helping him to
crush Conrad, they had in reality made him the instrument of their
vengeance against one whom they hated, not on account of his recent
rebellion, but because of his zeal for law and order and his former
loyal service, and he refused to reward these lawless men by setting
over them a chief as lawless as themselves, and one too, who, by reason
of his popularity, would have all the more power to work mischief; nor
would he confer the duchy on another German vassal, for such would be
not unlikely to follow the example of Conrad. Henceforth he would govern
Lotharingia by means of the Church.
True, the Church had ceased to be the power which she had been in
Charlemagne's day. Her authority was no longer enhanced by the glamour
of wealth and the glamour of learning and the glamour of political
prestige. Her spiritual life had waned. She had lost much of her
pristine fervour, something of her child-like faith. Her sanctuaries had
been ruined; she had been robbed of her treasure; a considerable portion
of her landed property had been appropriated by laymen, and it needed
all her tact and all her vigilance to safeguard the rest, a task the
more difficult from the fact that many bishops owed their appointment to
harpies eager to despoil them. But for all that she was still a power to
be reckoned with--an ally whose friendship was not to be despised. If
only she could be freed from the feudal incubus which was strangling
her, she might yet do yeoman service for the Crown.
This then was the task which Otho set himself to perform, and the method
which he adopted to accomplish it was a bold and an effectual one: he
rendered it henceforth impossible for his vassals to interfere with
episcopal elections by naming the bishops himself, and at the same time
he took good care to appoint none but worthy, capable and reliable men,
entirely devoted to his interests. But this was not all; if the bishops
were to hold their own in their perennial conflict with the barons,
their hands would have to be strengthened; and henceforth it became
Otho's policy, and the policy too of his successors, as opportunity
offered, to gradually enlarge their boundaries, to endow them with fresh
sources of revenue, to increase their temporal authority, and to shower
on them all sorts of civil and political rights.
Nor was the result disproportionate to the Emperor's expectations--the
bishops of Lotharingia became their most faithful and devoted servants.
'If the Emperor were to pluck out my right eye,' cried Bishop Wazon of
Liége (1042-1048) in an outburst of enthusiastic loyalty, 'I would still
use the left in his honour and service.'[3] That was the spirit which
animated all of them, and for a hundred and fifty years they were able
to keep the wolf at bay.
[3] _Anselme_, _Gesta episcop. Leod., Mon. Germ. Hist. Script._, t. vii.
p. 225.
The man on whose head Otho now placed the ducal crown was his brother
Bruno, a clerk in holy orders, on whom he also conferred the
metropolitan See of Cologne, which included among its suffragans
Utrecht, Liége and Cambrai, thus making him supreme alike in Church and
State (953). The success of Otho's policy in Lotharingia was in great
measure, if not entirely, due to the energy, the perseverance, the
courage, and, above all, to the consummate tact and the marvellous
administrative capacity of this great man. His work was essentially a
constructive one, out of chaos he brought order, and his success as an
organiser and administrator was only equalled by his success as an
educator. 'His schools at Cologne,' says M. Pirenne, 'were frequented
not only by clerks who aspired to ecclesiastical dignities, but also by
young nobles--for many of the feudal lords confided their sons to his
care--and all of them returned reconciled to the Empire and entirely
subjugated by the charm of the Archbishop-Duke.'[4] In the twelve years
during which he governed Lotharingia--he died in 965--he succeeded not
only in pacifying that rebellious province, but, if we may trust his
biographer, in working a marvellous change in the lives and morals of
its inhabitants: 'he found them,' says Ruotger, 'rugged and fierce, and
he left them gentle and tame'; and though the conversion of the vast
majority was sufficiently short-lived--when the benign influence of
Bruno was withdrawn they soon relapsed into their old blood-thirsty and
lawless ways--the grandeur of his work is sufficiently appreciable when
we compare such ruffians as Régnier au Long Col, for instance, or his
slippery son Giselbert, with one who came immediately under Bruno's
influence, whose character, indeed, he formed--his friend and disciple
Ansfried, Count of Louvain, who, after having been for long years a
faithful and devoted servant of the Emperor, at last took orders, became
Bishop of Utrecht, and died in the odour of sanctity; or to men like
Godfrey of Verdun, the most perfect type of those nobles whom Bruno had
reconciled to the imperial cause, a man who had no more sympathy for
feudal aspirations than had Bruno himself, and whose staunch loyalty may
be gauged from the message he sent to his wife when he was a captive in
a French prison, and which has been preserved for us in the Memoirs of
Gerbert--who afterwards became Pope Sylvester II. (997-1003)--whom he
charged to deliver it:--'Remain staunch in your fidelity to the ever
august Empress and her son. Make no truce with the French; hold your
forts firm against their king, and let not the hope of restoring your
husband and your son to liberty diminish the energy of your
resistance.'[5]
[4] _Histoire de Belgique_, vol. i. ch. iii. p. 57 (Brussels, 1902).
[5] _Lettres de Gerbert_, ed. J. Havet, No. 50, p. 47 (Paris, 1889).
I.--Genealogical Table of the House of Long-Col
$Régnier au Long-Col.$, _d._ 915
|
+-----------+-+------+
| | |
Louis d'Outremer, = Gerberge = Gislebert, Régnier II. |
King of France | (daughter | Duke of | |
| of Henry | Lotharingia, | a daughter = Bérenger,
| the | _d._ 939 | Count of
| Fowler) | | Namur
| a son |
+--------------+--+ _d._ in infancy |
| | |
Lothaire, Charles, Duke of Régnier III. _d._ 958
King of Lower Lotharingia, | (in exile in
France, _d._ 992 | Bohemia)
_d._ 987 | | |
| | |
+--------+-------+ +---------+----------+
| | | |
Otho, Duke of Gerberge = Lambert Longbeard, Régnier IV., Count
Lower Lotharingia, first hereditary of Hainault,
_d._ 1012 Count of Louvain, _d._ 1013
_d._ 1015
_Facing page_ 19.
Between Régnier of Hainault, that half-tamed leader of rebels, and the
gentle scholar and polished gentleman, Saint Bruno of Cologne--men whose
dispositions were so different and whose interests and ideals were so
diametrically opposed, the one the incarnation of feudal chaos and
feudal license, and the other the representative of imperial liberty
and imperial law, each of them endowed with unflagging perseverance, and
an indomitable will--no treaty of peace would have been possible, even
if Régnier had not believed that the Emperor had ungratefully bestowed
on Bruno the inheritance which was lawfully his, and from the first they
were at daggers drawn.
As was natural, the man who had been rejected did all in his power to
thwart his successful rival and to frustrate his projects of reform. For
three years the conflict continued and then Bruno was able to pluck the
thorn from his side. Fortune delivered his tormentor into his hands and
he forthwith banished him to Bohemia and detained him there until he
went the way of all flesh. But the house of Long Col was not
extinguished by the death of its chief--the old count had two sons,
Régnier and Lambert, who, when their father was captured and his estates
confiscated, found an asylum in France at the Court of King Lothaire.
The French monarchs, as direct heirs of Charlemagne, had always regarded
Lotharingia as their own inheritance, and Lothaire himself and his
brother Charles were the sons of Duke Giselbert's widow Gerberge by her
second husband, Louis d'Outremer.
Thus ties of kindred and a common grievance disposed the French king to
befriend the children of Régnier of Hainault, and at his Court they
remained for fifteen years nourishing their enmity against Bruno and the
Emperor, and praying for an opportunity of vengeance. At last the day of
reckoning came. The strong and gentle hand of Bruno had been removed by
death in 965, and Otho the Great was gathered to his fathers in 973.
Taking advantage of the confusion incident on this last event Charles of
France now claimed his mother's dowry, and Régnier and Lambert their
father's estates, and presently they invaded Lotharingia to make good
their demands at the sword's point.
Welcomed by the feudal chiefs and backed by the power of France, so
formidable were the invaders that Otho II. deemed it prudent to treat
with them and at last restored their paternal heritage to Régnier and
Lambert and conferred the duchy on Charles. Two considerations made him
the more ready to grant this last concession. Charles on his father's
side was a descendant of Charlemagne and as such was likely to be a
_persona grata_ to the nobles, many of whom had Carolingian blood in
their veins, and through his mother he was the grandson of Henry the
Fowler, thus first cousin to Otho himself, and hence there was reason to
believe that he would prove a loyal vassal.
Otho's hopes, however, were only partly realised. He had no reason to
suspect Charles's good faith, but the feudal chiefs, with Régnier and
Lambert at their head, so far from acknowledging the new duke, did all
in their power to second the desperate efforts which Lothaire was making
to annex Lotharingia, efforts which in despite of his allies were doomed
to disappointment. True he at one time succeeded in reaching the
imperial palace at Aachen, and there 'had the satisfaction of eating a
dinner which had been prepared for Otho himself,' but he was forced to
beat a hasty retreat, and his death, which took place shortly
afterwards, followed as it was by the death of his only son, left the
Emperor master of the situation (987), and Duke Charles heir to a crown
which he was never able to wear. Hugh Capet, who for years past had been
drawing nearer and nearer to the French throne, had himself proclaimed
king at Noyon, and though Charles fought valiantly for his heritage, and
there seemed every likelihood that his efforts would meet with success,
he failed, almost in the hour of triumph: treacherously delivered into
the hands of the usurper by the Bishop of Laon, he was cast into prison
at Orléans where he shortly afterwards died (992).
This unfortunate prince is the first ruler whose name is intimately
associated with Brussels. Tradition says that he was born there, and he
certainly made it his chief place of abode. His palace was situated on a
little island between two branches of the Senne, somewhere about the
site now occupied by the Place Saint Géry, and that little island
contained the whole of the settlement called Brussels, for in those days
Brussels was not a town, it was little more than a castle and a cluster
of huts:--the dwellings of such of the ducal servants and court
officials as were not lodged in the castle itself and of those who
catered for the ducal household and maybe also the homesteads of a few
farmers whom a sense of greater security had induced to settle there.
Charles was succeeded in the Duchy of Lotharingia by his only son Otho,
and when he died childless twenty years afterwards (1012), Lambert Long
Col, who had married Charles's eldest daughter Gerberge, claimed his
heritage as next-of-kin. He did not obtain the dukedom--that dignity
fell to Godfrey of Ardennes, the son of Bruno's pupil, Godfrey the
Captive--but he managed to make good his claim to a very considerable
portion of his father-in-law's maternal heritage--the rich dowry which
Henry the Fowler had bestowed on his daughter, the elder Gerberge, on
her marriage with Duke Giselbert, and which later the Emperor Otho II.
had granted to Duke Charles, her son by her second marriage. The castles
of Louvain and Vilvorde and Brussels, and all the adjoining territory,
fell to Lambert's share, and this vast and rich domain, called until the
close of the century sometimes the county of Brussels, more often the
county of Louvain, was the nucleus of the Duchy of Brabant.
CHAPTER IV
_The Making of the Duchy of Brabant_
In obtaining legal recognition of his right to the county of Louvain,
Lambert I., as we must now call him, had accomplished something, but the
house of Long Col had not yet realised, nor was it ever to wholly
realise, the darling dream of its ambition--the establishment in
Lotharingia of an independent realm, although that cherished wish did,
in later days, receive some measure of fulfilment: in their long contest
with the Empire the triumph of the barons was presently assured, and
with the title of Duke the Counts of Louvain at last obtained practical
independence.
It was on the Church, as we have seen, that the emperors mainly relied
for the maintenance of their authority in Lotharingia, and by a strange
irony of fate it was to the Church that the overthrow of that authority
was in great measure due. Not that the bishops belied their trust:
against tremendous odds they held the fortress which had been confided
to their keeping for over a hundred years, and only at last surrendered
when their master's breach with the papacy gave to his turbulent vassals
what had before been lacking to them--a legitimate excuse for rebellion.
Given the conjunction of events, no other issue was possible. The
bishops had no choice: the quarrel concerning investiture broke the back
of imperial rule.
Amongst the clergy the monks alone had succeeded in endearing themselves
to the native population, and the power which they wielded was immense.
The bishops--learned, capable, God-fearing men as most of them
undoubtedly were, had never been able to gain the confidence of the
people: save to the higher clergy, whom they had formed, and to a
handful of the lay aristocracy who had received their education at Liége
or Cologne, they were almost unknown to them. It could hardly have been
otherwise, they were strangers in a strange land, they were the
standard-bearers of order amid a barbarous people, whose lawlessness
filled them with horror and contempt, and of whose very language they
were in many cases ignorant. Well might they bewail their lot in the
words of Tetdon of Cambrai, for a moment cast down at the hopelessness
of the task before him, 'O wretched man that thou art, in vain didst
thou quit thy native land for this land of savages!'
The lot of the regular clergy, and the conditions under which they
laboured were altogether different. The strong man who by his marvellous
energy, his burning zeal, his eloquence, his sweetness, his piety, and,
above all, by the example of his stainless life, had made of the
undisciplined rabble, who, calling themselves monks, scoffed at the
Evangelical counsels, and hardly believed in the Gospel, an army of
humble, hard-working men, ever ready to spend themselves and be spent in
the service of Christ, was himself nurtured in the bosom of feudalism:
Gerard of Brogne wore a coat of mail before he put on the monk's frock.
One day out hunting in his own domain along with his master, Count
Bérenger of Namur, a son-in-law of Régnier au Long Col, he had turned
into a wayside chapel to pray, whilst the rest of the party were dining.
Presently he fell asleep, and dreamed that St. Peter bid him build a
church there and dedicate it to St. Eugène. That was the origin of the
famous abbey of Brogne, and Gerard became its first abbot (923).
Presently the rumour spread abroad that a band of monks who kept their
rule had established themselves in the Forest of Namurois, and that
their leader was a saint. Strangers flocked from far and wide to see if
such things could be, and Brogne became a place of pilgrimage. Soon the
fame of Gerard's holiness outstepped the borders of Namur: at the
request of Duke Giselbert (915-939) he reformed the abbeys of
Lotharingia; later on (965-976) summoned to Cambrai by Bishop Tetdon,
and to Flanders by Arnulph the Great,[6] he accomplished a like work in
their domains; before his death, towards the close of the century, there
was hardly a religious house from the Meuse to the sea which he had not
set in order. Nor was this all, so great was his influence with the
feudal lords that many of them who held ecclesiastical appointments
resigned them, and everywhere the right of free election was restored; a
host of new monasteries were founded, some due to the munificence of the
feudal aristocracy, others to that of their political opponents, the
bishops; and so great was the religious enthusiasm of the people that
they gave their time and labour freely for the erection of these
buildings. Gerard was crowned with the aureole of sanctity--that was the
secret of his success: he loved God with his whole heart and his
neighbour as himself; he was inspired by 'that wisdom which proceedeth
from the mouth of the Most High, and reacheth from end to end, and
mightily and sweetly setteth all things in order.'
[6] See _The Story of Bruges_, ch. iii.
The great reformer's interpretation of the rule of St. Benedict, a rule
which leaves much to the discretion of local superiors, was large, mild,
tolerant, without exaggerated asceticism. His disciples, like their
master, in touch with baron and bishop, were careful not to compromise
their good relations with the Episcopate by any expression of sympathy
with the ideals of feudalism. Indeed, St. Gerard's anonymous
biographer, who most likely was a monk of his own abbey at Brogne, does
not even spare Duke Giselbert, his master's chief benefactor, averring
that his untimely end was a just punishment for his rebellion:--'Sicque
completur vaticinium psalmigraphi qui dicit _Homo cum in honore esset,
non intellexit_. Ob ambitionem quipe regni circa eos istud obvenit.'
Such was the monasticism of Gerard of Brogne and such was the spirit
which for half a century after his death inspired his disciples. The
work which they accomplished was immense. The influence which they
exercised is almost incredible. The Low Countries became for the time
more devout than any other region of Europe; in the eyes of the people
the monk alone was the true servant of God, the incarnation in his own
person of the mystical body of Christ. A wave of religious enthusiasm
swept over the land, and it prepared men's minds to receive later on a
more drastic reform of which the consequences were momentous.
Lavish in alms-deeds, given to hospitality, a loyal friend to the poor
and oppressed, upright, virtuous, dogged, keen, ever ready to do battle
for justice sake, contemned and worshipped, beloved and loathed, such
was the monk of Cluny. Uncompromising in his championship of the rights
of the clergy and of the rights of the apostolic See, clerical laxity
and lay interference alike stank in his nostrils, for him the bishop
whom the Emperor had named was a Simonist, and the married clerk an
adulterer. Gentle to others sometimes, always stern to himself, strait
was the gate and narrow the way by which he went to Paradise. To fast,
to labour, to keep silence, to submit, these things were to him meat and
drink; his one earthly consolation was in the sweetness of his psalmody
and the splendour of his ritual, and in magnifying the glory of the
priesthood collectively he perhaps found some compensation for his
complete abasement of self. His manner of life, he averred, was in
strict accord with the spirit of the old Benedictine rule, he alone of
the monks of his day had discovered its true meaning, but for better or
worse the reform of Cluny constituted in fact a new order, for one
essential feature of Benedictine life, the family tie, was all but
blotted out: wherever Cluniac discipline prevailed the local abbot
ceased to be his own master, he obeyed the Abbot of Cluny, and the monk
no longer regarded his own monastery as his only home--he was a member
of a vast international community, and in each of the hundred homes of
his Order he was sure of a welcome as a son of the house.
Inaugurated at the beginning of the nine hundreds by William of
Aquitaine, who had exchanged a ducal coronet for a monk's cowl,
perfected by a series of capable rulers, who were possessed of that
faith which removes mountains and whose consistency of life inspired
respect, the new order rapidly spread from province to province and
realm to realm till at length it became a power in Christendom.
Early in the ten hundreds 'the sweet savour of its good report' began to
fascinate the monks of the Netherlands, and though some of the elder
brethren who remembered St. Gerard or had been trained by his immediate
disciples had little liking for these new-fangled French ways, monastery
after monastery adopted them. A wave of enthusiasm swept the land and
bore down all opposition. The people from honest conviction were heart
and soul with the movement, the lay lords who saw in Clunyism a weapon
to further their own ends favoured it with no less zeal; the bishops, in
spite of their imperialism, were carried along with the stream, and by
the close of the century there was hardly a religious house in the
Netherlands which had not adopted the new rule.
Notwithstanding their conversion to Clunyism the bishops were still at
heart true to their old political creed, or may be their ingrained
loyalty to the Empire was stronger than their religious belief, certain
it is that they did not at first translate their new theories into
action. When the investiture quarrel broke out, they were among the
staunchest of the Emperor's adherents, but as the relations between
their master and the Holy See became more and more strained they began
to falter, uncertain which road to take, and at last the time came when
no further choice was left them--in spite of themselves they were
constrained to separate their cause from his: the lay aristocracy were
in open rebellion, the people aroused by the preaching of the monks were
raging against the married clergy and 'those Simonists the bishops,'
with a violence past belief; Godfrey the Hunchback, the one man who
might perhaps have quelled the storm, had been struck down by the hand
of an assassin.
If that rickety, misshapen dwarf had lived, the course of events might
have been different. Duke Godfrey was a man of marvellous enterprise,
undaunted courage and indomitable will; a man, too, of infinite
tact--shrewd, long-headed, keen, and withal a convinced believer in the
justice of the imperial cause. Through good report and evil report he
had been true to Henry; he was his intimate counsellor and devoted
friend, and the only man who had any influence over him for good. He
always showed himself a staunch supporter of the bishops, and during the
six years of his government of Lotharingia (1070-1076), with their aid
he had kept the feudal lords at bay. If he had lived out his days he
might perhaps have been able to curb alike the violence of Henry and of
his vassals, and thus have averted the terrible chastisement which
afterwards overtook his master's misdeeds. He was the last Duke of
Lotharingia who exercised, as such, any real power in the land, and his
death was the deathblow of imperialism in this quarter of Europe, but
the agony was not a short one: it was prolonged for thirty years, and
then came the funeral.
Though circumstances had compelled the bishops to withdraw their support
from the Emperor, there was one amongst them, Otbert of Liége, who clung
to him to the bitter end. Cut off from the society of Christian men,
deserted by his wife, a fugitive from his own son, it was in Otbert's
episcopal city that the old Emperor found a refuge during the closing
months of his chequered career. Inspired by their bishop, the men of
Liége banded together to defend him, and with such success that they
drove young Henry from the town. Nor was this all. So great was their
pity for the misfortunes of the fallen Emperor that they altogether
forgot the follies and the crimes which had produced them. In their
eyes, the sinner had become a saint; and when he died they pressed round
his coffin to touch his poor lifeless body as though it were some holy
thing, and strewed over it their seed-corn, firmly convinced that by so
doing they would insure a bountiful harvest. Henry was excommunicate,
and as such it was impossible to give him Christian burial. They laid
him to rest in a small unconsecrated chapel beyond the city walls,
without dirge or requiem, and his mournful funeral, to quote the words
of Pirenne, was the funeral of imperial rule in Lotharingia.
When Duke Godfrey the Hunchback died in 1076, Henry IV., perhaps because
at that time he mistrusted Godfrey of Bouillon, the late Duke's nephew,
and the next in the line of succession, had conferred the Duchy of
Lotharingia on his own son Conrad, a child of two years old, thus, to
all intents and purposes, leaving the throne vacant--a false move, which
Henry himself recognised too late: when, in 1089, he set the crown on
the head of the rightful heir, the feudal lords, who for thirteen years
had been accustomed to the sweets of anarchy, refused to acknowledge
him, Godfrey, who lacked what had always been the mainstay of his
predecessors--episcopal co-operation, was not strong enough to coerce
them, and the old imperial dukedom became little more than an empty
title. The man who held it was almost a nonentity in his own dominions;
and when, in 1096, he set out on that eastern expedition which gave him
a name, and from which he never returned, the barons were left to their
own devices for over five years, and then at last Henry set over them
his namesake, Henry of Limbourg, almost the only one of his Lotharingian
vassals who kept faith with him to the end. This man, when Henry V. put
on his father's crown, refused to acknowledge the usurper, who in
consequence deprived him of his duchy and conferred it on the fallen
Emperor's direst foe, Count Godfrey of Louvain--this was only a few
weeks before the elder Henry's death--and, at the same time, he gave him
the March of Antwerp, 'the land of Ryen,' as it was then called, an
imperial fief which had been held by the Dukes of Lotharingia since the
days of Godfrey the Hunchback certainly, and most likely since the days
of his grandfather, Gothelon I., and which brought the territory of the
Counts of Louvain right up to the banks of the Scheldt. Henceforth that
territory was known as the Duchy of Brabant, and the man who owned it
styled himself Duke of Brabant and Lotharingia. Thus at last did the
house of Long Col obtain the title its chiefs had so long coveted, and
for which throughout so many generations they had intrigued and fought.
It was nothing more than an empty title now--a mere name, which, perhaps
from old-time associations, added something to Godfrey's prestige, but
gave him no increase of territory, and in no way augmented his power. He
was the most redoubtable prince in the Netherlands, but he owed his
strength to his mighty hand and his outstretched arm, not to his phantom
duchy. Presently the Emperor deprived him of it in favour of the rival
house of Limbourg (1128). Matter of little moment to either dynasty: in
Louvain the imperial mandate was ignored, and in Limbourg it had long
ago been anticipated, and for more than a hundred and fifty years the
chiefs of each house continued to use the illusory title. Then, at last,
the fortunes of war gave Limbourg to John the Victorious, and henceforth
the Dukes of Brabant were the only Dukes of Lotharingia (1288).
[Illustration]
II.--Genealogical Table of the Counts of Louvain
Lambert Longbeard
_d._ 1015. (_See_ Table I.)
|
+------------------+------------------+
| |
Henry I., Lambert II. (Balderic),
_d._ 1038 _d._ 1063
| |
| |
Otho, _d._ 1041 Henry II., _d._ 1079
|
|
Henry III., _d._ 1095
|
|
Godfrey Longbeard, Count
of Louvain from 1095,
Duke of Brabant from
1106, _d._ January 15th, 1140
CHAPTER V
_The Rise of Brussels and Louvain_
The cities of Belgium, unlike the cities of Italy or of the Rhine-land,
or of France, which often go back to Roman times, and trace their
descent to great administrative centres, date nearly all of them from
the Middle Age, and are the children of industry and commerce. Bruges,
Ypres, Ghent, the three _bonnes villes_ of Flanders, were not towns in
the modern sense of the word until the beginning of the ten hundreds,
and it was almost a century later before the farmers of Brussels and
Mechlin and Louvain became manufacturers and merchants.
Its geographical position between France and Germany, its long coast
line, its nearness to England, its numerous navigable streams--all these
things rendered the Low Country a region peculiarly adapted to
mercantile pursuits; nor was it less favourably situated with regard to
that industry which afterwards became, and for centuries remained, the
staple trade of the country: the herbage of the seaboard was naturally
suited to sheep, from time immemorial vast flocks of them grazed on the
polders, and their wool was of the finest quality; thus there was at
hand the raw material for the fabrication of cloth.
When the Danish incursion ceased and the land became comparatively
tranquil, men soon began to consider how best they might turn these
natural advantages to account, and presently along the waterways came
bands of wandering traders with rich cargoes from foreign parts: wine
from France and from the Rhine-land, silk and spices from Italy, furs
from the North--all kinds of merchandise destined to supply the growing
needs of the country, or to be exported to England or Denmark, or the
regions round the Baltic; and when they had disposed of their wares they
would return to the lands from whence they hailed with their barges
laden with woollen goods--product of the looms of Flanders. Coming and
going, they broke the journey at such places along stream as were best
suited to afford accommodation for themselves, their servants, and their
draught cattle, and where they would be likely to find a market for what
they had to sell: by some castle or abbey or collegiate church, around
which clustered the houses of clerks or Court officials, and the
homesteads and the hovels of yeomen and serfs. In these settlements,
too, they took up their winter quarters, and they often found wives
among the daughters of their hosts. When this was so, the place of
sojourning became a home--the permanent abode of their little ones and
of their women folk, the spot where they purposed to end their days when
they had made their fortunes, or, perchance, had been worn out by the
hardships of their calling.
Amongst these early traders, the first merchants and the first
commercial travellers who gained a livelihood in the Low Country,
foreigners there were no doubt, but by far the greater number of them
were natives of the soil, and they seem to have been recruited from all
ranks of society. Some were knights, who hoped to find the business of
buying and selling more profitable than the trade of war; some were
Karls from the seaboard, men who had lost their land, if they ever had
any to lose, but still retained their freedom, and some were runaway
slaves. Matter of little moment, they were birds of passage; no man knew
their condition or whence they came, or what lord, if any, claimed
their allegiance, and they were all of them treated wherever they went
as their own masters. The freedom which they enjoyed compelled
association, for since they were no man's vassals no man was bound to
protect them; what rights and privileges they possessed were necessarily
in their own keeping; hence the great merchant guilds famous in the
story of the Netherlands. Meeting together at night to discuss over
their liquor their own personal transactions, the guild brethren soon
began to consider the public affairs of the settlements in which they
dwelt or which they frequented, and little by little to busy themselves
with municipal administration, and presently they obtained the charters
which gave them a legal standing. Nor were they without funds: their
coffers were filled by self-imposed rates, and by fines levied by their
elected chiefs for infringements of their rules of association. The
money thus raised served for the erection of guild halls and belfries,
the building of town walls, the maintenance of waterways, and the making
of roads and bridges.
Another element was soon to be added to the population of these
river-side settlements of agriculturists and tradesmen: hard on the
heels of the merchant came the manufacturer. Thanks to the greater
security which the land at this time enjoyed and the consequent increase
in the number of its inhabitants, the fens were being drained rapidly,
and vast areas which had been lakes were already under pasture; this
meant an increase of flocks, and a wool crop so abundant that the
shepherds unaided were no longer able to convert the whole of it into
cloth. Hence the professional weaver, and the new commercial activity
made weaving a profitable profession. The men who adopted it--and their
name was legion--naturally flocked to the towns, where, in touch with
merchant and trader, they would be likely to find a more ready market
for their wares. Like them, and from like motives, they found it
expedient to band together, and soon the 'Draperie,' or Cloth Guild,
became an institution of mark in the Netherlands.
As for the original settlers--the serfs attached to the soil, the yeoman
bound by less stringent ties to the Church or the chief under whose
protection they dwelt, the _ministeriales_ who collected manorial fines
and dues, administered justice in their lord's name, and managed
generally his estate, and who were practically free men--living
alongside of the new-comers, often united to them by marriage ties, they
gradually adopted their manner of life, and themselves became merchants
and manufacturers. For a time they seem to have been submitted to the
old manorial _régime_, but they soon began to agitate for emancipation,
and presently they obtained the parchments which gave them complete
freedom.
The making of the great commercial and manufacturing centres of mediæval
Belgium was for the most part and generally speaking in this wise, but
they did not all of them come into being at the same time--not even in
the course of the same century. As a rule the towns of Brabant are less
ancient than the towns of Flanders, and most of them owe their
development less to the river than to the road. It was so with Brussels
and Louvain, and, to a certain extent also with Mechlin. Off the main
waterways, on the banks of tributary streams, navigable only by light
craft, what business they at first did was more or less of a local
character. It was not till the opening of the eleven hundreds, when the
great high road was made from Bruges to Cologne, passing through Louvain
and Brussels, and within easy reach of Mechlin, that these little towns
at last became places of importance.
The commercial movement reached Brussels earlier than it reached
Louvain. If we may trust St. Guy's anonymous biographer, who lived most
probably in the second half of the ten hundreds, there was a settlement
of merchants established there at the commencement of the century. He
tells us a curious story concerning one of them, a friend of Guy's, who
seems to have done a thriving trade.
But first a word as to Guy himself, the poor man of Anderlecht, as
people called him--a picturesque and interesting figure from several
points of view. To this man--the earliest private inhabitant of Brussels
whose name we know, the first of whose doings we have any record, the
only one who has ever attained the honours of the altar, the most
ancient sanctuary in the town, the crypt of Anderlecht, is dedicated. In
this church when he died they laid his body to rest; here his tomb may
still be seen, and his bones are still treasured; and strangely enough
it was in this same building that in his childhood he used to pray. Then
it was the Church of St. Peter; a hundred and fifty years afterwards the
dedication was changed, and henceforth men called it the Church of St.
Peter and St. Guy. Of this beautiful remnant of a forgotten age we shall
have much to say presently. Guy was born somewhere about the middle of
the nine hundreds. His parents were very humble folk, probably serfs
attached to the soil of Anderlecht. He himself began life as a farm
labourer, and his employer's holding seems to have been hard by the
Castle of Brussels. A beautiful legend has come down to us concerning
him at this time. It was his master's custom to provide the labourers
with a mid-day meal, served to them in the fields, and Guy's to carry a
portion of his each day to his parents at Anderlecht. One of his
comrades, a cross-grained, ill-conditioned fellow, took umbrage at this,
and accused him to their master of wasting his time. Next day, during
the dinner-hour, the farmer betook himself to the field which Guy was
tilling, determined, if his man had played truant, to rate him soundly
on his return, but though Guy, as usual, had gone to Anderlecht, when
presently he came hurrying back, with no harsh words was he greeted, for
during his absence an angel had taken his place at the plough. This
story is the subject of an ancient and very beautiful wall painting in
the upper church at Anderlecht.
And how many other fairy tales, some of them no less touching, have been
woven about the name of this popular hero, the only man of his day whose
memory is still green in the city of Brussels! And yet throughout his
whole career no deeds which the world calls great are recorded of him.
His life for the most part seems to have been an even and uneventful
one. He soon gave up farm labour, and for many years he was sacristan to
the little church at Laeken, now a populous suburb of Brussels, then a
hamlet just outside the town. The last ten years of his life he spent in
making two pilgrimages to Jerusalem and in travelling over Europe to
visit famous shrines. All these journeys were made on foot, and
doubtless they were not devoid of adventure, but his earliest
biographer, who wrote nearly a hundred years after his death, has little
to tell us on this head. In the fall of the year 1012 he returned to his
native village, and in pitiable plight, worn out with want and fever and
the wear and tear of the road. The canons of Anderlecht received him
into their hospice, where he was tenderly cared for, for nine days, and
then at last, on the 12th of September, he set out for Jerusalem the
Golden. He loved God with his whole heart, of his penury he ministered
to those who were poorer than himself, and he did what he could in his
small way to sweeten and soften the hard lot of his neighbours. Even
during his lifetime he was regarded as a saint: his anonymous biographer
informs us that when Dean Wonedulph of Anderlecht and a company of
pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem encountered him unexpectedly at Rome
'they fell down on their faces and adored him,' and when he lay dying in
the hospice of the canons of Anderlecht, Heaven itself, so runs the
legend, miraculously proclaimed his sancity. A heavenly light filled the
room in which he lay, a white dove hovered over his head, and a voice
was heard saying: 'Veniat dilectus meus ad percipiendam æternæ
jocunditatis coronam.'
[Illustration: Subterranean Church of St. Guy at Anderlecht]
Strangely enough 'the poor man of Anderlecht' at one time seriously
thought of embarking in trade. Satan, in the guise of a rich Brussels
merchant, would fain have persuaded the saint, then sexton of Laeken, to
enter into partnership with him, cunningly representing that by so doing
he would soon make a fortune, and thus be the better able to help the
poor, and Guy fell into the trap; but it was not God's will that His
servant should imperil his soul in so hazardous a calling, and hardly
had he started on his first journey down Senne, when his craft grounded
on a sandbank in mid stream, and, notwithstanding all their efforts, the
boatmen were unable to float it; and, worse still, when the saint
himself vainly seized the barge-pole it miraculously adhered to his
fingers, nor could he unclasp them until he had made a solemn vow to
utterly eschew commerce.
'Mercatura raro aut nunquam ab aliquo diu sine crimine exerceri potuit,'
shrewdly notes his biographer, who was most likely a clerk of
Anderlecht, and that seems to have been the general opinion of the
ecclesiastical authorities of the day. The Church looked askance at
trade, the methods of the merchant were too nearly allied to the methods
of the usurer, as she knew very well to her cost. When she wanted a loan
she sometimes had to pay him fifty or sixty per cent. Yet, strangely
enough, it was on Church land, and under the auspices of a collegiate
chapter, that the most flourishing of the great commercial centres of
Brabant gradually grew up: it was not by Lambert Longbeard's castle, but
higher up stream, alongside the Church of St. Peter, that the wandering
merchants who frequented Louvain first pitched camp.
[Illustration: At Mechlin]
CHAPTER VI
_The Serfs of St. Peter_
Though Lambert Longbeard was the first hereditary Count of Louvain, he
was certainly not the founder of the city of Louvain, or even of the
Castle and its dependencies--the 'Old Bourg of Louvain,' as it was
called in later days--which he made his capital.
The city dates from a much later period than Lambert's day, and there is
a tradition that some Merovingian noble had built himself a home on the
site of the Old Bourg soon after the Frankish invasion. Certainly since
Arnulph's victory over the Danes there had been a fortress there, which,
until Lambert's day, was held in the Emperor's name by a series of
provincial governors, one of whom was Bruno's friend St. Ansfried. This
building, which has long ago disappeared, and of the site of which even
we are ignorant, is said to have stood on an island formed by two
branches of the Dyle, and there is little doubt that it was for a time
at least the home of Lambert I., but the Counts of Louvain did not long
continue to dwell there. Most likely, on account of the frequent floods
and the dampness of the situation, they soon migrated to a new castle,
built on the height now called Cæsar's Hill--some vestiges of it still
remain--and which, in all probability, was built by Lambert II.--Lambert
Longbeard's younger son, Lambert surnamed Balderick. A name to be
remembered this, for the man who bore it was the real founder of
Louvain: it was Lambert Balderick who built and munificently endowed
the great Collegiate Church of St. Peter, the church around which, as we
have already seen, the city grew up, and which in its early days was its
nursing mother. The collegiate chapter was invested with all the rights
and privileges of a great monastic corporation, and the yeomen and serfs
who dwelt on their lands, and who formed what was called St. Peter's
family, participated in their immunities, and were submitted only to
their jurisdiction--no small boon, for the conditions of life on an
ecclesiastical estate were far more conducive to liberty and progress
than were those on lay domains. There was no _taille_, nor _droit de
gite_, nor forced labour for the maintenance of ramparts; Church land
was universally held to be the patrimony of the saint to whom it was
dedicated, to violate it was sacrilege, a crime which the greediest
feudal robber was generally loth to commit, and thus, amid the turmoil
and warfare with which the surrounding country was so often vexed, its
inhabitants for the most part enjoyed the blessing of peace. Further,
justice was administered by themselves, and they were altogether free
from State exactions. Indeed, so jealous was the Provost of Louvain of
this privilege that he would suffer no civil officer to sojourn within
his borders.
Though the landed estate of the collegiate chapter was not a large one,
the 'Petermen' or lay members of St. Peter's family seem to have been
sufficiently numerous. The Provost had the right to admit outsiders, his
conditions were not onerous--a trifling entrance fee, generally two
_deniers_ and an undertaking in the event of marriage to pay a small
tribute, and upon these terms a host of free men and liberated serfs
were glad enough to barter their liberty, to quote the characteristic
phrase of the charters of the day, 'for a servitude freer than freedom
itself.'
[Illustration: Saint Peter's Louvain]
The privileges and immunities of the Church of St. Peter were not
peculiar to that foundation, almost all the great ecclesiastical
establishments of the Low Countries were similarly favoured; but whereas
in other towns which had grown up on Church land the laymen affiliated
to the religious community which originally owned the soil--the
Martinmen at Utrecht, for example, the men of St. Rombold at Mechlin,
the men of St. Bavo at Ghent, when at last they obtained rights of
citizenship, lost the ecclesiastical privileges and immunities which
hitherto they had enjoyed, at Louvain this was not the case: the
privileges of the Petermen survived long after their obligations to the
institution which conferred them had become a dead letter, and for
centuries too after they had obtained full civil rights. Indeed, by the
opening of the thirteen hundreds, perhaps even earlier, their connection
with the Chapter of St. Peter's had ceased to be anything but a nominal
one: they remained exempt from taxation and were amenable only to their
own court, but the Mayor of Louvain had taken the place of the Provost
in all that appertained to their government. They were still a class
apart, but these men who owed their distinction to servile descent had
now become a rich, influential and aristocratic caste, the cream of the
burgher nobility, and thus they continued until the close of the
seventeen hundreds, and then, at last, 'the men of St. Peter' were
ruthlessly swept away, along with so many other interesting and
time-honoured abuses.
Such was the famous collegiate church which Lambert Balderick founded at
'the place called Looven,' and whose rights and privileges every
successive sovereign of Brabant swore to maintain at his 'Joyous Entry,'
until the days of Albert and Isabel.
So completely identified was it with the town which grew up around its
walls that a likeness of the material fabric was graven on the city
seal, its steeple was the city belfry, the gold and silver pieces coined
at the city mint were called 'Peters,' and proof that a man was a
'Peterman' was held to be sufficient proof that he was a burgher and a
patrician of Louvain. Without any further investigation he was at once
admitted to all the rights of citizenship.
CHAPTER VII
_The Greater and the Lesser Folk_
The municipal organisation of the towns of Brabant was at first of a
very simple character. It consisted in every case of an unpaid
magistracy--a college of _schepen_ or aldermen appointed by the Duke for
life from among the chief freeholders of the city, of which they were
held to be its representatives--presided over by a paid officer, who
bore the title of Mayor or Ecoutête or Amman--from town to town the
title differed--was the sovereign's direct delegate, and in all things
the representative of his authority. He was not necessarily or even
usually a burgher of the city over which he presided. The Duke was free
to choose whom he would, and to revoke the appointment at will; and
though this officer held the first place in the civic hierarchy, he was
in reality nothing more than his master's hired servant.
Alongside of the College of Aldermen was the Merchants' Guild. Whether
this corporation had any legal existence prior to the institution of the
magistracy is a problem which has yet to be solved; but it is certain
that by the end of the eleven hundreds the guild was firmly established
in most of the towns of Brabant; that, including as it did all the
commercial and industrial capitalists of the city, it had exercised from
the first no little influence on public affairs, and that it contributed
in great measure to the full expansion of municipal self-rule.
The next century saw the birth of another institution, the Council of
Jurors, and there can be no doubt that it was to the Merchants' Guild
that the Jury owed its origin.
With the increase of the population, outcome of the commercial
development which signalised the opening of the twelve hundreds, the old
machinery no longer sufficed for the maintenance of public peace and the
regulation of trade. It became necessary to devise some new means to
check the growing disorder, and the burghers, united as they were in the
powerful organisation of their guild, were strong enough to take the
matter into their own hands. Hence the Council of Jurors, a subsidiary
body, annually elected by the people for policing the city and the
management of municipal affairs, and which also participated with the
College of Aldermen in the administration of justice.
So far from offering opposition, the sovereigns of Brabant from the
first showed themselves favourable to this development. Not that they
had any particular liking for democratic institutions, but because they
were sufficiently clear-sighted to see that, in the interest of their
revenue, it was incumbent on them to do so: they were well aware that
the towns of Brabant depended wholly on trade, and that this delicate
plant can only thrive in an atmosphere of freedom.
There is no record of the Jury at Brussels prior to 1229, at Antwerp
till 1232, at Louvain till 1234, and at Tirlemont till 1249, but it is
most likely that in all of these towns it dates from an earlier period,
and by the close of the first half of the century it had been granted to
almost all the communes of Brabant.
Its existence, however, as a body distinct from the higher magistracy
was nowhere, save at Louvain, of long duration. As early as 1274 the
Jury had disappeared at Brussels, and in hardly any of the great towns
did it outlive the century. From the first the relations between the two
corporations had almost everywhere been strained: they were the
embodiment of hostile ideals--oligarchy and popular rule. Presently the
burghers obtained a voice in the election of aldermen, and their term of
office was limited to one year. The Council of Jurors thus ceased to be
the sole expression of the will of the people; the higher magistracy had
become, not only in theory, as it had always been, but in fact,
representative of the city, and had risen proportionately in public
esteem. Thus protected by the mantle of popularity, it was able,
seemingly without opposition, little by little to itself assume the
functions of its rival, and thus, little by little, to absorb it into
its own bosom.
At Louvain, however, the case was different. In that city the
aristocratic element was all-powerful, and the jury was recruited from
the same families which furnished the College of Aldermen; from the
first the two corporations had worked together in harmony, and until the
end of the Middle Age they continued to exist as two distinct bodies.
For a long period after the municipal organisation of the cities of
Brabant had been definitely determined, all administrative and
legislative power remained in the hands of a narrow oligarchy of great
capitalists, headed by the old patrician families, which from time
immemorial had furnished the magistracy.
One was the source of their title to distinction--the ownership of land;
but the means by which the first patricians had acquired their
title-deeds were not in every case the same, nor were they all of like
origin. Some of them were the descendants of _ministeriales_ who, when
the township was a feudal domain, had levied their lords' dues for him,
and generally managed his affairs; others of yeomen of the same period,
whom thrift or good fortune had enabled to purchase the freehold of the
soil they tilled; others, again, were successful traders, or the sons of
successful traders, who, retiring from business, had invested the wealth
which commerce had given them in real property.
Together they formed a class apart, distinct alike from the feudal
nobility and from the general body of townsmen. They were divided into
groups in each city, which bore the characteristic title of _lignages_
or clans; but it is certain that many patricians were not the direct
lineal descendants of the houses whose names and arms they bore: the
status of patrician was transmissible in the female line, and patrician
daughters were not unfrequently given in marriage to prosperous
plebeians; moreover, some of the sons of the house were only sons by
adoption--the wealthy merchant of alien blood was not always refused
admission to the charmed circle, though as a rule the door of matrimony
was the only door open to him; and occasionally we find whole families,
sometimes sections of families, forsaking their original clan to enroll
themselves in another. Indeed, the great _lignages_ of Brabant, which
play so large a part in the stories of her towns, were, to a certain
extent, voluntary associations of aristocratic families banded together
for the sake of mutual protection and help, and with a view to securing
the election of their own nominees to the magistracy; and though, no
doubt, a considerable number of the members of each clan traced their
descent to one stock, it is certain that the ties by which they were
most strongly knit together were not those of blood, but of kindred
pursuits, and kindred associations and kindred political interests. It
is a significant fact, as Pirenne observes, that the number of
_lignages_ in each town corresponded to the number of their aldermen,
and that each _lignage_ had obtained a prescriptive right of
representation in the magistracy.
Though the patricians as a body were a wealthy class, all of them were
not rich men; some, indeed, were so poor that they were glad to earn a
livelihood by hiring themselves as servants to their more fortunate
kinsmen; others, on account of their poverty, renounced their
privileges, and sank back into the general body of the people. On the
other hand, the wealth of the patricianate was being constantly
augmented by the new men who found admission into its borders, and with
the increasing prosperity of the town, their land was becoming daily
more valuable for building purposes. Many of them were thus able to live
in luxury on the rents produced by their property, others increased
their revenue by farming the State taxes, others were engaged in banking
operations, others again in commerce. In that case they became members
of the Merchants' Guild, for the Guild, whose members were constantly
being enrolled in the _lignages_ was always ready to open its doors to
the son of the aristocratic house who wished to resume the calling by
which, most likely, his ancestors had attained wealth. Thus it was
growing daily more and more aristocratic, and at last nearly all its
members were patricians by birth or by adoption. Embracing as it did at
first traders of every kind, it now became an exceedingly close
corporation, and only admitted to its membership the sellers of cloth
and the sellers of wool, the cream of the commercial world.
Such were the men who owned the soil of the cities of Brabant, who had
endowed them, often at their own cost, with magnificent public
buildings,[7] who had won for themselves free institutions, and who for
the best part of two hundred years tyrannised over everyone else.
[7] The old Cloth Hall of Louvain, for example.
[Illustration: Cloth Hall Louvain]
Mightier than the feudal chiefs, whose fathers' swords had made the
evolution of the city possible, they had absorbed them into their own
ranks, or driven them forth from their borders, and now adopted their
dress and speech and manner of living. In time of war they wore coats of
mail like knights, and they alone of the civic army were mounted. They
lived in great houses of stone, whose turrets and battlements towered
above the thatched hovels of the helots who did their bidding:--weavers
who starved when work was slack, and in good times just managed to keep
body and soul together, the poorest and the most numerous of them all
were they, the most turbulent, too, and the worst organised, always
snarling at their hard lot and their impotence to better it, ready to
break out into rebellion on the slightest provocation, and never
content with their wages; dyers with blue nails--outward and visible
sign of moral degradation, for though it was owing to their skill that
the cloth of Brabant was more beautiful than that of any other land, and
sometimes, though not often, they obtained wealth, they could never hope
for the rights of citizenship until time had wiped out those fatal
stains; men of a hundred other callings, degraded creatures all of them,
who earned their bread by the sweat of their brow, mere human chattels
without heart and without soul, whom an honest burgher might cuff at
will, aye, and, if he would, carry off their daughters without fear of
incurring any legal penalty.
It was not always so. Before the year 1200 class distinctions were far
less marked. In the early days the weaver could sell his own cloth, and
even petty traders were admitted to the Merchants' Guild. The advent of
the middleman had changed all this, and as time went on the patricians,
the _majores et potentiores_, as an ancient chronicler calls them, grew
more and more exclusive and more and more overbearing. But though they
looked down on the 'lesser folk,' the bowels of their compassion were
not shut up against them: they built and lavishly endowed hospitals
where they might be tended when they were sick, refuges to which they
could retire when hard work and old age had worn them out, orphanages
for such of their children as had been deprived by death of their
natural protectors, and above all, churches, glorious without and
within--palaces of the people, where Lazarus and Dives knelt side by
side. Nor is the stream of their charity yet dried up: the rich
endowments of the _Bureaux de bienfaisance_ throughout Belgium are in
great measure due to the munificence of these merchant princes of the
Middle Age, who in turn cuffed and caressed the turbulent folk on whose
hardships they fattened, and whose poverty rendered their riches
possible.
No less inconsequent was the patrician burgher in his dealings with the
Church--with one hand he smote her in the mouth and with the other he
loaded her with benefits. And yet, after all, perhaps he was not so
inconsistent, for the soul of this man who possessed the faith, in his
way a devout Christian, was consumed by pride and the lust of power. He
would share his authority with no man, he would be master in his own
house, and so he ousted the noble, ground down the toiler, flouted the
clerk and set his heel on his neck. A firm believer in the rights of the
laity, he would never suffer priest or monk to meddle with his affairs,
but he did not hesitate, whenever it suited his purpose, to busy himself
with theirs. Thus, from time immemorial most city livings had been in
the gift of one or other of the religious houses which dotted the
countryside, but he quietly ignored their abbots' pretensions, and named
his parish priests himself, and never rested until he had obtained a
legal right to do so. So, too, in the matter of education: the
management of schools had been always recognised as the especial
province of the clergy, but he was not happy until he had succeeded in
placing them under municipal control, or, in other words, until he had
undertaken their management himself. Nor would he always recognise the
clerk's right to justice in his own courts, though when he himself was
technically a churchman, he never scrupled to make use of them if he
thought it would be an advantage to him to do so. Thus at Louvain, where
almost all the patricians were _Hommes de Saint Pierre_, the old
ecclesiastical courts, officered indeed by laymen, were maintained
intact for his behoof till the Revolution.
The peculiar circumstances of the Church in Brabant favoured these
pretensions. The one great ecclesiastical power in that province, where
no bishop had his See, was monasticism, and when the burgher was in the
heyday of his magnificence monasticism was spiritually and temporally at
a low ebb. The fiery zeal which characterised the days of the Cluniac
revival had long ago flickered out. Discipline had become sadly relaxed,
the monk had ceased to be the saint and the popular hero he had been in
days of yore, and the alms of the faithful no longer flowed into his
coffers. Another source of revenue, too, had all but dried up. Owing to
the fall in the purchasing power of money, the produce of his manorial
dues, which he had no power to raise, had diminished almost to vanishing
point. Thus was the abbot, at his wits' end how to keep order amongst
his rebellious family and make both ends meet, sadly handicapped in his
contests with his all-powerful foe, from whom, indeed, he was not
unfrequently constrained to borrow at usurious rates of interest. But
although the burgher looked askance at the old religious orders, for
some reason or other his antipathy to the monk did not extend itself to
the friar. He never quarrelled with the 'watch dogs of the Lord,' and
with the disciples of 'the poor man of Assisi' his relations were most
cordial. Perhaps as a practical business man the object of their mission
appealed more to his sympathies; perhaps he thought he had nothing to
fear from the children of the gentle saint who had taken for his bride
the Lady Poverty. But by a strange irony of fate it was not the monk but
the friar who hurled the first blow at his dominion. It was from the
lips of the friar who toiled among the poverty-stricken masses that
these poor folk learned, for the first time, the dignity of man, and no
teacher was needed to awaken in their souls the consciousness of their
degradation. They experienced it every day: when they lounged about the
market-place on Monday morning waiting, often in vain, for the supply of
labour generally exceeded the demand, for someone to hire them at wages
fixed by the town magistrates, men who themselves were employers of
labour and in whose appointment the people had no voice; when, working
at home at their looms, they received the visit of the guild inspector,
who had the right to ransack their hovels at all hours, with a view to
assuring himself of the excellence of their work, and who received as
his salary a portion of the fine imposed for any fraud detected. This
was their normal lot in times of prosperity, and when work was slack, or
when there was no work at all, as was sometimes the case when wool was
not forthcoming from England, the wounds inflicted on their self-respect
went deeper and smarted more: then were they constrained to choose
between two evils--either they must starve, and, worse still, see their
wives and their little ones starve; or they must band together and
parade the streets whining for that bread which they could no longer
win. Well might the friar preach to men set in such straits the beauty
of Christian humility and of Christian resignation, and bid them despise
as dross that gold which they could not obtain. The weavers and dyers
who hung on his lips possessed, of earthly goods, very often only the
rags they stood up in; and the wealth which they saw around them, and
which they could never hope to enjoy, they knew very well was in many
cases the fruit of their underpaid toil, and that the holders of it, of
like origin with themselves, were not only their rulers and taskmasters,
but corrupt stewards of the common-weal--the men who managed the city,
and managed it in their own interests.
What wonder, then, that they soon began to confound contempt for riches
with contempt for the rich, and that presently contempt engendered
hatred. Were not the oppressors of the poor the enemies of Jesus Christ?
Was it not easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for
a rich man to enter the kingdom of God? Had not one of their
preachers[8] told them that the rich man, even if he were righteous, was
less worthy of esteem than the woman of the street?
[8] Guillaume Cornelius of Antwerp. _See_ Thomas de Cantimpré (a native
of Brussels, born in 1201), _Bonum universale de apibus_, p. 433 (Duaci,
1605). 'Il importe de remarquer toutefois,' notes Pirenne (vol. i. p.
353), 'que ce Cornelius était hérétique, mais, même dans l'église
orthodoxe, des prédications analogues à celles de Lambert le Bègue
(_see_ 'Story of Brussels.' p 233) et l'ardent mysticisme des premières
béguines (_see_ pp. 228 and 233) devaient agir fortement sur le peuple.'
[Illustration]
CHAPTER VIII
_The Coelveren and the Blankarden_
Strangely enough it was the patricians themselves who placed in the
hands of the lesser folk the weapon with which they presently won
independence. For years past it had been cause of just complaint that
municipal affairs were managed in the interest of one class only, and
before the middle of the twelve hundreds things had come to this pass:
the men in office considered alone their own advantage and the advantage
of their kinsfolk and their friends. Hence heartburning, jealousy,
strife without end, the upper classes split into factions, and sometimes
the fire thus enkindled burnt so fiercely that it could only be
extinguished by the shedding of blood. This was so all over Brabant, and
in the year 1260 there broke out a conflict which brought forth
unlooked-for results.
The Coelveren and the Blankarden were two of the mightiest families of
Louvain; for generations past they had been rivals, and they hated one
another with 'a perfect hatred.' Whatever may have been the first cause
of their mutual hostility, the quarrel was of ancient date; it had been
handed down from father to son, and had become in each case a family
tradition.
The times were favourable to disorder. Duke Henry III. had just died
(February 6, 1260); his eldest son had not yet reached man's estate; his
widow, Adelaide of Burgundy, harassed by ambitious kinsmen, who claimed
a share in the administration of the realm, was holding the reins of
government with faltering hands. For years past the rival families had
been only waiting for an opportunity to settle their long dispute, and
hardly had Duke Henry been laid in the grave than they flew to arms.
What was the immediate cause of the conflict is unknown, but it is
always easy to find a pretext when men are determined to fight, and the
war in this case was probably the outcome of some very trifling affair.
Be this as it may, opinion was sharply divided at Louvain as to which
side was in the right, and men took such interest in the quarrel, and
party feeling ran so high, that by the end of the year 1262 there was
not a patrician in the city who had not taken up arms on behalf of one
or other of the belligerents.
Nor was this all: the Blankarden had sought and obtained the support of
Duchess Adelaide, and the Coelveren, casting about for some pillar of
strength to counterbalance this advantage, presently found a more
dangerous ally--the mob. They appealed, and not vainly, to that herd of
downtrodden and plundered helots, who for years had been writhing under
the sense of their wrongs, and riot and confusion reigned in the city
for two years;[9] and then matters, instead of becoming better, grew
worse, for Adelaide added fuel to the fire: she provided the
belligerents with a fresh bone of contention. On the ground that her
elder son Henry was incapable, she disinherited him, and proclaimed her
younger son John heir to the Duchy of Brabant, whereat the Coelveren
cried 'Shame! If Henry were indeed as poor a creature as his mother
alleged, that were no excuse for trampling on the rights of
primogeniture. Could he not appoint responsible ministers and rule
through them?' The Blankarden, of course, were of the opposite opinion,
and shouted their loudest for John, but, supported by the great mass of
the people, their rivals were strong enough to silence them, and when
presently Adelaide and her younger son appeared before the gates of the
capital they found them shut.
[9] _See_ Divæus _Annales_, 1262.
Meanwhile the strife had extended to the whole of Brabant, and until
1267 the land was a prey to civil war; and though at last a
reconciliation was effected, and the Coelveren consented, for a
consideration, to acknowledge John, the government of the city had
become completely disorganised, and the patricians, who for five years
had been disporting themselves by cutting one another's throats, were
not only thinned in numbers, but had lost credit.
Before the war they had been hated and despised, but until then at least
they had been feared. The craftsman hitherto had only ventured to snarl
and show his teeth. He was a bolder dog now. The experience of the last
five years had shown him something of his own might. He had not only
fought, and fought on the winning side, but it had been in great measure
owing to his efforts that the victory had been won. If he could fight so
well for others, why not one day fight for himself? The flame of hope
was rekindled within his breast. That was something. It was probably
some such thought as this which moved him to demand as guerdon for his
services a boon which would place him in a position to do battle with
some chance of success. The moment was a propitious one for craving
favours. Duke John and a considerable number of the aristocracy were
alike beholden to the men who petitioned--men flushed with victory, and
still under arms. Fear, if not gratitude, then counselled compliance,
and the boon was not denied. By the charter which John granted to
Louvain in 1267 it was expressly ordained that the craft guilds, which,
until now, had been purely industrial corporations, should henceforth be
endowed with military organisation, and that each guild should march
under its own banners, and be commanded by its own elected chiefs.
The result was what might have been, and what probably was, foreseen,
though no doubt the situation developed sooner than the longest-headed
of them had expected: before the year was out the rabble who had thus
been imprudently armed turned their weapons against the men who had
armed them, and though the rebellion was promptly quelled, and the
ringleaders were sent into exile, it was impossible to extinguish the
flame of hope which recent events had enkindled. The craftsmen were
firmly convinced that the flowing tide was with them, and though the
victory was not in their day, after events showed that they had
accurately gauged the situation.
During the confusion incident on Duke Henry's death, the craftsmen of
several other towns had likewise been able to wrest some shreds of power
from their patrician taskmasters. In some places, notably at Brussels,
the old Council of Jurors was re-established, but in no case was its new
lease of life a long one. The young Duke had little sympathy with
democratic ideas, and no sooner was he firmly established on his throne
than he set to work to restore the old order of things. John the First
was a strong man, and with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm he
accomplished his purpose, but it was only a putting off of the evil day.
The plebeians were for a moment cowed, but their spirit was not crushed.
Confident in the justice of their cause, they bent their heads to the
storm, and possessed their souls in patience.
Presently (1302) the victory of Courtrai sent a thrill through Europe,
for what a triumph it had been. 'On the one side was Philippe le Bel,
the mightiest prince of his day, with all the chivalry of Navarre and
all the chivalry of France, and a host of mercenary forces from all
parts of Europe; on the other were the weavers of Bruges and a troop of
Flemish boors, half naked, bare-headed, and with no other weapon but
the rude _scharmsax_ of their forebears--and these puny folk had
conquered: the tyrants who would have enslaved them lay humbled in the
dust.' When the news of the victory was noised abroad the downtrodden on
all sides took heart, and in the cities of Brabant a general uprising
was the immediate outcome. But the day of their triumph was not yet:
other was the social and political situation in Brabant to that in the
neighbouring county. The rulers of Brussels and Mechlin and Louvain were
of a different stamp to the men who had tyrannised over Bruges and Ypres
and Ghent. The latter were an effete and decrepit aristocracy--a herd of
_ledigoers,_ as working men contemptuously called them--mere loafers who
despised that trade which had enriched their fathers, and who knew of no
other means of increasing their dwindling income than by bribery and
corruption; the former were for the most part practical business men
actively engaged in commercial pursuits, and shrewd enough to reap a
large profit from their several avocations. Nor were they, like the
patricians of Flanders, at loggerheads with their sovereign. On the
contrary, they regarded him as their natural protector, and were on the
best of terms with him. In their eyes the Duke of Brabant was a highly
respectable and most efficient officer of police, who, as such, deserved
their confidence and esteem, and though the wages they paid him were
certainly high, they considered on the whole that he was well worth his
price. And the Duke on his part regarded them as men peculiarly worthy
of his affection, for his expenses were heavy, and he was often short of
cash, and they were always ready to make him presents with other
people's money, or even to advance him their own when he could give them
reasonable security and they were assured of a fair rate of interest.
In a word, these two forces were necessary to one another, and they were
wise enough to know it. Thus united they were irresistible, and the
plebeians hurled themselves in vain against the bedrock of their
omnipotence. As long as this state of things lasted there was but one
issue to their most strenuous efforts--defeat.
Once, indeed, by rare good fortune the craftsmen of Brussels almost
achieved success, but the cup of triumph was dashed from their hands as
they were carrying it to their lips. It happened thus. During the reign
of Duke John II. and his wife Marguerite, a daughter of King Edward I.
of England, there arose at Brussels, on the vigil of Candlemas 1306, a
quarrel between two citizens, in the course of which one of them
received a sword thrust. The wounded man does not seem to have been
seriously injured, but the outrage had been committed in a public place;
the assailant was an aristocrat, the victim a son of the people. That
was enough. Riot ensued. The Duke was out of town. The patricians, left
to their own resources, were powerless in face of the mob, and before
daybreak riot had become revolution. Throughout the hours of darkness
the city was a prey to the wildest disorder. Property of all kinds was
vowed to destruction; strongholds, in which patricians were hiding, were
taken by storm and wrecked; the mansions of the richest and most hated
merchants presently went up in flames. The Duchess in vain left the
shelter of her palace on the Coudenberg, and, with her life in her
hands, confronted the mob. The rioters hailed her with shouts of
derision, and though they offered her no personal violence, they laughed
her authority to scorn. The people were drunk with their own excesses,
and Brussels that night was a pandemonium. The storm was a fearful one
whilst it lasted, but its fury was soon spent, and at the meeting of
craftsmen, which was held next morning to deliberate on the future
government of the city, the men who had been rioting in the streets all
night showed singular moderation.
They decided that the magistracy should consist as heretofore of seven
aldermen, but that henceforth the people should name them; that two
financial assessors should be added to the city council, and that the
Jury should be once more re-established. And when the time came to elect
a new magistracy they gave further proof of their conciliatory
dispositions, for whilst they took care to safeguard their own
interests, they were not unmindful of the class prejudice of their
vanquished opponents: the new aldermen were all of them members of the
old ruling class chosen from among the little band of patricians whose
sympathies were known to be with the popular cause.
The new order of things, however, did not last six months. John II.,
deeply wounded at the scant civility shown to his wife, refused to
acknowledge the new constitution: the patricians' quarrel, he said, was
his own, and, worse still, he swore to make no terms of peace without
their consent, and until they had been fully indemnified for the losses
they had sustained. This was in the middle of February 1306. Some
attempt at negotiation seems to have been made, but without success, and
early in May the patricians in a body left the town for Vilvorde,
whither John had shortly before arrived along with what knights he had
been able to muster, and whither also presently came the craftsmen in
battle array, determined to exact at the sword's point the privileges
denied them. When the knights at Vilvorde saw the crowd drawing nearer
and nearer to camp, some of them suggested that 'the curs meant
submission'; when the howling pack was at their throats, they knew
better. During the first shock of battle the Duke himself was unhorsed,
some said slain, and for a moment the craftsmen thought they had won,
but it was only for a moment, they soon found to their cost that their
enemy was again in the saddle and in the forefront of the fray, whereat
they lost heart, and unable to bear up any longer against the charge of
the cavalry frantically made for home. The patricians followed at full
speed. It was a wild, fierce race for Brussels. On its issue hung their
fate. The people knew it, and fear and hope gave to their feet wings. If
only they could outstrip those cursed horsemen, were it but by a
hair's-breadth, they would slam the town gates in their noses, and thus
at the last moment turn defeat into victory. Vain hope. The hour of the
craftsman's salvation had not sounded yet: the outcome of the contest
was a dead heat, and once more the iron entered into his soul.
Seventy craftsmen had been slain at Vilvorde or in the mad rush home,
the old constitution was re-established with all its odious privileges
and all its time-honoured abuses, and there was a heavy bill of costs to
pay, wherein note this item, 'a hundred _livres_ to Willem Moll for
burying weavers and fullers alive.'
At Mechlin, at Léau, at Tirlemont, at Louvain, all of which towns were
about this time the scene of insurrection, the result was the same: in
every case the patrician triumph was accomplished with less difficulty
than at Brussels, and everywhere the lot of the plebeians became harder
than it had been before.
The most stringent precautions were taken to guard against further
disorder, craftsmen of all kinds were disarmed, their guild meetings
strictly prohibited, and at Brussels at least it was death for a weaver
or fuller to pass the night within the town.[10] These turbulent folk
were enjoined to remain after dusk in their own wretched suburbs or pay
the price of their temerity.
[10] Within, that is, the first line of ramparts. For their circuit,
_see_ map (dotted line). The outer ramparts were not constructed till
some fifty years later (1357-1359): during the reign of Duke Winceslaus.
No vestige of them remains but the Porte de Hal. Their site is now
occupied by the Outer Boulevards (_see_ map).
Nor was this all. On the 12th of June, 1306, Duke John authorised the
magistrates of Brussels to crush any further outbreak by any means they
thought fit. In the following September he granted like faculties to the
magistrates of Louvain, and presently all the cities of Brabant agreed
together that the craftsman banished from any one of them should, _ipso
facto_, be an outcast from all the rest.
What could they do, these small tradesmen and artisans, with their
wrists handcuffed and irons on their feet, but bewail their hard lot and
the evil days on which they had fallen, and weary Heaven for a
deliverer. Presently a deliverer was sent them, but the days of their
expectation filled three score years, and during all that time their
adversaries were at peace. Not only was their will law in the cities
where they dwelt, but they gradually extended their dominion far into
the open country, and, continually encroaching on the prerogatives of
their Duke, at last succeeded in reducing his sovereignty to little more
than a name, and themselves, to all intents and purposes, directed the
helm of State.
The patricians of Brabant had at length ascended the mountain of their
ambition, but for no long time were they able to hold the high place
which their gold had conquered.
III.--Genealogical Table of the Dukes of Brabant from
Godfrey I. to John III.
$Godfrey I.$
(Longbeard), Count of Louvain
from 1095, Duke of Brabant from May 13, 1106,
_d._ Jan. 15, 1140
|
|
$Godfrey II.$, _d._ 1142
|
|
$Godfrey III.$, _d._ Aug. 10, 1190
|
|
$Henry I.$ (The Warrior), _d._ Sept. 5, 1235
|
|
$Henry II.$, _d._ Feb. 1, 1248
|
|
$Henry III.$, = Adelaide
_d._ Feb. 6, 1260| of Burgundy
|
+------------------+---------+
| |
Henry, $John I.$
retired into a (The Victorious),
monastery, 1267, _d._ May 3, 1294
renouncing his right |
to the duchy to |
his younger brother $John II.$, = Marguerite,
John _d._ Oct. 17, | daughter of
1312 | Edward I. of
| England.
|
$John III.$
CHAPTER IX
_Peter Coutherele_
Amongst the tangle of intricate causes which at last brought about, not,
indeed, the complete discomfiture of the patricians, for to the end they
were able to share in the duties and spoils of municipal government, but
the shrinkage of their prestige and the loss of much of their power,
three stand out pre-eminent:--the gradual diminution of their wealth
after 1350, outcome of English competition in the cloth trade; the
conduct of their chief officer of police, who presently, for his own
ends, made it his business to foment rebellion; and the growing
conviction in their own ranks that, after all, the stately edifice which
they had reared was not founded on justice.
At a very early date there was a popular party among the patricians of
Brussels, which little by little seems to have gained sufficient
influence to modify the policy of the municipal government, for in 1306
we find Duke John II. giving discretionary powers to the College of
Aldermen to admit craftsmen to the freedom of the city, and though no
doubt the primary object of this grant was to enable the ruling class to
purchase the goodwill of leading plebeians, the patricians would hardly
have requested the right to confer such a boon, even by way of
corruption, if they had been seriously opposed to the admission of
commoners to the franchise.
As it was at Brussels so was it in the other towns of Brabant, and
notably at Louvain, the city, above all, where the aristocracy was the
proudest and the most hated, and the proletariat the most turbulent and
the most oppressed. In this hotbed of storm and suspicion, where class
feeling ran the highest and class distinctions were the most sharply
defined, it was in the ranks of the patricians that the people at last
found a leader whom they trusted, and one who showed himself worthy of
their trust. That leader was Peter Coutherele, Mayor of Louvain, and, as
such, the first citizen of the first city of Brabant.
Though on the paternal side he does not seem to have been a man of
ancient lineage--his father, Godfrey, who was a member of the Council of
Jurors in 1328, and again in 1339, is the first of the family of whom we
have any record--Peter Coutherele was enrolled in the great landlord
clan of Van Redinghem, and claimed kinship, probably through his mother
or his grandmother, or through both, with the oldest and noblest houses
of the Commune. His enemies said of him that his love of the people was
born of hatred of his own class, outcome of private spleen, and that in
making himself the champion of plebeian claims his first care was to
feather his own nest; but whatever may have been the motives which
inspired his action, there is this much to Peter's credit: to the end he
was true to the cause he had espoused and to the principles he
professed, and if he received large rewards, he at least did his work
well. There can be no doubt that the ultimate triumph of democracy at
Louvain was in the main due to his efforts. For four hundred years the
constitution which he gave to his native city was the guarantee of the
rights and liberties of all sorts and conditions of men. He was no
wanton shedder of blood, he was very zealous for law and order, he
always showed himself a just, a merciful, and a moderate man, and at
last he died poor and forgotten.
We first hear of Peter Coutherele in 1348, when, no doubt owing to the
influence of his high connections, he was appointed by Duke John III. to
the important office of Mayor of Louvain, a position which must not be
confounded with that of a modern English or French mayor. The Mayor of
Louvain was the immediate representative of the Sovereign. His office
corresponded in some sense to that of the high sheriff of an English
county. He was also chief constable and commander-in-chief of the civic
militia, and he took precedence of all other ducal officers. At this
epoch, then, Coutherele was still on friendly terms with the ruling
class, for John, who was always very tender with his patricians, would
never have chosen for his representative a man who was not a _persona
grata_ to them, but the break soon came. The new Mayor was no respecter
of persons, and before his first year of office was out he denounced
certain measures which the aldermen had taken as infringements of the
ducal prerogative. The magistrates, indeed, succeeded in justifying
their conduct, but from that moment between them and Coutherele there
was war to the knife. Presently in their turn they denounced him: he was
hatching a plot with the plebeians to overthrow their power. But they
were able to furnish no proof, and Duke John maintained him in office.
Though it was common knowledge that the Mayor sympathised with the
aspirations of the lesser folk, it is not probable that at this period
he had translated his sentiments into action. He was shrewd enough to
know that any uprising of the masses against their oppressors could have
no hope of success unless it were backed at least by the tacit consent
of the Sovereign, and he had already had experience of Duke John's
friendliness to the patricians. Four years later, in 1359, the Mayor of
Louvain was again at loggerheads with the magistracy, and this time the
consequences were far reaching. The quarrel arose out of a very small
matter. De Dynter thus relates the story of its origin:[11]--
[11] _Chron. Brabant_, t. iii. p. 47.
'It came to pass at this time that as a certain fishmonger was on his
way to Louvain, there to dispose of his wares, as was his wont, the
barrow on which his fish was charged stuck fast in a deep hole full of
mud, whereat he was beginning to have grave doubts whether by reason of
the bad road he would be able to reach the city in time for market, when
haply he espied, in a field close by, some horses grazing, one of which
he caught and harnessed to his truck, and when by this means he had
extricated himself from his trouble he led him back again to the pasture
whence he had taken him.
'Now it so happened that a certain wicked, false ribald, who had seen
all that had taken place, at once made report thereof to Myn Here
Coutherele, Mayor of Louvain, and affirmed upon oath that the fishmonger
had stolen the horse; and thus it came to pass that no sooner had the
said fishmonger set foot in Louvain than he was arrested for a thief and
cast into gaol. At last the matter was brought before the Court of
Aldermen, who adjudged the accused not guilty and directed that he
should be set free; whereat the Mayor refused to comply, and the
magistrates were cut to the quick. In flouting their sentence Coutherele
had infringed one of those very privileges which, upon taking office, he
had solemnly sworn to maintain. He was no longer worthy to be their
Mayor. Henceforth they would cease to regard him as such.'
In refusing to carry out the sentence of the aldermen Coutherele had no
doubt acted illegally, and the magistrates, in retaliating as they did,
were strictly within their rights, but if they had not been blinded by
passion they would have surely held their peace. They knew very well
that the Mayor of Louvain would be certain to represent the course they
had pursued as a flagrant violation of the ducal prerogative; and they
knew too that the man who now sat on the throne of Brabant was of other
blood and of other complexion to those friends and fosterers of
freedom--the princes of the House of Louvain. The last of them was John
III., and when (December 5, 1355) he was gathered to his fathers the
mantle of their policy did not fall on the shoulders of his son-in-law
and successor. Winceslaus of Luxembourg, the new Duke, knew nothing of
civic institutions. How should he? There were no great towns in the land
in which he had been reared. And though it was to the burgher-nobles of
Brabant that he owed his recently acquired domains, he deemed the
influence and pretensions of these tradesmen a standing affront to his
dignity, of which from the first he was determined to be rid. Moreover,
he was aggrieved with most of them personally, for had they not welcomed
Louis of Maele when that sycophant of patrician pride, under pretext of
recovering his wife's portion, had invaded his domains, and was it not
by their counsel that he had afterwards styled himself Duke of Brabant?
Added to this, it was the lesser folk who had at last driven out the
usurper, and when others of his order had deserted their prince
Coutherele had stood by him manfully.
Such was the complexion of affairs at the moment when the patricians of
Louvain defied their enemy, and such was the man into whose jaundiced
ears that aggrieved individual now poured the story of their
aggressions.
Nor was Coutherele without allies in the ducal council--amongst them
Reynold, Lord of Schoonvorst, a personal friend who shared his own
opinions anent the plebeian question, and one of his Sovereign's most
trusted advisers. This man plainly told the Duke that if he would be
master in Louvain he must find some means of raising the people and of
abasing their proud taskmasters. As for Winceslaus, he made no sign, and
promptly withdrew to Luxembourg, as though unwilling to interfere in the
quarrel; but when Coutherele returned to his native city, men noted that
he was in nowise cast down--he had no doubt received some private
assurance that he was free to act as he would.
For a little while there was calm at Louvain, calm before the storm, and
the patricians had almost begun to hope that their trouble with
Coutherele was over, when presently it was rumoured abroad that his
nephews were tampering with the weavers. Employers of labour, comparing
notes, called to mind that of late their men had shown themselves idle
beyond wont, sullen, fractious, insolent; they had wondered what this
meant, now they knew the reason. When the days grew longer, and honest
merchants came forth after supper to cool themselves with the evening
breeze, they noted that the loungers, muttering together in market-place
and at street corner, leered at them as they passed with evil eyes, and
scarce vouchsafed to lift their hats.
Mischief, it was clear, was brewing. At last the plot was discovered,
and then the crisis came. Edmund De Dynter tells us how it all happened.
On the evening, he says, of the Feast of St. Mary Magdalen (July 21), in
the year of Our Lord 1360, it came to pass that a certain _meschine_ in
the service of one of our magistrates, having been sent by him to a
certain tavern to fetch a flask of wine, fell in with her sweetheart,
who in confidence told her that the people, egged on by Peter
Coutherele, intended to rise that night against the patricians, take
possession of the Town Hall, and make a pretty piece of mischief (_faire
aulcune mauvaise oevre_). Of course she divulged the secret to her
master, and he without delay imparted the same to his brother aldermen,
who forthwith betook themselves to the Town Hall, and arrived there
amazed and confounded at the manifest evidence of commotion which they
had witnessed on the way, for by this time the night was restless with
the tumult of a gathering mob: men were hurrying from all sides to the
great market behind the Cloth Hall, where the Mayor of Louvain was
already addressing a crowd of weavers, 'with arms in their hands and
anger in their brains.'
And what had Myn Here Coutherele to say for himself? If we may trust De
Dynter, who wrote indeed more than fifty years afterwards, he began by
enlarging on the misery of the people, and on the pride, the wealth, the
corruption, of those who held them in bondage, and who fattened on their
toil and on their tears. Was it not the people who paid the taxes, and
the patricians who had the spending of them? Did not the poor man have
to bear the heat and the burthen of the day whilst the rich were growing
richer on the spoils of administration? And what right had these men to
lord it over them? Were they not their fellow-citizens, of like birth
and of like origin with themselves? And when he saw that he had
enkindled their ire, he said that now was the time to strike; their
oppressors were at their mercy, they had mortally offended the Duke, he
would close his eyes and close his ears to aught which might be
attempted against them. It were madness to lose so favourable an
opportunity, let them then take up arms for dear liberty's sake.
It chanced that a certain great feudal lord, one Gerard of Vorsselaer,
was in town that day along with a band of retainers. This man seems to
have been esteemed in Louvain, and having no personal interest in city
affairs, he was on friendly terms with the leaders of each party. Having
vainly endeavoured to dissuade Coutherele from his purpose, he made his
way, as best he could, to the Town Hall and offered his services to the
patricians. 'Let them come forth like men and face the mob, and he and
his followers would help them _de bon coer et de bon courage_. For,'
said he, 'the people have not yet had time to muster; if we go forth
now, I doubt not that with God's help we shall put to shame the handful
that are already in the market-place, and when the rest behold their
discomfiture they will run to cover like poulets that have spied a
hawk.'
Sound advice probably, 'but those _hommes de loy_ were men of such frail
and meagre courage' that they deemed it too hazardous. Whereat
Vorsselaer, disgusted, incontinently leapt into his saddle and made for
Brussels, where we shall presently meet him. Meanwhile the mob was
increasing each moment in fury and in numbers, and the patricians, thus
left to their own devices, very soon came to the conclusion that no
other course was open to them but to treat with Myn Here Coutherele.
They did so, and with this result. To their envoy he made reply that the
people would fain be assured that the city accounts were in order. Let
the doors of the Town Hall be opened, and he and his friends would enter
and examine their books, and, when they had done so, withdraw. The
patricians complied, and Coutherele kept faith to the letter, nay, he
went even beyond his bond, for not only did he examine the account
books, he made a bonfire of them, and added thereto the charters of
patrician privileges and all other parchments he could set hands on;
and when at last he and his friends withdrew, they took care to bring
their opponents with them disarmed and under arrest.
Thus did the old _régime_ at Louvain come to an inglorious end. The
patricians had not struck a blow in defence of their privileges, and the
fact that the revolution was accomplished without bloodshed bears
witness not only to the humanity and moderation of Coutherele, but to
the marvellous influence which he must have had over the mob. Next
morning Coutherele himself, who was now practically dictator, named a
new magistracy, consisting of four patricians, men who were known to
favour the people, and three plebeians. It was the first time that a
commoner had been named alderman in any town of Brabant.
Meanwhile the men who had been captured in the Town Hall were still in
prison, and presently their friends made private appeal to Duchess
Jeanne, who opened communications with Coutherele with a view to their
liberation. Perhaps it was the policy of neither party to come to an
understanding; in any case, after several weeks had elapsed and nothing
had been effected the negotiations were broken off. Whereat the
prisoners, fearing for their lives, which after all hung by a thread,
proceeded themselves to treat with the all-powerful dictator, and with
better results, for after some haggling they purchased their freedom
upon undertaking to quit the city as soon as they should be set at
liberty.
The ransom which each man paid was assessed in proportion to his means,
but the sum-total thus realised amounted to a very large figure, and his
enemies said that, by this transaction, Coutherele had made himself one
of the richest men in Brabant, but in reality he expended the whole of
this fund, or, at all events, the greater portion of it, in the purchase
of the new charter which Duke Winceslaus granted to the city of Louvain
in the month of September 1360.
In this remarkable document, which was no doubt drawn up by Coutherele
himself, the Duke gave legal sanction to the changes accomplished in
July. He fully recognised the claim of the plebeians to participate in
the government of the city; he decreed that henceforth three aldermen
and eleven jurors should be chosen from among their ranks, and that all
other municipal functions should be equally divided between the two
classes. The elections were to take place annually, the plebeian members
being named by the patricians and the patrician members by the
plebeians--a very prudent regulation, calculated to secure in each case
the return of moderate men.
The action of Coutherele in this matter must not be judged by the
standard of to-day. In permitting his prisoners to purchase their
freedom he was only following the usage of the age in which he lived.
But that Winceslaus should have exacted a heavy fine or loan or
gratuity--call it what you will--from the man who had realised for him
his heart's desire was conduct more questionable. The only excuse that
can be made for him is this: his expenses were heavy and his purse was
light. The men of Louvain, however, were too well satisfied at the
success of their enterprise to grumble at the bill of costs, more
especially as the cash with which it was paid had been extracted from
their enemies' pockets, and so elated were they at Coutherele's
management of the whole affair that the magistrates voted him, from the
public funds, a large annuity for life.
If the patricians had been wise enough to recognise accomplished facts,
and had accepted the new constitution, which, after all, gave them the
lion's share in the government, all might yet have gone well, and the
city of Louvain would have been saved many years of strife and
bloodshed; but their privileges had been so large and so profitable, and
the good things which accrue to holders of office had been theirs for so
long, that they would have been more than human if they had been willing
at once to forego all thought of regaining their former position, and
these substantial men of commerce were neither heroes nor saints. Most
of them left the city in which they had once been supreme, and where now
their claims were mocked at; where their very lives were, perhaps, in
danger, and certainly were made a burthen to them by reason of
domiciliary visits and all kinds of vexatious precautions. For the men
in power were by no means sure of the stability of the new
_régime_--they lived in constant dread of a counter revolution. What
wonder, then, that their opponents, who, if the truth must be told, were
not famous for courage, found it more comfortable to plot in their
country homes than amid the turmoil of their town mansions, even though
their voluntary exile meant confiscation of property?
As for Duke Winceslaus, though his capital was a prey to disorder and in
imminent danger of commercial ruin, it was not his policy at present to
interfere. He knew very well that these purse-proud traders, who in the
day of their prosperity had given themselves the airs of princes, would
presently grovel at his feet, and with their caps in their hands humbly
beg his assistance; for, like their brethren at Brussels and elsewhere,
though it amused them sometimes to play at soldiering, they would never
do battle themselves if they could find someone else to fight for them,
and this was what actually occurred. When their town property had been
all confiscated, and commercial ruin was staring them in the face,
having vainly invoked the aid of Brussels, of Mechlin, of Liége, they
humbled themselves before their Sovereign, and, about the middle of
October 1361, with a great army he sat down before the city of Louvain.
But though Winceslaus made great show of helping the patricians, he had
not the slightest intention of breaking with the people, and the details
of the farce which followed had no doubt been previously arranged with
Coutherele. Certain it is that no sooner had Winceslaus encamped before
Louvain than that worthy, in the name of the city, professed submission.
His friends, he said, were ready to accept any conditions that the Duke
might dictate. Whereat Winceslaus, to save appearances, ordained that
they should come forth from the city to meet him, unarmed, unhatted and
unshod, and, when they had reached his presence, fall down on their
knees and humbly ask forgiveness. His instructions were carried out to
the letter, and when the farce had been duly performed he presented them
with a new charter, a masterpiece of duplicity, in which may be clearly
seen the hand of Coutherele. It restored to the patricians the whole of
their confiscated property; ordained that the ransoms paid by the
prisoners of 1360, the greater part of which, it will be remembered, the
Duke had pocketed himself, should be refunded from the public purse; and
further, and most important of all, deprived Coutherele of his
mayoralty. This was probably as much, or more, than the most sanguine of
them had looked for, but in reality, as the patricians soon learned to
their cost, Peter Coutherele and his mob were still masters of the
situation; nay, so far as they were concerned, things were worse than
they had been before, for the charter of 1360 gave them a majority in
the College of Aldermen, and though that body was still to contain four
patricians and three plebeians, Winceslaus had now reserved to himself
the right of appointment, and first among the patricians whom he
presently named was 'the renegade Peter Coutherele.' When the
reactionists knew that in spite of his specious promises, the Duke had
played them false, they at once declined to take any part in municipal
affairs; and sooner than be compelled to do so--for the new charter made
refusal to accept office, when named thereto, a crime punishable by
imprisonment--shook the dust of Louvain off their feet, and again
withdrew to their country strongholds.
The great tribune was now at the height of his power: his will was law
in Louvain; he himself was first burgomaster; in his friend Jan
Hanneman, the richest cloth merchant of the city, and one of the few
patricians who favoured the popular cause, he had an able and willing
lieutenant; another friend, the plebeian Gedulphe Rogge, one of his most
devoted adherents, was second burgomaster; Paul Herengolys, a clerk in
holy orders, was mayor, and every other municipal office was held by one
or other of his creatures. Nor was this all. As a reward for his
'manifold good and faithful services' Winceslaus invested him with the
ducal fief of Asten, in Limbourg, and all the rights and privileges
appertaining thereto. In addition, then, to his hereditary rank of
patrician, he was now a member of the feudal nobility--an anomalous
position, maybe, for the leader of a democratic revolution, but
presently Peter gave thanks to Heaven that the Castle of Asten was his.
About the same time, too, he made a brilliant marriage for his daughter
Gertrude, whom he gave to Henri de Cuyck, a brother of the powerful Lord
of Hoogstraeten--a useful alliance this, and one which stood him in good
stead, as we shall presently see.
Meanwhile the city finances were in sorry plight. For years past the
patrician oligarchy had not only mismanaged public funds, but had
systematically enriched themselves at the public cost, and though their
corruption had been one of the chief causes of complaint against them on
the part of the plebeians, now that they themselves were in office they
deviated no whit in this matter from the traditions of their
predecessors; for years past, too, the profits arising from cloth had
gradually been diminishing, and since the Revolution of 1360 all
business had been practically at a standstill. Added to this, Duke
Winceslaus had been paid, and paid handsomely, for the charter of 1362.
Indeed the quarrels of the men of Louvain were a fruitful source of
wealth to their Sovereign. His method of extorting cash seems to have
been this: he first fomented disturbances, then sold his support to the
highest bidder, and finally, when he was called in to arbitrate, charged
a heavy fee for expenses. In this manner he succeeded in amassing vast
wealth, and it was currently reported in Brabant that during the year
1361 he received more money from the men of Louvain than would have been
realised had the whole city been sold with all its outlying territory.
Be this as it may, the city treasury was empty, and to obtain the funds
necessary to meet current expenses, Coutherele had recourse to an
expedient still resorted to by communities in like straits: he invoked
the aid of foreign capitalists. Jan Hanneman was dispatched to Germany
to sell life annuities, and so good was the credit of Louvain, or so
great, perhaps, were his powers of persuasion, that in a very short time
he returned laden with treasure. Of course Peter's enemies said, judging
of him by what they themselves would have done under similar
circumstances, that no small portion of it found its way into his own
coffers:--This were surely the fund with which he had dowered his
daughter. The charge of peculation which he had hurled at them they now
flung back in his teeth, and again made appeal to Winceslaus and
promised him gold. Whereat he once more assumed the _rôle_ of
arbitrator, confirmed the 'Peace of 1361,' adjured the belligerents to
forgive and forget, and, as surety for their future good behaviour,
demanded from each party hostages and, by way of compensation for the
expenses he had incurred, a further cash payment. This was in February
1363, and shortly afterwards Coutherele himself conducted the plebeian
hostages to the ducal castle at Tervueren.
The Lord of Asten went forth from Louvain exulting in the glory of his
might, he was accompanied by a train of seventy horsemen, the cavalcade
was a brilliant one, the people cheered him as he passed; his popularity
had not one whit abated, he was still their idol, the saviour of the
city, the valiant champion who had broken the yoke of slavery from off
their necks; but in reality his sun had set: the triumphant ride to
Tervueren was but the aftermath. He knew it when he had seen Winceslaus,
and he knew too that lurid storm clouds were rolling up with the night.
He was as sure that the Duke had joined the enemy as if he had learned
it from his own lips. For him Louvain had ceased to be a safe abode: if
haply he escaped the headsman's axe, he would sooner or later be stabbed
in the back by a muffled ruffian lying in wait for him at the corner of
some dark street; and if his lamp were put out, the cause for which he
had so long suffered would at the same time die, for who could take the
place of Peter Coutherele? Prudence and duty, then, counselled flight,
and he fled to his manor at Asten, where he was presently joined by
Hanneman and Herengolys.
If Peter had been content to lie low for a while, the natural course of
events must have presently restored him to his former position: he had
powerful friends at Court, he was still in possession of his barony,
Winceslaus, satisfied at his voluntary exile, seems at the present
juncture to have had no intention of wholly breaking with him. The
Duke's policy was a policy of expedience: at Louvain the name of
Coutherele was still one to conjure with, and the force of circumstances
must have presently compelled him to fall back on his former ally, for,
as after events showed, the patrician reaction was only a passing phase;
in reality the flowing tide was still with the people.
But it was impossible for a man of Peter's temperament to sit with
folded hands whilst vandals were wrecking his 'house Beautiful' and
threatening to pull it down. That this was the case there was,
unfortunately, no room for doubt. He was in constant communication with
Louvain, and each day his envoys returned with tidings which lashed him
to fury. They told him how these men of Belial, not content with
corrupting the Duke, had corrupted also some of his own
followers--plebeians, in whose integrity he had placed implicit
confidence; how Winceslaus, whilst cynically confirming their charter of
rights, had twisted it into an instrument of torture, by naming these
renegades representatives of the people in the city council; how the
patricians, thus free to act as they would, had not only compensated
themselves largely from the public purse for property of which they had
been most righteously deprived in 1360, but had deemed it no shame to
draw from the same source the huge sum they had promised Winceslaus, and
this at a time when the city was honeycombed with debt, when all
business was at a standstill, when thousands of men were out of work,
and their wives and little ones starving. Nor did even this complete the
sum of their iniquity: foreseeing that the victims of their evil deeds
would at last be goaded to turn on them, they had meanly deprived them
of the power to do so by taking away their weapons.
That was the last straw. Coutherele was beside himself. He would
hesitate no longer. Not one of these men should escape the sword of his
vengeance. His plan was to advance on Louvain under cover of night with
what men and arms he could muster, enter through one of the city gates,
which, at a given signal, friends within would open, join forces with
the craftsmen, stealthily break into the Town Hall, where he knew there
were weapons, and then, when each man had armed himself, fall on their
adversaries unawares, and slay them in their beds. The plot was
doubtless suggested by the Bloody Matins of Bruges, and if it had been
possible to carry it out a like result might have followed; but at
Bruges the craftsmen were true to one another, at Louvain there was a
traitor in the camp, and on the appointed night, when Coutherele and his
little band were nearing the Castle of Heverlé,[12] on the outskirts of
the city, they found themselves confronted by Winceslaus and an army of
knights and burghers; a desperate encounter followed, and the rebels
were put to flight.
[12] The Castle of Heverlé is still standing; part of it dates from
Coutherele's time, but the greater portion was erected in the course of
the fifteen hundreds. It is a grand old building, picturesquely situated
on the banks of the Dyle, in the midst of a beautiful and well-wooded
park. It is one of the country seats of the Duc d'Arenberg, who kindly
allows strangers to visit it.
Even now Winceslaus seems to have been loath to resort to extreme
measures against his former friends and accomplices. Coutherele had fled
the country, and was beyond his reach, Hanneman and Herengolys had also
disappeared, and if he had been left to his own devices he would most
likely have found it convenient to follow the advice of his friend
Schoonvorst and take no further action in the matter, but the
patricians, as was natural, objected.--As long as these
murderous ruffians lived they were not safe in their beds; let a price
be set on the head of each one of them, and warrants issued for their
arrest. And they used another argument, one which experience told them
would prove convincing: they jingled their moneybags. And Winceslaus
signed the required edict and pocketed 300 _florins d'or._ This
transaction had notable results. Herengolys was presently captured,
condemned to death by the city magistrates, and in due course brought to
the block; but the aldermen had reckoned without their host, the
ex-mayor of Louvain was a clerk, and, as such, not amenable to their
jurisdiction, and John of Arkel, who at this time ruled the Church of
Liége, no sooner heard of his fate than he set Louvain under interdict.
He would never suffer the rights of his clergy to be trampled on with
impunity, and moreover he seems to have shared, at all events to a
certain extent, Herengolys's political opinions. In his own principality
he consistently favoured the aspirations of democracy, and in the
struggle at Louvain he more than once intervened, and always on behalf
of the people. Perhaps his action in the Herengolys affair was inspired
by Peter Coutherele, who, immediately after the disaster of Heverlé, had
fled to Liége.
Nothing daunted by the fate of his friend, Coutherele at once set to
work to concoct new measures for the deliverance of his beloved city.
Having ingratiated himself with Albert of Holland, he now took up his
abode in that country, where presently a great conference was held of
outlaws from every town in Brabant, during which was planned another
attack on Louvain; but this scheme, like the last, was betrayed, and
failed miserably.
For years the great agitator led a restless and vagabond life, sometimes
in Holland, sometimes in Germany, sometimes in France, never long in one
place, always intriguing wherever he went, and making plans which he
could never carry out, and hatching plots which, for some reason or
other, he could never bring to maturity. At last, at the intercession of
his son-in-law, Henri de Cuyck, Winceslaus granted him a free pardon,
and permitted him to return to his native city (March 1369), but he was
a broken-down, worn-out old man, and he came back to Louvain to die. The
few months he had to live he passed in strict retirement in his house in
the Rue de la Fontaine, where he died the following year, poor and
forgotten.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER X
_The Peace of_ 1383
The flight of Coutherele and the failure of his subsequent efforts left
the reactionary party a free hand, and by 1375 they had so consolidated
their position that they were able to compel Winceslaus to cancel the
charter of 1361 and grant in its place a new charter, which gave back to
the old ruling class its former monopoly of political power. The result
may be surmised: mismanagement and corruption were the order of the day;
no accounts were published, and justice had to be bought; any
manifestation of discontent was put down with cruel vigour, and even the
right of sanctuary was not always respected. Once, after some abortive
rising, when a score of trembling wretches, who had taken refuge in the
cloister of Notre Dame, were dragged forth by order of the magistrates
and put to death, the Bishop of Liége interfered and imposed a heavy
fine; and no doubt the patricians laughed in their sleeves when
presently the account was settled, for it was not they, but the people,
who bore the brunt of the imposts.
Though taxation had never before been so high, the treasury was empty;
loan had been added to loan, and private individuals travelling abroad
were on all sides being arrested for public debts. Thus export trade had
become impossible, and as for industry, there was nothing doing, for
sooner than submit to the exactions of their taskmasters, a third of the
working population had emigrated.
At last, when Louvain was on the verge of ruin, the patricians
themselves began to suspect that there was something wrong with their
methods of government, and, at their wits' end what to do, presently
consulted Winceslaus, who, wise man, suggested a great conference of all
the cities of Brabant to consider the situation. This was early in the
year 1378. The patricians agreed, and in due course a conference was
summoned. Towards the close of March the deputies met in the Town Hall
of Louvain; the Duke himself presided, and almost every town in the
duchy was represented.
It is not certain whether the craftsmen of Louvain took any part in the
proceedings, but they were able to make their influence felt. Whilst the
conference was sitting they sent in a petition to Winceslaus, humbly
requesting, among other things, that a statement should be published of
the town accounts from the time of Coutherele's administration to date;
that such patricians as had been awarded annuities by way of indemnity
for losses incurred during Coutherele's term of office should cease to
receive them as soon as the sum justly due to them had been repaid, and
that those who had already received more than their due should be
compelled to refund the surplus; and, most important of all, that the
town seal should be confided to the joint care of the patrician clans,
the guild and the trade companies, so that henceforth no new loan could
be negotiated without the unanimous consent of the burghers.
It is significant of the trend of public opinion that the deputies made
these requests their own, and further, named a committee of eight
patricians and eight plebeians to study the question of the town debt
and the financial situation generally. By Pentecost they had sent in
their report, and Duchess Jeanne--Winceslaus being absent in
Luxembourg--at once laid it before the conference, which was now
sitting in St. Gertrude's Abbey. It embodied many wise and prudent
suggestions, some of which sound strangely modern, but they touched too
nearly the rights of property to be acceptable to most of the
patricians. It would have been surprising, indeed, if many of them had
welcomed an income tax and death duties, or a tax on Church lands, or an
all round reduction of official salaries, and these proposals, and
others of a like kind, aroused such a storm of opposition that Jeanne
suggested that perhaps it might be as well to leave it to the Duke and
his council to solve the financial problem, but to this, naturally
enough, everyone objected, and when presently Winceslaus himself
returned he could only reiterate his wife's proposal, promising that he
would take no step without first consulting his _bonnes villes_ and his
brother-in-law of Flanders--Louis of Maele, whose tenderness to his own
patricians was notorious throughout the Low Countries; but he might just
as well have held his breath, the patricians refused to hearken and
things came to a standstill. Whereat the people grew restive.
Difficulties, they alleged, were being purposely raised to stave off
reform, they themselves would settle the matter in their own fashion;
and on the 22nd of July the mob was out, battering at the doors of the
Town Hall, and clamouring to Burgomaster Van Nethen to bring forth the
great seal and the town charters. To do so, he said, was impossible, he
had not got the keys, and, even if he had, it were contrary to law to
unlock the rolls coffer save in the presence of the whole council.
Needless to say, the rioters were not convinced, and at nightfall a host
of them, with arms and banners, headed by the weaver, Wouter Vander
Leyden, filed into the Grand' Place, took possession of the Hôtel de
Ville, arrested the aldermen they found there, and, without much
difficulty, made themselves masters of the town.
The victory was all the more easily won from the fact that a large
number of patricians--all who had the welfare of the city at heart, were
in reality not opposed to the rioters, perhaps even secretly leagued
with them. These men were under the leadership of Alderman Jan De
Swertere, a patrician of note who loved the people, his enemies said,
because he hated Alderman Vanden Calstere, the chief of the
ultra-reactionists. It was the time when the famous 'White Hoods' of
Ghent were disporting themselves in Flanders, and the revolutionists of
Louvain, patricians and plebeians alike, adopted their headgear. Wouter
Vander Leyden and Hendrick Portman were chosen captains of the city,
there was an exodus of reactionists, and a deputation was sent to
Winceslaus, now at Brussels, begging him to come at once and legalise
what had been done. It was not, however, until nearly two months had
been consumed in negotiation, and until he had received from the men of
Louvain more than 6000 _peters_, that he at last consented to give them
a new and acceptable charter.
The constitution with which the city was now endowed, so far as
concerned the composition of the magistracy, was identical with
Coutherele's constitution--the College of Aldermen and the Council of
Jurors were still to contain respectively four and eleven patricians,
and three and ten plebeians; but the method of appointing these officers
was considerably modified: henceforth the aldermen were to be named by
the Sovereign from a triple list presented to him jointly by the
patrician and non-patrician members of the Merchants' Guild; the
non-patrician members alone were to name the patrician jurors; and the
plebeian jurors were to be chosen by the trade companies, now grouped
together in ten corporations called nations, each nation electing a
juror. Further, there were to be two burgomasters--the first chosen by
the plebeians from among the patricians, the second by the patricians
from among the plebeians--and four treasurers, all plebeians:--two
craftsmen and two members of the Merchants' Guild. They were to have the
entire management of the finances of the town, hold office for one year,
and give an account of their stewardship to the College of Aldermen, the
Council of Jurors and the Merchants' Guild, assembled in solemn council,
every quarter-day. Satisfaction was also given to the people in the
matter of the government of the guild: henceforth there were to be eight
deans--four plebeians named by the patricians, and four patricians
chosen by the nations; and, for the rest, all minor offices were to be
equally divided among the two classes of the _bourgeoisie_.
Such, in its main outlines, was the constitution with which Louvain was
endowed by the Great Charter--the Peace, as it was called--of 1378, and
which, with some slight modification, continued to be the constitution
of the city until the close of the eighteen hundreds. Never before had
the people enjoyed so large a share in the government. The patricians,
indeed, still retained a considerable place in the magistracy, but their
voice was almost stifled in the matter of elections, though, mark this,
what they had lost was not given to the proletariat, but to the middle
class, as represented by the non-patrician members of the guild--rising
merchants and manufacturers, men, for the most part, of moderate means
and moderate opinions, in touch on the one side with the working-class,
from which most frequently they had sprung, and on the other with the
aristocracy, which already included some of their kinsmen, and within
whose charmed circle it was not beyond the dreams of several of them,
if trade went well, to one day find admittance.
Nobody supposed that Vanden Calstere and his friends would be grateful
to Duke Winceslaus for the 'Peace' of 1378, but it was probably matter
of surprise to everyone that their resentment took the form it did: they
remained without the city walls, not in their own strongholds, but at
Aerschot, Vilvorde, Hal, in one or other of the little towns hard by
Louvain, and, sallying forth from these places with what ruffians they
could hire, lay in wait for stray burghers, and with such of them as
fell into their clutches it went hardly--sometimes they held them to
ransom, and sometimes they cut their throats. At last things came to
this pass:--no foreign trader would come within measurable distance of
the city, and no burgher who valued his life would venture beyond the
ramparts, but it was not till Wouter Vander Leyden had been murdered
that the people lost patience. This man, who was now burgomaster, had
been charged by the magistrates to make complaint to Duke Winceslaus of
the conduct of the reactionists, and as he was journeying to Brussels to
execute the commission, or, as some say, as he was returning home at
night, he was surprised in a lonely spot by Vanden Calstere himself and
Willem Wilre, his henchman, and literally hacked to pieces.
Hardly had the news reached Louvain than the craftsmen flew to arms, the
city gates were shut, and all patricians suspected of being hostile to
the new _régime_ were arrested and imprisoned in an upper chamber of the
Town Hall. This seems to have been done by order of the magistrates,
perhaps by way of precaution, for the people were at the end of their
patience. Presently they got out of hand; a rush was made for the Town
Hall, the doors were forced and the prisoners thrown out of window, one
by one as their names were called by the mob outside. Sixteen or
seventeen persons perished in this manner (December 15, 1378)--innocent
or guilty who shall say: they had not been placed on trial. Amongst them
Jan Platvoet, a patrician of fourscore years whose only crime seems to
have been that he was a kinsman of one of the murderers; and an archer
of the guard, name unknown, who had formerly been his servant. This man,
when the doors were forced, made his former master crawl under a bench
placed against the wall, and had then seated himself on it, and perhaps
old Jan might have escaped if it had not been for the sharp eyes of a
weaver's inquisitive 'kint,' who said he saw something shining between
the archer's legs. It was the gold-embroidered ends of poor Platvoet's
necktie. They dragged him forth, and, in spite of his prayers, cast him
headlong into the market; but the traitor who would have saved a
patrician's life was pitched out of window first. Hitherto the craftsmen
of Louvain had contented themselves with banishing or imprisoning their
enemies; it was the first time in the course of their long struggle that
they had stained their souls with blood.
For weeks after the murder of the patricians the rioters remained in the
streets, and for months after order had been re-established men lived in
a fever of anticipation, each side looking for some fresh outrage which
would be sure to result in yet crueller acts of reprisal. But though
Winceslaus knew all this, and seems to have been early appealed to, it
was not till the close of May that he made any serious effort to restore
public confidence by punishing the delinquents. Then he published an
edict in which he enjoined twelve of the principal rioters to make a
pilgrimage to Cyprus, sentenced to exile nine patricians who had been
mixed up in the murder of Vander Leyden, and imposed on the city a fine
of 4000 _peters_.
But things were in too parlous a plight to be righted by proclamation:
the White Hoods, indeed, for the moment were quiet, but the reactionists
refused to submit, and forthwith proceeded to harry the country estates
of the rallied patricians, whom, rightly or wrongly, they suspected of
having instigated the murder of their relatives. Of course De Swetere
and his folk retaliated in like fashion, and in all that they attempted
and in all that they did, of course they were aided and abetted by their
very good friends, the plebeians: homestead after homestead was razed to
the ground, castle after castle fired, and soon the whole country round
Louvain became the scene of guerilla warfare.
Meanwhile Vanden Calstere, or some of his friends, had again taken to
the road. Burgomaster Oorbeke, returning from Brussels, was arrested and
held to ransom; so, too, several jurors; and worse still was the fate of
a notable private citizen--Myn Here Van Grave, a merchant of vast
wealth: they cut off his hands and his feet, and sent him home in a
waggon, bidding him tell his fellow-burghers that any one of them whom
they chanced to take would be treated in like fashion.
Again and again the _bonnes villes_ tendered their good offices. Again
and again the Duke did his utmost to arrange matters. Negotiations were
often begun, but, for some reason or other, they always fell through. It
was not till the beginning of the year 1383, after Winceslaus had been
compelled to lay siege to Louvain, that the Bishop of Liége was at last
able to reconcile the belligerents.
Of course, as in all such cases, the settlement was a compromise; but
though it banished nineteen craftsmen for a year and a day, opened the
gates of the city to Vanden Calstere and his friends, and guaranteed
them complete immunity for all their past offences, it was not these
men, but their opponents, who in reality had the best of the bargain:
the constitution of 1378 remained intact; the people surrendered no jot
or tittle of their political rights and privileges.
Peace then was at last established; the terms of agreement were on each
side loyally adhered to, and the reconciliation endured. Mutual
confidence had taken the place of universal suspicion, and the craftsmen
nourished no rancour against those who had formerly been their bitterest
foes: when presently, in the month of June, the time arrived for the
annual renewal of the magistracy, Henry Pynnock, Godfrey Utten Liemingen
and Goswin Vanden Calstere were elected aldermen, and that, in spite of
the fact that they had all of them been reactionists; nor, it is
pleasant to note, did they belie the people's trust.
CHAPTER XI
_Reform_ versus _Revolution_
When the revolution of 1360 broke out the city of Louvain was, in name
and in fact, the first city of Brabant. The cluster of cottages around
the church which Lambert Balderic had founded on the banks of the Dyle
three centuries before had grown into a great industrial and commercial
centre, with a population of something like 70,000 souls. In the number
of its inhabitants, in the extent of its trade, in political influence,
in social prestige, in the splendour of its public and private
buildings, it eclipsed at this time every town in the duchy. Among the
burgher nobles of Brabant none were so rich and so powerful as the
Petermen of Louvain: not only did they enjoy the dignities and
privileges common to all patricians, but they participated, as we have
seen, in the immunities of the Church, and that, without being irked by
correlative duties. Also, they shone alone, there were no brighter stars
in their firmament: the Sovereign had long ago left Louvain, and there
were no Court nobles to rival their glory or to dispute their right to
pre-eminence. As they were human, of course they were puffed up--proud
of their wealth, proud of their race, proud of their solitary grandeur
and of the consideration which these things gave them; exceedingly
jealous of their privileges, very swift to resent any attempt at
aggression, whether it came from above or from below; and of course they
contemned the seething mass of shame and misery beneath them--a mutinous
army of workers, many thousands strong, as eager and determined to
obtain liberty as their masters were to keep them in bondage.
Such was the social complexion of Louvain during the fifty years which
preceded the revolution of 1360. Paint the picture on a smaller scale
and in less glaring colours, and you will have some idea of the social
complexion of Brussels during the same period.
Brussels, like Louvain, was at this time divided into two hostile camps;
here, too, patricians and plebeians were biting their thumbs at one
another; but neither side was so strong or so violent as in the sister
city. The patricians were not so rich, and perhaps in consequence not so
selfish, and the plebeians were less numerous, and probably on this
account less exacting; and too, though they were not born on a bed of
rose leaves, they had less cause for complaint. High and mighty as were
the merchant princes of Brussels, they were not so high and mighty as
the descendants of Saint Peter's serfs. Their splendour was not enhanced
by a semi-ecclesiastical aureole; they had no title to distinction but
that which their money gave; and though, like the patricians of Louvain,
they owned the freehold of the town which they administered and
governed, they were not alone in their glory. When the Duke was not at
the Coudenberg he was at his hunting-lodge at Tervueren, just outside
the city gates, and the burghers were in frequent contact with the
nobles of the Court, who, though often poor and often in their debt,
were, for all that, socially their superiors. For these or for some
other reasons the local aristocracy at Brussels was less overbearing
than at Louvain, class distinctions were less sharply defined, and the
plebeians were treated with more consideration.
On the whole, then, Brussels was a less turbulent town than the capital,
and the road to reform, as might be expected, led through smoother ways.
The great struggle began about the same time as at Louvain, and, as at
Louvain, the Duke's action precipitated events. In the year 1356
Winceslaus, in order to reward the plebeians for driving the Flemings
out of Brussels, and also to mark his displeasure at the disloyal
conduct of the patricians, who had welcomed them with open arms, granted
to the trade companies by charter an equal share with the patrician
clans in the government of the city; but this boon, which the people had
so long coveted, and which at last they had obtained, was theirs only
for a day: the ink of the new charter was hardly dry when Winceslaus
revoked it.
No record has come down to us of the motives which inspired his action,
nor do we even know the exact date of the cancelling of the charter.
This event, however, can hardly have taken place earlier than 1357 nor
later than 1360, and most likely the reactionary party in the patrician
camp by means of bribes or promises had purchased the Duke.
Naturally the people were profoundly irritated. Secret meetings were
held, and presently matters came to a crisis. It was just at this time
that Coutherele was meditating his _coup d'état_, and perhaps there was
some understanding between the craftsmen of the two cities: it is
significant that the rebellion at Louvain began on the 21st of July, and
that at Brussels the mob was out on the night of the 23rd. The
craftsmen's plan of action was to surprise the patricians in their beds,
and if they had been able to keep it close perhaps they might have
accomplished something, but at the last moment they were betrayed, and
thus it came about that whilst they were seeking their banners their
opponents took possession of the market-place.
Strangely enough Gerard of Vorsselaer, the same who two nights before
had been busying himself with the affairs of Louvain, first essaying to
calm the mob, and when that failed, advising the patricians as to the
best means of quelling them, had now arrived at Brussels, and finding
the town in a similar predicament, he did what he could to set matters
straight. By his advice the senior alderman essayed negotiations: he
invited the dean of the butchers, who were assembled under arms in their
guild house, to a conference in the Town Hall; and presently the
messenger returned trembling--he had been treated with threats and
curses, and the dean had bade him say that 'the butchers would come in a
body soon enough.' Hardly had he finished speaking when word was brought
that the weavers were attacking the Steenporte (the city prison).[13] In
an instant the patricians were in their saddles. If only they could
intercept the butchers the situation might yet be saved, and with
Vorsselaer at their head, they made for the meat market, and _en route_
fell in with the men they were seeking. A skirmish followed, but the
patricians, who were well armed and on horseback, had little difficulty
in overcoming a handful of footmen with no weapons but pole-axes: they
were soon disarmed and driven home to their own squalid quarters.
Meanwhile the men of the spindle had been vainly hurling themselves
against the doors of the Steenporte, and now, with the assistance of
fullers and dyers, they were preparing to burn it down. Why not repay
the curs in their own coin by setting fire to their kennels? The
suggestion came from Myn Here Van Vorsselaer; it was forthwith carried
out, and the issue showed that honest Gerard was a man whose judgment
was to be relied on.
[13] A portion of this building, now called _La Tour d'Anneessens_, is
still standing. It is situated in a garden behind a tavern called _à la
vue de Steenporte_, at the entrance to the _rue Steenporte_, on the left
hand side of the way (_see_ Map). It is not visible from the street, but
the landlord is always glad to allow his customers to visit it.
When the rioters saw the redness in the sky they knew what had happened,
and with a mad rush made for home, only to fall into the arms of their
enemies, who barring the way in a narrow street halfway down the hill,
mowed them down like grass and trampled the life out of them beneath
their horses' feet; and that was the end of the rising of 1360. It does
not seem, after all, to have been a very serious affair--butchers and
clothworkers alone had taken part in it, but if the magistrates had
followed the example set them by the magistrates of Louvain two nights
before, there is little doubt that by morning things would have assumed
a very different complexion.
Thanks to the energy and determination of the patricians, revolution had
been nipped in the bud, but the city was seething with discontent, the
plebeian triumph at Louvain had inflamed the people with an unquenchable
thirst for liberty, and they were only awaiting a favourable moment to
try their luck again. Of this the patricians were well aware, and since
most of them were not yet prepared to relinquish a shred of their
authority, only one policy was open to them--a policy of stern
repression applied with energy and vigilance. Of these qualities they
gave ample proof, but they do not seem to have been guilty of wanton
cruelty or even, bearing in mind the object they had in view, of
unnecessary harshness.
The number of weavers who perished on the night of the insurrection was
indeed very considerable, but when once order had been restored they
refrained from further bloodshed. Their main object was to rid the town
of agitators, and all who were suspected of being such were condemned to
banishment. Nor were these men suffered to unduly defer the date of
their departure by taking refuge in churches: the right of sanctuary was
not violated, but the proscribed were forbidden to remain in any church
within the liberty of Brussels for more than a week, under penalty of a
prolongation of their term of banishment by as many years as they had
remained days above that period, and their fellow-citizens were
forbidden to supply such persons with provisions under penalty of a
heavy fine; but, on the other hand, all those who were willing to quit
the city within the time prescribed were at once provided with a safe
conduct.
It is impossible within the limits of this little manual to give any
detailed account of the numerous penal laws with which the statute book
of Brussels was at this time endowed. Suffice it to say that many of
them were of an inquisitorial and vexatious character; that the dire
penalties with which all of them were sanctioned--exile, long terms of
imprisonment, in some cases even mutilation--were for the most part
commutable for fines, thus giving to the rich an advantage over the
poor, which the latter resented as a flagrant violation of right; and
lastly, that they were not evenly enforced. Measures of this kind were
not calculated to allay irritation, and though there was no open display
of sedition, the city was seething with discontent, and the patricians
knew it. Haunted by plots and rumours of plots, they were never sure
when they went to bed at night that their throats would not be cut
before morning, and, half blind with terror, they struck out wildly on
all sides, and often the guilty escaped, and a host of harmless citizens
experienced the taste of their lash.
Meanwhile the little band of patricians who from the first had favoured
a conciliatory policy were steadily making converts; but it was not
until they had preached for eight years, and when Brussels was on the
edge of revolution, that they at last succeeded in convincing the
majority that the times were ripe for reform. The first step was to
restore confidence in the administration of justice, and to this end the
city fathers (June 19, 1368), having first taken counsel with the
leaders of the people, named a commission of four patricians and four
plebeians to inquire into the numerous disputes and grievances which had
arisen from the maladministration of the coercion laws, and to make
report thereon to the magistrates, who, it was decreed, should be bound
by oath to remedy such grievances and settle such disputes in accordance
with the evidence thus laid before them, and it was further decreed that
such sentence should be final. Any man who refused to accept the same,
thereby lost all his rights and privileges until such time as he chose
to conform: if he were a patrician he ceased to be a member of his
lignage, if he were a craftsman he was expelled from his guild.
These measures proved so efficacious that before the close of the year
the aldermen had sufficiently recovered from their nerve crisis to be
able to consider finance, and that, though they had to face some
abstruse questions--how to balance the budget without increasing
taxation or having recourse to fresh loans, how to put a stop to
corruption without incurring enmity or wounding the susceptibilities of
friends, and, above all, how to pay off that terrible debt which was
crushing the life out of Brussels, outcome of so many years of
extravagance and thieving. Problems, these, not easy to solve, but again
the patricians were wise enough to consult the people, representatives
of the trade companies took part in their deliberations, and somehow or
other between them they managed to set the affairs of the town on a
sound financial basis--the following year revenue covered expenditure
and the interest of the debt, the year after that they began to pay off
the principal, and by 1386 the whole debt was wiped out. Matter this for
congratulation, and no doubt the people rejoiced, but there was
something that gladdened their hearts even more, and which they
flattered themselves accounted for the fact that the loan had been
repaid so quickly: for more than eighteen years their fingers had been
on the purse-strings, and by the grace of God they meant to keep them
there. Nor was this all, in 1368 the guild had been thoroughly
reorganised, and on popular lines. About the same time it became
customary to bestow a certain number of government appointments on
burghers of the middle class, and though the patricians were not yet
prepared to give the people any voice in the magistracy, they were
determined that justice should be administered with an even hand, and
that henceforth no man should be able to say that Brussels was ill
governed, and to this end, in 1375, a new system had been elaborated for
recruiting the College of Aldermen.
In the early days in Brussels, as in the other cities of Brabant, the
Sovereign himself had named the city magistrates. Later on some form of
election was adopted in which all the members of the patrician class
seem to have taken part, but little by little this custom had fallen
into disuse, and at the time when the reform movement set in, though the
college was still annually renewed, no election had taken place for
something like a hundred years--the outgoing aldermen had gradually
acquired a prescriptive right to name their successors. This had opened
the door to all kinds of abuses, and in order to put a stop to them and
to insure that henceforth none but honest and competent men should be
admitted to the magistracy, in 1375 the city fathers reverted to the old
system of election, and stringent rules were drawn up to regulate the
proceedings which now became exceedingly long and complicated.
In the first place, each of the outgoing aldermen drew up a list of all
the members of his lineage eligible to succeed him, that is to say, of
all the married members of twenty-eight years of age and upwards who had
sufficient means to live without exercising any trade or profession. The
next step was to summon the clans, and this, too, devolved on the
outgoing aldermen, each man inviting the members of his lineage to
assemble in the Town Hall on the day fixed for the election--generally
the 23rd of June--and there select from the names on his list three
candidates for the magistracy. 'I swear,' runs the quaint and
characteristic oath which each man present was required to take at the
commencement of the proceedings, 'I swear by the Saints, and on the Holy
Gospels, that I am in no way bound or pledged to any man, and that no
man is bound or pledged to me, directly or indirectly, nor have I
purchased any man's vote, either on my own behalf or on behalf of any of
my friends. I swear, on my soul, to give my suffrages to the best man,
the wisest man, and in every respect the fittest man, the most devoted
to Holy Church, to the Duke and Duchess of Brabant, the city of Brussels
and the patrician order; consulting only my conscience and acting
according to my conviction. I swear, on my soul, not to let any personal
interest or private friendship move me, nor to suffer myself to be
carried away by hatred or anger, or by fear of loss or hope of gain; so
help me God and His Saints.'
No less curious than the preliminary oath was the process of election.
Every member of the clan was bound to be present and to take the
prescribed oath, under penalty of forfeiting all his rights and
privileges, but never more than five, and sometimes only four, members
took part in the actual voting; they were picked out from the rest by
lot, and the drawing was managed in this way. A number of waxen balls,
equal to the number of clansmen present, all without alike, but of
which four contained within a white and one a black cipher, were placed
in an urn, and, when they had been well shuffled, each member drew
therefrom one of them, and presently, when the drawing was over, broke
it. Whereupon the four men to whom the white-marked balls had fallen
withdrew to a separate apartment to consider who was the most fitting
man to represent their lineage, each man being free to propose what name
he would, provided it was not his own. If they were all of one mind the
man of their choice became a candidate for the magistracy, so too if
three of them voted for the same individual, or, if two were agreed on
one man, and each of the other two were in favour of different men. If,
however, the suffrages were equally divided, that is to say, if all four
electors cast their votes differently, or if two voted for one man and
two for another, black ball was called in to give a casting vote. When
the whole operation had been completed, it was repeated a second and
again a third time, and by this means three candidates were chosen,
whose names were afterwards submitted to the Duke, and he, in due
course, named one of them alderman of his clan for the ensuing year.
The College of Aldermen, it should be borne in mind, consisted of seven
members, each of whom was held to represent, in a special manner, one of
the seven patrician clans of Brussels.
How great had been the evil resulting from the old method of election
may be inferred from the stringency of the new rules, and the dire
penalties attached to any infraction of them, and also from the cumbrous
and complicated machinery deemed necessary to guard against corrupt
practices.
Thanks to this important measure, and to the other reforms which had
been previously inaugurated, the city was now honestly and capably
governed, and, in consequence, enjoyed peace. Indeed, for more than
fifty years after 1368--the time of the great reconciliation--patricians
and plebeians seem to have lived, if not on terms of affection, at all
events without quarrelling. The latter, it is true, had not relinquished
their high aspirations, but finding that the town was honestly
administered, and, on the whole, equitably governed, they were wise
enough to cherish their ideal in their innermost bosoms, and to take no
active steps to realise it.
No doubt the greater material prosperity which the city at this time
enjoyed was conducive, in no small measure, to the maintenance of peace.
Brussels was not dependent on cloth to anything like the same extent as
was the sister city, and, moreover, the loss which she had sustained on
this head from English competition, and the competition of the country
towns, was to a certain extent made good by the profit arising from
trade which formerly went to Louvain, but which was now, owing to the
disturbed state of that city, directed to her doors. Hundreds of
merchants and thousands of mechanics went forth from the capital between
1360 and 1382, and not a few of these took up their permanent abode in
Brussels. Linen, leather, tapestry and goldsmith's work were among the
articles for which, about this time, Brussels became famous, and, thanks
to these new industries, the loss, or rather the diminution, of her
cloth trade was a matter of little concern to the people.
CHAPTER XII
_Everard T'Serclaes_
Chief among the giants who at this time were cleansing the Augean
stables of Brussels, building up her shattered bulwarks, promoting
harmony among their fellow-citizens, strangling discontent with good
government, and putting off revolution by reform, towers the figure of
Everard T'Serclaes, a head and shoulders above the rest of them. Everard
T'Serclaes, or in plain English Everard Nicholson--politician, patriot,
aristocrat, possessor of much gold and many acres, high in authority,
high in his Sovereign's favour, one whom the whole town spoke well of,
and, in spite of it all, an honest man. Born in the year 1315 or
thereabout of an old magisterial house famous in civic annals,
descended, probably in the female line, from the unknown founder of the
great clan in which his family had for generations been enrolled, the
clan called _S'Leeuws Geslachte_--that is, of the lion--so named from
the magnanimous beast displayed on the S'Leeuws escutcheon, from the
time when he reached man's estate Everard T'Serclaes had in all
probability busied himself, after the manner of his fellows, with civic
affairs; and yet for at least twenty years after this period his life is
a blank to us: of his childhood, his youth, his upbringing, we know
nothing; and even the date of his birth is matter of conjecture. This is
all the more remarkable from the fact that T'Serclaes did more for his
native town and his native land than any other man of his day, and was
deservedly the most popular Brussels hero of the Middle Age. He first
appears on the stage of history in 1356, when he must have already
reached middle life, and his coming was in this wise.
It was the time of the Flemish invasion. On the 17th of August 1356 the
Duke's forces had been utterly routed at Scheut, hard by Anderlecht; he
himself had fled the country; Louis of Maele had entered Brussels almost
without opposition, and his right to the duchy had been acknowledged by
every town in Brabant. 'Truly it was an admirable thing to behold so
sudden a metamorphosis: in two days the whole government had completely
changed its face.' Thus the contemporary chronicler Butkins, but in
reality the sympathies of the governing classes, had been from the first
with the Count of Flanders. They knew very well that Winceslaus hated
patricians, and they knew too that Louis in his own dominions was a
staunch supporter of aristocratic rule. Hence they regarded his triumph
as their own, and it was actually at their instigation that he had
assumed the title of Duke of Brabant.
Meanwhile Winceslaus was at Maestricht collecting forces, considering
invasion, and Louis's allies, Englebert de la Mark, Bishop of Liége, and
William, Count of Namur, were posted on the eastern frontier of his
former duchy ready to oppose him. Presently news unlooked for astounded
either camp--the standard of Brabant was once more floating over
Brussels, the Flemish garrison had been driven out; the feat had been
accomplished by a simple burgher, Everard T'Serclaes. It was the English
victory at Poitiers which made this achievement possible: the French
army had been cut to pieces, King John himself was a prisoner, and the
interests of Louis of Maele were one with the interests of France; hence
when the news reached him at Brussels he had at once set out for
Bruges, purposing from thence to proceed to Paris, where at the present
juncture he deemed his presence indispensable; and thus the field was
left clear for Everard's machinations. That wily burgher, now in exile
at Maestricht, had trusty friends in his native town, who kept him
constantly aware of all that was taking place, and by them he was at
once informed of the Flemish Count's departure. The time was ripe, it
seemed to him, for attempting something. A plan of action was arranged,
and presently he was nearing Brussels alone, through the forest of
Soignes, which at that time extended right up to the city. It was the
29th of October, and a black raw night had set in with drenching rain,
which showed no sign of abatement. So much the better, there was the
less chance of meeting wayfarers, and T'Serclaes was so well acquainted
with the country that darkness was no hindrance to him. Making for a
spot near his own dwelling,[14] where he knew the rampart was low and
unprotected by water, thither he stealthily came when the night was well
advanced, and without much difficulty effected an entrance. No one was
stirring, there was no sign of life, no sound but the cry of the wind
and the sullen drip of the rain--the city seemed wrapt in slumber; but
though comfortable burghers were snoring in bed, T'Serclaes had friends
expecting him, for the most part mere riff-raff who catered for the
wants of the masses--the keepers of small taverns and those who helped
them in their calling, tapsters, potmen, scullions, cooks, the offscum
of a great city, men who feared not a reckless venture, because they had
nothing to lose. Presently the signal agreed on broke the silence of the
night--'Brabant for the great Duke,' and almost before the echo had died
away Everard was leading a ragged army to the _Groote Markt_, where
soon the golden lion of Brabant was to take the place of the black lion
of Flanders. When the change had been duly effected and the Flemish
banner spat on, shredded, dragged in the mire, the crowd, which by this
time had assembled, sent up a great cheer for Everard T'Serclaes and the
flag of the fatherland; whereat the Flemish guard turned out to discover
the cause of the hubbub. Only half awake, deafened by fierce oaths,
scared by angry faces, it seemed to them that a haunted town was peopled
by a legion of furies. Like men in a dream they tried to run, but their
feet were glued to the pavement, and before they had time to wonder at
it they were cut down. Some by a mighty effort compelled their limbs to
flight, but it availed them nothing--they were stabbed from behind. A
few by rare good fortune got free of the market unobserved, and if they
had kept cool these men might perhaps have escaped, but that night the
town was enchanted, and fleeing from phantom pursuers they leapt on the
swords of foes in the flesh, or hurled themselves over ramparts and so
dashed out their lives, or trapped in a net of byways at last took some
specious turning which led them back to the shambles. Death in some
shape was the lot of all, and for the most part they made no resistance,
but a handful stood shoulder to shoulder and sold their lives dearly.
That was practically the end of Flemish domination in Brabant. Within
the next few days every town in the duchy, save Mechlin, had followed
the example of Brussels, and before the close of the Octave of All
Saints Winceslaus was back in his domains.
[14] T'Serclaes' house was at the end of what was then an _impasse_,
called the Eetengat, now the _rue de Berlaimont_ (_see_ Map).
Local historians are often wont to emphasise this little war, which
bears witness, so they say, to the patriotism and chivalry of their
forebears; but were the men who drove out the Flemings wholly inspired
by love of country and loyalty to their Duke? The facts of the case, we
venture to think, suggest an answer in the negative. The patricians, of
course, had taken no part in ousting the Flemish garrison, but when
their allies at Brussels were being cut to pieces they seem to have made
no effort to help them. No doubt they deemed it a wiser, safer and more
comfortable policy to remain in bed and await the issue of events. Not
that they were devoid of courage: when there was anything to be gained
by drawing the sword they were never loth to do battle, but as practical
business men it was not their wont to embark in any undertaking likely
to end in disaster, and on the night of the massacre at Brussels they
knew very well that no help which they could have given would have saved
their friends from destruction. As for the plebeians, their action was
probably inspired by mixed motives--a little hysterical patriotism,
caught perhaps from T'Serclaes, a little liking for Duke Winceslaus, due
chiefly to the fact that he was the enemy of their enemies the
patricians, and a very large measure of hope that somehow or other the
issue would be to their advantage. Nor in this were they deceived. They
presently obtained the boon they most coveted--municipal representation.
And T'Serclaes, too, had his reward--a knighthood, and until the day of
his death what all men love, popularity.
That the Saviour of Brussels, as he was henceforth called, should have
been esteemed at Court is sufficiently comprehensible: he had
re-established the Duke on his throne; that he should have been the idol
of the people was natural enough: through him they had reached the goal
of their ambition; but that he should presently have been able to gain
the goodwill of the very men whose hopes he had shattered, and whose
privileges he had taken away, is a matter past comprehension, yet such
was undoubtedly the case: he was premier alderman in 1365, and again in
1372, and at this time, be it born in mind, the old order of things
having been re-established, the outgoing aldermen named their
successors; after the reform of 1375, when the magistracy became
elective, and all kinds of precautions were taken against corruption,
and with a view to securing the best possible candidates, he still
retained the confidence of the patricians, who named him premier
alderman in 1377, and also in 1382; in 1375 he had represented the
patricians of Brussels at the National Assembly of Braine-l'Alleud,
summoned at the instance of the Bishop of Liége to put an end to sundry
disputes between Winceslaus and his subjects, which were threatening
civil war; on September 28, 1386, in spite of his seventy years, he led
the men of Brussels to the siege of Gavres, outcome of a frontier
trouble with Duke Henry of Gelderland; and, notwithstanding the
disastrous issue of that campaign, he still retained the confidence of
the patricians, who in 1387 again named him chief magistrate. It was the
last time--before his year of office was out he came to a violent end.
It happened thus. Sweder Van Apcoude, Lord of Gaesbeke, the last of the
barons of Brabant who exercised sovereign sway and regarded themselves
as the equals of the chiefs to whom they owed allegiance, traced his
descent through his mother, Jeanne of Homes, to Godfrey first Lord of
Gaesbeke, a younger son of Duke Henry the Warrior. Like many other peers
of Brabant, Sweder was a citizen of Brussels, and as such, when his
mother died, and his uncles disputed his succession, he had summoned
them before the College of Aldermen, who, to their cost, had decided in
his favour. From his father, a Dutch knight, and one of the mightiest
vassals of the Bishop of Utrecht, he had inherited a large estate in
Holland, which he had exchanged with his brother Giselbert for the
barony of Aa, an extensive domain adjoining his own maternal heritage,
and he thus became lord of a vast and undivided territory, which
embraced two hundred manors, and extended from the walls of Ninove
well-nigh to the gates of Brussels. Sweder was a baron of the old
school, impetuous, violent, bold, within his borders his will was law,
and, if need be, he could call to his flag three thousand men-at-arms.
Such was the social rank and such were the resources of the man whom the
city fathers had made their near neighbour, and when it was too late
they regretted it. For Sweder, not content with his own, set covetous
eyes on the lordship of Rhodes, a strip of Crown land which separated
their territory from his, and which, from time immemorial, had been
submitted to their jurisdiction. Duchess Jeanne, who was now a widow,
was heavily in his debt, and presently he approached her with offers to
purchase the freehold, which she was not loath to agree to. Whereat, in
Brussels, consternation and a stormy meeting in the Town Hall. 'If this
iniquitous bargain were struck, trade, industry, order, right, the very
existence of the city itself would be thereby threatened; nor had Jeanne
any right to sell. Was she not debarred by her _Blyde Incomst_ from
alienating an inch of the Crown demesne? Even to thin
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