The Story of Bruges
by Ernest Gilliat-Smith · English · Gutenberg #46552 · 684,932 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Story of Bruges
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The Story of Bruges
Author: Ernest Gilliat-Smith
Illustrator: Edith Calvert
Herbert Railton
Release date: August 10, 2014 [eBook #46552]
Most recently updated: November 28, 2024
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46552
Credits: Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF BRUGES ***
Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images available at The Internet Archive)
_The Story of Bruges_
'I do love these ancient ruins;
We never tread upon them but we set
Our foot upon some reverend history.'
_Duchess of Malfi._
_All Rights Reserved._
[Illustration]
_The Story of_ Bruges
_by Ernest Gilliat-Smith
Illustrated by Edith Calvert
and Herbert Railton_
[Illustration]
_London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.
Aldine House, 29 and 30 Bedford Street
Covent Garden W.C._ _1909_
_First Edition, July 1901.
Second Edition, October 1903.
Third Edition, December 1905.
Fourth Edition, November 1909._
PREFACE
Few great mediæval towns possess so many memorials of the past, alike in
masonry and on parchment, as does 'the ancient town of Bruges.'
They have been indited by the patience of the scribe in breviary and in
charter-roll; they have been perpetuated by the art of the painter, in
gold and glowing tones, in portrait and in altar-piece; they have been
graven with an iron pen in wood and metal and stone; they have been
handed down by word of mouth through countless generations.
The municipal rolls go back to the year 1280, and included amongst them
are the annual accounts of the city from 1281 to 1789, almost complete;
those of the Collegiate Church of _Notre Dame_ to early in the eleven
hundreds; and there are, too, the rolls of _St. Sauveur_, of the old
Cathedral of St. Donatian, of the great Abbey of Dunes, and of many
other time-honoured corporations; whilst the Municipal Library and the
Library of the Diocesan Seminary contain together, no less than seven
hundred and thirty-four manuscripts, not a few of which were written in
the city itself or in its immediate neighbourhood.
There are buildings in Bruges which carry us back to the days of Baldwin
Bras de Fer, perhaps to a still more remote period; four of the seven
parish churches date from the twelve hundreds; the oldest of the civic
monuments to at latest 1280, and from this epoch until the close of the
Middle Age almost every year is marked by the erection of stately
edifices, of which very many have come down to us.
Lack of material will not hamper the future historian of Bruges, for the
history of Bruges has yet to be written. The present work lays no claim
to such title. It is but a bare outline, a mere sketch, and in this it
resembles, in some degree, the beautiful map at the end of the volume,
and many of the illustrations by which the book is adorned.
The artists who designed these fascinating pictures have succeeded by
means of a few skilful touches in laying before us a faithful reflection
of the beauty of Bruges, and, following in their footsteps, I, too, have
essayed to render my story of the men who created it alike faithful and
picturesque.
If my efforts have not been crowned with the same measure of success,
the fault lies not in the material, but rather in the manner in which it
has been handled; for the life's story of the builders of Bruges is no
less marvellous and no less alluring than are the monuments which they
reared.
E. G.-S.
BRUGES, _June 1901_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
_The First Flemings_ 1
CHAPTER II
_Earliest Bruges_ 9
CHAPTER III
_Arnulph the Great_ 21
CHAPTER IV
_Progress of the City_ 26
CHAPTER V
_The Murder of Charles the Good_ 38
CHAPTER VI
_Vengeance_ 57
CHAPTER VII
_Bruges in the Days of Charles the Good_ 75
CHAPTER VIII
_William Cliton_ 81
CHAPTER IX
_Dierick of Alsace and the Precious Blood_ 90
CHAPTER X
_Philip of Alsace and the Charter of the Franc_ 105
CHAPTER XI
_Baldwin of Constantinople_ 111
CHAPTER XII
_The Love Story of Bourchard d'Avesnes_ 122
CHAPTER XIII
_The French Annexation_ 136
CHAPTER XIV
_Peter De Coninck_ 144
CHAPTER XV
_The Battle of the Golden Spurs_ 153
CHAPTER XVI
_The Great Charter_ 164
CHAPTER XVII
_Louis of Nevers_ 172
CHAPTER XVIII
_Louis of Maele_ 195
CHAPTER XIX
_Bruges under the Princes of the House of Burgundy_ 210
CHAPTER XX
_The Great Humiliation_ 230
CHAPTER XXI
_The Terrible Duke and his Gentle Daughter_ 248
CHAPTER XXII
_The Final Catastrophe_ 268
CHAPTER XXIII
_The Architects and Architecture of
Bruges in the Fifteenth Century_ 306
CHAPTER XXIV
_The Painters and the Pictures of Bruges in the Fifteenth Century_ 334
CHAPTER XXV
_Modern Bruges_ 389
INDEX 411
GENEALOGICAL TABLES
PAGE
_I. Table of the Counts of Flanders from
Baldwin I. to Baldwin V. facing_ 36
_II. Table of the Counts of Flanders from
Baldwin V. to Baldwin VII.
facing_ 82
_III. Table of the Counts of Flanders from
Baldwin VIII. to Guy de Dampierre
facing_ 162
_IV. Table of the Counts of Flanders from
Guy de Dampierre to Marguerite of
Maele facing_ 208
_V. Table of the Counts of Flanders from
Philippe le Hardi to Philippe le
Beau facing_ 304
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
_The Belfry of Bruges (photogravure) Frontispiece_
_Godshuis on the Quai Vert_ 1
_View of the Quai Vert_ 12
_Palais du Franc and the Hôtel de Ville from River_ 13
_The Crypt of St. Basil's_ 16
_The Church of Notre Dame_ 19
_Charles the Good (from an old Bruges print)_ 38
_Angle of the Rue de l'Ane Aveugle_ 56
_The Porch of Notre Dame_ 79
_A Renaissance Gable_ 89
_Hôtel de Ville and Chapel of the Holy Blood_ 93
_The Minne Water Bridge and Round Tower_ 97
_Baptistry Chapel in the Crypt of St. Basil's_ 100
_Porch of the Chapel of St. Basil_ 101
_Godshuis in the Rue du Marécage_ 104
_The Palais du Franc_ 109
_Interior of Notre Dame_ 130
_Hospital of St. John and South Aisle of Notre Dame_ 132
_The Beguinage, with Tower of Notre Dame_ 134
_Old Houses on the Roya_ 151
_A Fourteenth Century Chimney_ 163
_Thirteenth-Century Iron Gates in Belfry_ 168
_Madonna and Niche_ 194
_Maele Castle_ 196
_The Hôtel de Ville_ 206
_Porte de Gand_ 219
_Old Houses at Damme_ 235
_The Church of St. Sauveur_ 238
_The Lepers' Hospital, Marché au Fil_ 241
_Old Roofs below the Belfry_ 255
_The Belfry from the Quai Vert_ 263
_Porte des Baudets_ 280
_Hôtel Gruthuise_ 287
_Kitchen in Gruthuise_ 290
_Chimney-piece in the Gruthuise Palace_ 292
_The 'Paradise' of Notre Dame and Gruthuise_ 307
_Hooded Fire-place in the Gruthuise_ 312
_Tribune of the Gruthuise in Notre Dame_ 314
_The Hôtel Bladelin_ 317
_The Ghistelhof_ 321
_Courtyard of the Hôtel Adornes_ 322
_Tomb of Anselm Adornes_ 324
_Van Oudvelde's Window by the Pont Flamand_ 328
_Quai du Rosaire_ 329
_Guild Hall of Archers of St. Sebastian_ 332
_Portrait of George Van der Pale_ 349
_Gerard David's 'Baptism of Christ'_ 359
_Memlinc's 'Adoration of the Magi'_ 377
_Memlinc's 'St. John the Baptist'_ 382
_Memlinc's 'St. Veronica'_ 383
_Bruges from the River Yperlet_ 392
_Godshuis, Quai des Marbriers_ 394
_Lancelot Blondeel's Chimney-piece in the Palais du Franc_ 399
_The Vlissinghe Tavern, frequented by Rubens_ 404
_Quai des Ménétriers_ 406
_Pont St. Augustin_ 408
_Plan of Bruges Facing_ 410
[Illustration: BRUGES]
The Story of Bruges
CHAPTER I
_The First Flemings_
It is not to the stalwart Celtic tribes which Cæsar found scattered
about the low-lying sandy plain which stretches along the coast from the
mouth of the Rhine to the Canche that this part of Europe owes either
its name or its greatness.
The Menapii and the Morini, the bravest of them all and the last to
withstand the Roman legions, were at length compelled to bend their
necks beneath the yoke of Rome's enervating and effete civilization, and
when, four centuries later, a whirlwind of Northern barbarism had swept
the land, only a handful of them, sparsely scattered, abject, cringing,
hidden away in forest and marsh, were left to tell the tale.
The civilization of Rome had been clean wiped out in that quarter of
Europe. Silence unbroken settled down on the land, and for two hundred
years the Latin-Celts of the Netherlands slipped out of the world's
memory.
It was not until the middle of the six hundreds that men began once more
to think of them.
The cause of their reappearance upon the stage of European history is
chronicled for us in a contemporary life of St. Amand, Bishop of
Bourges.[1] It happened in this wise.
Towards the close of the year 630, Amand, who had journeyed to Rome, was
one day praying before the tomb of the Apostles, when suddenly he heard
the voice of St. Peter bidding him be up and return to Gaul, where he
must preach the Gospel.
So impressed was he with the reality of the warning, that he at once set
out for the northern province, and presently reached Sens.
Here he was told that there was a country beyond the Scheldt called
Gand, where dwelt a wild people who had forgotten God, and who
worshipped trees, and that so rude was this land, and so fierce were its
inhabitants, that no missionary had hitherto ventured there. This must
be the field, said Amand, which St. Peter would have me till, and with a
small band of companions he landed on the further bank of the Scheldt.
The reception the new comers met with was not one calculated to inspire
confidence. The natives, men and women alike, showed unmistakable signs
of hostility, and at length, in a wild outburst, seized upon Amand
himself and plunged him into the stream. This so terrified his
companions that they, all of them, drew back in fear of their lives. But
Amand, nothing daunted, went on with the work he had undertaken, and in
course of time won the confidence of the natives, many of whom he
baptized.
For thirty years he wandered up and down this forlorn district, enduring
all manner of hardships, preaching and teaching wherever he went.
Presently he was joined by other missionaries. Here and there churches
and monasteries were built. The land around soon began once more to be
brought under cultivation, and, beneath the shelter of their walls,
villages and little towns gradually sprung up. Bruges, St. Omer,
Thorhout, Tronchienne, each of them claims as its founder one or other
of the missionaries who at this time were evangelizing the country; and
at Bruges they still show the rude chapel on the banks of the Roya in
which St. Amand baptized his first neophytes.
It was not, however, to this remnant of resuscitated Celts that the
Netherlands owed the important part they played later on in the
civilization of Europe. A race ignorant alike of the refinement and the
corruption of Roman civilization, and which, because it was barbarous
itself, had never had its spirit crushed beneath the heel of barbarism,
a race which hailed from the same fatherland from whence came our own
ancestors, akin to them in habit of thought and speech and blood,
animated by the same intense passion for liberty and hatred of
servitude, by the same reverence for woman and love of home, by the same
keen admiration for the brave and the true, was destined to build up
that marvellous stronghold of mediæval freedom, culture and commercial
enterprise called Fleanderland, the land that is of the Fleming, of the
exile, the land whose hospitable shore had given to the victorious
Viking a haven for his ships and a foot or two of solid earth on which
to pitch his tent.
How or when the first Flemings came here are subjects wrapt in mystery.
Perhaps the same upheaval which, in the middle of the four hundreds,
drove our own Saxon forefathers from their old homes in Jutland and
Friesland and Sleswicke-Holstein to seek new homes in Britain, impelled
also the Saxon Flemings to the northern shore of Gaul. Be this as it
may, all along the coast line of the Netherlands were scattered, at a
very early date, settlements of men of Saxon origin, of this there can
be no doubt, who possessed in a very marked degree the qualities and
characteristics of their race. They were chaste, proud, daring,
avaricious, given to plunder. Mutual responsibility was the basis of
their social system; the Karl, or free land-holder, the pivot on which
hinged their entire political organization. Like all Saxons, they had a
horror of slavery. Courage for them was the queen of virtues; freedom
dearer than life; vengeance but the cultus of filial piety, and family
ties the most sacred of all.
These were the dominant tones which coloured all their institutions. At
the uproarious banquets at which in Fleanderland, as elsewhere, the
Karls assembled to deliberate on public affairs, to choose their
leaders, and deposit in a common hoard the _gulden_ destined for an
insurance fund in case of shipwreck, fire or storm, the first goblet
drained was in honour of Woden, for victory, and the last to the memory
of those heroes who had fallen on the battlefield.
When, after the carnage of _Fontanet_ (A.D. 841) all Europe was overrun
by robber bands, who killed, burnt and harried at will, in those rude
days when 'not to be slain,' as Stendhal says, 'and to have in winter a
good leathern jerkin, and,' in the case of a woman, not to be violated
by a whole squadron, was, for very many, the supreme sum of human
happiness, and all the world were seeking in feudalism a refuge from
anarchy such as this, and patiently accepting even the right of
_marquette_ as something less horrible than the horrors which they would
otherwise have to endure,[2] these hardy sons of the North, almost alone
among the peoples of Europe, retained their independence. Again and
again the feudal lords endeavoured to reduce them to serfdom, and again
and again their endeavour proved abortive.
In Fleanderland at least they preserved their liberty, living under
their own laws and their own elected chiefs; a nation of free men,
practically independent of the sovereigns who nominally ruled over them,
until, at all events, the advent of the House of Burgundy.
Of this stock was the real founder of Bruges--Baldwin of the Iron
Hand--first Count of Flanders.
His coming was in this wise.
It was the time of the break up of Charlemagne's artificial empire--A.D.
850--and strong men on all sides were gathering up the fragments and
laying the foundations of great houses, sometimes of kingdoms. The Danes
were everywhere harrying Neustria, and the old Frank king, Charles the
Bald, unable to purchase peace by the strength of his own arm, was
buying it at the best markets he could, with gold and concessions.
Guntfried and Gosfried, two Northern chieftains, had lately sworn him
fealty, and for the moment were exercising paramount influence over the
feeble will of their lord, whilst Rotbert, surnamed _le fort_, an
adventurer of obscure origin whom people had lately begun to talk about,
was at this time the strongest man along Loire, a freebooter, as some
said, from the forests of Germany, in whose veins ran the blood of
Charlemagne himself, according to others, the son of a butcher from the
shambles of Paris, matter of little moment. In days when a mighty hand
and an outstretched arm alone could lead to fortune, his reputation for
strength of will and thew was of far greater importance. This man, then,
it were politic to bind to the crumbling fortunes of the royal house, so
thought Guntfried and Gosfried, in all singleness of heart, and at their
instigation King Charles the Bald consented to receive his homage,
little thinking that he was thereby laying the foundations of a house
which would one day wreck his dynasty.
But the new vassal was something more than a strong man, he was a man,
too, of tact and address, and his influence soon became so great, and
the favours showered on him so large, that Guntfried and Gosfried,
jealous of the rival whom they themselves had set up, determined to
compass his overthrow.
To this end, supported by Louis, son of Charles the Bald, and by Judith,
his beautiful and accomplished daughter, they called to their assistance
the Flemish chief, Baldwin, son of Odoaker, a man of whose antecedents
we know nothing. Judith was at this time one of the most remarkable
women in Europe. Her career had been a strange and a stormy one. First
married, in his old age and as his second wife, to our own King
Ethelwolf of Wessex, it was to Judith, his step-mother, that Alfred the
Great was indebted for his earliest training.
When Ethelwolf died she had contracted an alliance with Ethelbald, a son
of the old king by a former marriage, and upon his death in 860 she
retired to Senlis, where she was living in queenly state under the
sovereign protection of its bishops when Baldwin saw her, became
enamoured of her beauty, and it would seem, with her own connivance,
carried her off for his bride.
King Charles was holding his Court at Soissons when the news of the
abduction and of his son's confederacy with Guntfried and Gosfried
reached his ears, and furious at the disregard shown to his parental
authority, he acted, for once, with energy and decision. Summoning the
nobles of his Court to his presence forthwith, he pronounced judgment
against the culprits in accordance with civil law, next obtained from
his complaisant bishops their excommunication, and marching in person
against the two conspiring vassals, surprised them at Meaux, and forced
them to lay down their arms. The plot then had for the moment failed.
Baldwin and Judith fled to the Court of Lothaire, and from thence to
Rome, where they sought the aid of that sturdy old Pontiff, Nicholas II.
Nor did they seek in vain.
'Your liegeman Baldwin,' he wrote to the King of France, 'has taken
refuge at the sacred threshold of the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul,
and with earnest prayers has approached our pontifical throne.
'We therefore, from the summit of our Apostolic power, beseech you for
the love of our Lord Jesus Christ and of His Apostles Peter and Paul,
whose support Baldwin has preferred to that of earthly princes,
vouchsafe to grant him your pardon and to completely overlook his
offence, in order that, supported by your goodness, he may live in peace
along with your other faithful subjects; moreover, when we ask your
sublimity to forgive him, we are not only moved thereto by reason of the
charity we owe to all those who implore the pity and protection of the
Apostolic See, but we are impelled likewise by fear lest your anger
should drive Baldwin to ally himself with the Danes, the enemies of Holy
Church, and thus prepare new evils for the people of God.' This
effusion, however, does not seem to have made much impression on
Charles, and the following year Pope Nicholas wrote again, and with
vigour. '"Consider the times," says the Apostle, "for evil days are at
hand," and I say unto you that the danger which he announces is already
at your door. See to it, then, that you do not bring down upon your head
disasters yet more terrible. Have sufficient good sense to master your
spleen, and be not for ever deaf to Baldwin.' At length, not without
reluctance, and less from love of his daughter than from fear of his
redoubtable son-in-law and the Danes, Charles yielded to the Pope's
request. On the 25th of October 863, he received Judith at his palace at
Verberie, and shortly afterwards her union with Baldwin was celebrated
with great splendour at Auxerre. But though Charles had consented to
acknowledge the marriage, no argument could induce him to be present at
the ceremony by which it was made legal. 'I could not persuade the
king,' runs the letter in which Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims recounts to
Pope Nicholas the whole affair, and Hincmar had probably at this time
more influence with Charles than anyone else, 'I could not persuade the
king to go in person to the wedding, but he sent his ministers and
officers of state, and in compliance with your request has conferred the
highest honours on Baldwin.'
Thanks, then, to the intervention of the Pope, the main object which
Guntfried and Gosfried had in view was at length obtained. Whilst
Rotbert, who had been successively created Count of Anjou and Abbot of
Tours, was consolidating his power on the banks of the Loire, Baldwin
was being invested with still greater authority over the Northern
'Marches,' in the vicinity of the Lys and the Scheldt.
The first was the founder of the royal house of France, the second the
ancestor to whom all the Counts of Flanders traced their descent.
CHAPTER II
_Earliest Bruges_
From a very early date, perhaps since the time of the Romans, there had
stood some nine leagues west of Ghent, on a small, oblong-shaped island,
formed by the confluence of the Boterbeke with an elbow of the Roya, and
a deep, broad moat which united the two streams, a fortified camp or
castle surrounded by a handful of cottages. Hard-by on the mainland,
near the spot where the rivers met, stood a small, ancient sanctuary,
which tradition said St. Amand had built, and further up stream, on the
banks of the Boterbeke, a larger church dedicated to the Saviour, and
said to be the handiwork of St. Eloi.
This place, perhaps from the _brugge_ or heather which surrounded it,
perhaps from the _brigge_ or bridge by which it was approached, was
called Brugge or Bruggestock or Bruggeswelle--a lonely, desolate place
hemmed in by forest and marsh, and, from the nature of its site, well
calculated to form a stronghold against the Danes.
Moved by this consideration, hither came Baldwin and Judith when they
had made their peace with the irascible King Charles, determined to make
Brugge the headquarters of their government and their principal abode. A
felicitous choice of residence destined to be fruitful in results.
Thanks to it, we shall see the tumbled-down ruins of Bruggestock develop
later on into that wondrous conglomeration of picturesque civic
splendour--rival, in its heyday, of Venice, alike in commerce and in
treasures of art, and in glory of piled-up brick, which later
generations called Bruges, the Queen of the North.
Before going further, let us linger awhile over the Brugge of Baldwin's
day. The old fortress which he found there was built on an oblong-shaped
island. The river Roya, which enclosed it on two sides (those facing
S.E. and N.E.), still runs in its ancient bed; it flows alongside of
that pleasant lime grove, which some old Burgomaster of a hundred years
ago planted in front of that unlovely terrace of substantial,
comfortable-looking eighteenth-century _bourgeois_ homes which goes by
the name of the Dyver.
Soon, however, after the bend of the stream, the Roya now burrows
underground, vaulted over in the seventeenth century, and wends its
subterranean course along the south-west side of the _Place du Bourg_,
under Government House, and at the back of the houses which line the
east side of the _rue Flamande_, and comes once more into daylight just
opposite the old Academy in the _Place des Biscayens_.
As to the Boterbeke--the stream which formed the north-west boundary of
the old Bourg, its course has long since been diverted, and it now only
skirts the city. It formerly entered Bruges beyond the station, near the
spot where the old Bouverie gate stood forty years ago, crept along near
the cathedral, down the _rue du Vieux Bourg_, beneath the Belfry, built
on piles thrust into its bed, and finally mingled its waters with those
of the Roya at the corner of the _rue Breidal_. The moat which formed
the south-western boundary of the old Bourg has also been filled in,
and the present _rue Neuve_ is built over its ancient bed.
Of the actual buildings which Baldwin found at Brugge, it is doubtful
whether any remain. Possibly the Baptistry Chapel, in the rear of the
Chapel of St. Basil, is of the date which tradition claims for it, and,
if so, it may perhaps be identified with St. Amand's Chapel on the banks
of the Roya, but recent expert investigation makes it almost certain
that this portion of the Chapel of St. Basil dates from the same epoch
as the rest of the building, and that Baldwin, Bras de Fer, was himself
its founder. St. Eloi's Church of Our Lady occupied the site of the
present cathedral, but of the original structure no vestige remains,
save perhaps the lower portion of the tower, and even this is doubtful.
The old Bourg itself had fallen into such a state of decay when Baldwin
first came to Bruges, that he did not dare deposit there the relics of
St. Donatian which had been given to him by Archbishop Ebber of Rheims,
but sent them for safe keeping to his castle at Thorhout, about three
leagues south of Bruges, until the new bourg which he was building
should be ready to receive them. The old fortress was never restored,
but its stones were used later on during the reign of Baldwin II. for
the construction of a wall round the city, and of this wall no vestige
remains.
Baldwin's new Bourg was built on an island formed by a backwater of the
Roya--an irregular-shaped strip of land of considerably smaller
dimensions than the island of the old Bourg. The backwater in question
branched off at right angles to the main stream, and running for a short
distance straight on, presently turned sharp round to the left, at a
little beyond the site of the present fish market; and then gradually
curved round till it again met the river at the corner of the _Grand'
Place_, and of the _rue Philipstock_.
[Illustration: VIEW OF THE QUAI VERT]
The course of this backwater has long since been entirely changed.
Running on in a straight line past the fish market, it now empties
itself into the _grand coupure_, and is one of the most picturesque
waterways in Bruges.
Along the right bank of this beautiful stream, going towards the great
canal, runs a towing-path, well shaded with poplar trees and limes, and
fringed on the side with some delightful old gabled houses, and by
[Illustration: Palais du Franc and the Hôtel de Ville from River]
others less interesting and of more recent date. But it is the left bank
which gives the stream its greatest charm, for here, at the angle where
the backwater turns off from the main stream, stand certain phlegmatic
municipal offices of the last century, laving their feet in the
water--comfortable-looking, old-fashioned red-brick buildings which,
somehow or other, 'the golden stain of time' has managed to make
beautiful. Behind them soar the high-pitched roofs and dormer windows of
an old city hall, whose pinnacles and turrets and spires give play to
light and shade, and break up the sky line. Hard-by, at the end of a
narrow street which runs back from the water, behold a rival of the
Bridge of Sighs, and in a gilded gatehouse without gates, the marriage
of the Middle Age and the Renaissance, and to the right, quaint,
venerable and picturesque in weather-beaten brick, the Palace of the
Liberty of Bruges, and further still, a vista of old homes, and shady
lawns, and overhanging trees and bridges, hunch-backed and of ancient
date.
But to return to Baldwin's bourg, the Castle itself--a spacious and
strongly-fortified building, which stood on ground now occupied by the
Palais de Justice, the Hotel de Ville, and the unsightly modern
erections on the east side of the square--included within its precincts
not only Baldwin's own residence, but the residence of the Châtelains or
Viscounts of Bruges, the _Ghistelhaus_ where hostages were lodged, the
Court chapel and the Court prison; opposite this group of buildings on
the north side, that is, of the Bourg, stood a sanctuary dedicated to
Our Lady, which Baldwin had founded to receive the relics of St.
Donatian, and further on the cloisters of the priests who served it.
The whole island was encircled by a strong and lofty wall, pierced by
four great gateways, each one protected by a portcullis and a
drawbridge, which were the only means of communication with the outer
world. Such was the citadel reared on the banks of the Roya by the
father and founder of Bruges. Of his handiwork only a fragment has come
down to us, but a fragment so perfect, that as one enters the gloomy
crypt beneath the Chapel of the Precious Blood, the mind is
involuntarily carried back to the time when Baldwin and his family
worshipped there, a thousand years ago.
[Illustration: THE CRYPT OF ST. BASIL'S]
Clustering around Baldwin's great fortress were the houses and huts and
hovels of such members of the sovereign's household as were unable to
find lodgings within the bourg, of the purveyors who catered for his
daily needs, and of a handful of traders and country folk who sought and
found safety beneath the shadow of its walls. Even at this early date
Bruges must have been a place of some commercial note, for the coins
which from time to time have been found in the neighbourhood show that a
mint had been already established there in the days of the first Baldwin
(865-879), and before the close of his son's reign, so greatly had the
settlement increased, that it was deemed necessary to surround the whole
with a moat and a great wall, built up of the _veltsteen_ (field stone)
and rubble, which had once been the old bourg (A.D. 912).
Baldwin, Bras de Fer, that redoubtable warrior whom no man had ever
seen in the day-time without his coat-of-mail, and who in time of war
was said to have not even doffed it at night, had received the County,
or, as it was called in those days, Marquisate of Flanders, on terms of
defending that quarter of Neustria from the ravages of the Danes, and
though with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, he managed to keep
the sea-dogs at bay, his reign of fourteen years was one unbroken
hurricane of effort and strife, until he saw the shadow of death on the
horizon, and then at last the old soldier sheathed his sword and
withdrew to the Abbey of St. Bertin, there in the quiet of its cloister
to gather up his strength for the last great battle.
So, too, was it during the days of the second Baldwin, but the mantle of
the old Marquis had not fallen on his son. The hard head and iron will
and iron hand of Baldwin, Bras de Fer, was not the heritage of Baldwin
the Bald, and the wild courage of the Karls of the seaboard, who had to
bear the brunt of the battle whilst their panic-stricken chief was
safely entrenched in his fortress at Bruges, could do little more than
stem the tide. Why dwell on the woes of Neustria, laments Adroald, a
monk of Fleury, why dwell on the woes of Neustria? From the shore of the
ocean right away to Auvergne there is no country which has preserved its
freedom, no city, no village but has been overwhelmed by the devastating
fury of these Pagans, and this has been going on for thirty years. Such
was the state of affairs at the close of the eight hundreds, and no land
on the Continent of Europe had suffered more than Flanders, but though
the rural population had been all but wiped out, though hamlet and abbey
had gone up in flames, though cities like Courtrai and Arras and Ghent
had been pillaged or razed to the ground, somehow or other Bruges had
escaped, nay, in spite of the surrounding devastation, perhaps by reason
of it, she had prospered, had increased her population, had enlarged her
borders, had girded herself, as we have seen, with ramparts, and added
to her crown of sanctuaries a new gem.
In the year 880, on the left bank of the Roya, a little higher up stream
than the old bourg, the citizens of Bruges built for themselves a
chapel, and dedicated it to St. Mary and St. Hilarius--a sufficiently
humble structure, knit together like so many churches in the eight
hundreds, of rudely-hewn beams and rough planks.
From this grain of mustard seed in after ages there sprang up a tree
that is still the glory of Bruges--a stately shrine, adorned by a
steeple, than which, in its grand simplicity, there is not one perhaps
more lovely in the world.
Baldwin II., who died in the year 918, was buried in the Abbey Church at
Blandinium.
The circumstances which led to his interment there are sufficiently
curious. They had at first laid him alongside his father at St. Omer,
but when his widow Alfrida, who wished to share her lord's grave, was
informed by the abbot of that monastery that his rule forbade him to
admit even a dead woman within the precincts of his cloister, she gave
orders that Baldwin's remains should be translated to Blandinium, where
they buried him with much solemnity _in ædicula Parentis Virginis_, and
where she herself was laid to rest eleven years later.
[Illustration: THE CHURCH OF NOTRE DAME]
CHAPTER III
_Arnulph the Great_
Some six years before the death of Baldwin Calvus, his suzerain, Charles
the Mild, had endeavoured to buy off Rolf the Ganger, a pirate chief who
about this time had carved out for himself 'a sphere of influence' along
Seine, with an offer of Baldwin's fief. But Baldwin meanwhile had got
wind of the plot, had set his house in order, had strengthened his
border towns. Rolf refused to exchange the land which his sword had won
for a less advantageous holding, which perhaps he might never obtain,
and the famous treaty of Claire-sur-Epte was the outcome of his common
sense.
By it he became the French King's vassal for the province we now call
Normandy, received the hand of his daughter in marriage, and embraced
the Christian faith. And though to the cynical Norman chief his oath of
fealty may have been little more than an empty form, and his change of
religion but a move in the game, the signing of the treaty of
Claire-sur-Epte was, for Neustria, the first streak of dawn. Then it was
that the storm which had been so long whirling its fury on the land at
last began to lull, and when, in 918, Baldwin Calvus was gathered to his
fathers, and Arnulph his son reigned in his stead, the times were
sufficiently tranquil to enable him to gather up the slackened reins of
government, and to set about a work much needed after the long years of
bloodshed and anarchy--a work of healing, and restoration, and reform.
It was chiefly in the reorganization of the Church in Flanders, and, in
the first place, of the great religious houses, that Arnulph sought to
accomplish the object he had in view. Matter of no little moment in days
when the lay aristocracy knew no trade but war, and the peasant was
still his lord's chattel, when the monastery was not only the last
shelter of learning and the arts, but the only agricultural college and
the only technical school, when the monk was the one physician, and the
one intelligent artisan, and the clerk, alike legislator, notary,
scribe, was almost the only man who knew how to sign his name.
Though the Church had suffered much at the hands of the Danes,
monasticism was not, at this time, at such a low ebb in Flanders as it
was in England in the days of Alfred. In England it was practically
extinct, in Flanders it had only languished. Nevertheless, and strange
as it may seem, it was chiefly owing to the efforts of Count Baldwin's
English wife, Alfrida,[3] the daughter of our own King Alfred, that
monasticism became once more in Flanders a burning and a shining light.
She it was who first tended the dying flame. The good work was completed
by her son Arnulph, who, in this matter, played much the same part in
his own dominions as that played in England by King Edred, his first
cousin. He was the builder or restorer of eighteen great monasteries.
The famous Chapter of St. Donatian at Bruges was founded and
munificently endowed by him. The Collegiate Church of St. Mary at
Ardenburg, and the Collegiate Church of St. Peter at Thorhout, were each
of them his handiwork, and a host of minor foundations bear witness to
his untiring energy and zeal.
He himself acted as abbot, or chief officer, of the great Abbey of St.
Bertin at St. Omer. He was the friend and patron of St. Gerard, the
thaumaturgus of Brogne, and through him he reformed more than one
religious house. He had received St. Dunstan with hospitality when he
fled before the fury of Æthelgifu, and in after years, when the storm
had passed and Dunstan had returned to his own land, we find the
Margrave of Flanders among his correspondents. A letter still
extant--_Epistola Arnulfi ad Dunstanum Archiepiscopum_ (MS. Cotton,
Tiberius A. 15, fo. 159b)--bears witness to their mutual esteem and
affection.
Dunstan's own munificence to the monasteries of Flanders, which, after
those of his own country, as Dr. Stubbs[4] points out, were, in a
special manner, the object of his solicitude, was doubtless prompted by
gratitude for the kindness which he had received from the Flemish monks
and their great Count Abbot Arnulph, and it was probably owing to
Dunstan's laudatory stories concerning the Flemish Count, that 'the fame
of his charity and good works was spread abroad throughout all the land
of Albion.' This last fact we learn from a curious letter addressed to
Arnulph himself by an English ecclesiastic of high position, whose
identity, as Dr. Stubbs observes, it is almost impossible to establish.
He was certainly the head of a monastery, perhaps a bishop. Dr. Stubbs
conjectures Ethelwold of Winchester, or may be Elfege, Ethelwold's
predecessor in the same See, and Dunstan's near relative. Whoever its
author may have been, the letter is an interesting one, and sufficiently
characteristic of the age in which it was written.
After expressing his best wishes, and enlarging on Arnulph's fame and
good works, the writer of the epistle in question goes on to say that he
was sending a messenger who would explain to Arnulph by word of mouth
that he had in his possession a book of the Gospels which had been
purloined from his--the writer's--Church by 'two clerks waxen old in
wickedness, and who, a fact much to be marvelled at in such men, had
afterwards confessed what they had done, and acknowledged that,
journeying to Flanders to recover a little girl who had been carried off
by his--Count Arnulph's--Danes, they had visited the Count in one of his
country houses, perhaps Winendaele or Maele, and there sold to him the
volume in question for the sum of three marks.' The writer concludes by
begging Arnulph to restore the book, 'for the love of God and all His
Saints.'[5] It would seem, then, from the above letter, that a certain
number of Danes were at this time settled in Flanders, and that they had
not yet entirely relinquished their predatory habits.
'Ego Arnulphus dictus Magnus'--I, Arnulph, whom men call the Great. Thus
did the Count of Flanders style himself in the year 961. In a grant of
fresh privileges to the great Benedictine house at Blandinium, indited
perhaps when the hand of death was upon him, Count Arnulph writes in
lowlier strain, 'Ego cognosco,' he says, 'Ego cognosco me reum et
peccatorem.'
He knew himself better perhaps than did his people, and yet the surname
which they gave him was one which he justly deserved. If any man merited
to be called great,, that man was Arnulph of Flanders. Consider what he
did.
In spite of almost insurmountable difficulties, in spite of a body eaten
up by disease, and often racked and torn by pain, whilst with one hand
he kept his garden gate, no child's play, with the other he went on
patiently sowing and dressing, and watering the tender seeds of that
plant which we call civilization, and this continued for forty years.
There is another side to the picture. The age of Arnulph was an age of
blood, and some said his hands too were stained with it. Perhaps they
were, but if this were so, at least he never sinned for mean or sordid
or selfish ends. If the guilt of murder encumbered his soul, it was
burthened for the sake of his people.
Of the greatest crime with which his enemies charged him, he denied all
knowledge, and even that black crime found its sanction in the approval
of the nation.
Flanders had so long been a prey to cruel and treacherous foes, that she
had at length come to believe that perjury, treason, cool-blooded murder
were legitimate means of defence, and the death of Wilhelm the Norman,
lured to destruction with fair speech and false promises, covered
Baldwin Baldzo[6] with glory, for if Arnulph had inspired the deed, it
was Baldwin who struck the blow. It gained for him more credit in
Flanders than if he had taken ten cities, and when he returned to his
native land, still reeking with his victim's blood, he was everywhere
received with frenzied ovations, and proclaimed the saviour of his
country.
Perhaps he merited the title. Wilhelm was the mightiest man of his day,
and he had always shown himself an implacable enemy to Flanders.
CHAPTER IV
_Progress of the City_
The story of the long chain of discords and disasters which make up the
reign of the grandson and successor of Count Arnulph the Great is not
graven in the stones of Bruges.
Arnulph II. was the founder of no monastery, the builder of no church.
No city hall nor hospital owes its origin to him. So far as Bruges is
concerned, his reign is a blank.
It could hardly have been otherwise. The days of Arnulph were very evil.
On all sides brute force had usurped the place of justice. Wars and
rumours of wars were making the whole world shudder. Flood, famine and
pestilence had filled Europe with an exceeding bitter cry. The thousand
years which were to elapse between Christ's first and second coming had
well-nigh run out. Surely His sign would soon appear in the heavens.
Surely the advent of the great King was drawing very near. So thought
all the world, and in an agony of hope and apprehension the whole world
was waiting with bated breath. Presently a streak of light appeared on
the horizon, but it was not the light which the world expected. With the
ten hundreds a new era had opened in Europe. Scourged by the hand of
misfortune, afflicted humanity seems to have at last realized the need
of drawing closer together, and a very general revival of commerce, of
literature, of art and of religion was the outcome.
Not least among the great leaders under whose auspices these things
were taking place, was Count Baldwin IV. of Flanders. Baldwin of the
Long Beard, as men called him.
He took up the work of civilization where Arnulph the Great had left it,
and his one ambition was to bring it to a successful issue. 'He was
noble and brave,' we read in the Flemish Chronicle, 'a man of good
report, and one who feared God. His riches were immense, he marched at
the head of his armies and sowed terror among his foes, and his sword
was no less keen than his mother wit. He honoured righteousness, was a
zealous promoter of reform, protected the Fatherland and defended the
Church. Stern to law breakers and men puffed up by pride, to the meek
and gentle he ever showed himself gentle and meek.'
Perhaps the picture is too highly coloured, but Flanders certainly
prospered under Baldwin's government. The outcome of his dispute with
the Emperor Henry II. was the island of Walcheren and the city of
Valenciennes. The marriage of his son with Ethel of France added Corbie
to the paternal inheritance, whilst his own marriage with Norman
Eleanor, if it brought him no increase of territory, at least healed the
old feud between Flanders and her powerful neighbour.
But this was not all. Under the fostering care of this prince, and
thanks to the very large charter of liberties which he granted, the
trade of Flanders increased by leaps and bounds. 'In these days,' we
read, 'the ports of Montreuil and Boulogne were full of shipping, and
traders from all sides crowded to Bruges, already famous by reason of
the rich merchandise they brought there.' Nor did the national
prosperity diminish when, in 1036, the old Count was gathered to his
fathers. So greatly had Bruges increased, that his son Baldwin of Lille
found it necessary, during the third year of his reign, to rebuild and
extend its walls.
It was about this time that Flanders first began to consider herself the
common fatherland of all foreigners who chose to reside within her
borders. Indeed, Baldwin of Lille seems to have kept open house at
Bruges for all the political refugees of the period. Hither, in 1036,
came Emma of England, widow of Canute the Great, driven into exile by
the machinations of Godwin, and the accession of her step-son Harold I.
Here she was joined later on by her own son Harthacnut, and here that
prince received the English envoys when, upon the death of Harold in
1040, they waited on him with an offer of the English throne.
Queen Emma was a daughter of Duke Richard the Fearless of Normandy, and
consequently the first cousin of Baldwin of the Long Beard. She did not
prolong her stay at Bruges after Harthacnut's acceptance of the throne
of England, but four years later Count Baldwin had an opportunity of
receiving another English connection, the Princess Gunhilda, a niece of
Canute the Great. She was accused of having opposed the election of King
Edward the Confessor, and forthwith fled to Bruges.
When, in 1047, Godwin's son Swegen was outlawed, he too found shelter at
Bruges, and when, four years later, the great English Earl himself had
to flee his native land, he directed his steps to the same retreat. It
was, doubtless, at his palace in the Bourg that Baldwin entertained his
guests, and most likely the Crypt of St. Basil--sole relic of Bruges as
Godwin saw it--was the place where they went to pray. Here Earl Godwin
remained all the winter, busy with many things, anon negotiating a
marriage for Tostig with Baldwin's daughter Judith, anon constructing a
great fleet with which he would presently conquer the right to live in
peace on his native soil.
Shortly before Baldwin's death, another great Englishman came to
Flanders, perhaps to Bruges.
Hereward, son of Leofric, the last man who defied the right of the
Conqueror's sword. Here he found for himself a wife, and here he would
have ended his days in peace had not the insults heaped on his mother
called him back to England. With him there went a band of Karls, and
with him they laid down their lives at Thorney. If there had been in
England three men like him, runs an old rhymed chronicle, the French
would have never landed, and if he had only lived, he would have driven
them back to France.
About this time, too, there came to Bruges two other victims of the
Conqueror's ambition. Githa, Earl Godwin's widow, and his daughter,
Gunhilda. Of Githa's subsequent career we are ignorant, but Gunhilda
made Bruges her principal residence for nearly twenty years. Here she
died on the 24th August 1087, and by way of acknowledgment for the
kindness she had received at the hands of the burghers, she bequeathed
her jewels to their Collegiate Church--jewels so precious that, when
they were sold a century later, a sufficient sum was realized to pay for
its restoration. They laid her to rest in the cloister of St. Donatian,
and when, in 1786, her tomb was opened, they found therein a leaden
tablet, still preserved in the Cathedral of Bruges, on which was graved
the story of her virtues and her sorrows.
Baldwin of Lille was succeeded by his second son, Baldwin the Good. The
tumultuous days of his immediate successors and the harshness and
violence of nearly all the sovereigns who followed them, have enhanced
perhaps the glory of his good fame. Be this as it may, the old Flemish
chroniclers delight to dwell on the story of this gentle youth, but his
name is not linked with Bruges.
He was a prince, they tell us, of wondrous dignity, and yet of a
disposition so sweet that all men were drawn to him. He alone of the
Counts of Flanders never once unsheathed his sword, and so great was his
love of peace that he would never suffer his subjects to do so. 'His
officers carried white wands, long and straight, symbols of justice and
mercy,' and they maintained such good order throughout his domains, that
no man was fain at night to bar his doors against thieves, and when the
husbandman went home in the evening, he did not fear to leave his
ploughshare in the fields, and this is the reason, they add, why all men
called him 'the good Count of Flanders.'
In order to accurately appreciate the causes of the almost perennial
struggles between the sovereigns of Flanders and their subjects
throughout the Middle Ages, it is important to know something of the
men, and of their position in the body politic who formed the backbone
of the people's resistance; of the men from whose primitive institutions
were gradually evolved the complicated municipal machinery by which all
the great cities of Flanders were eventually governed, and in defence of
which almost all the struggles in question were originally undertaken.
These men were the Flemings or Karls of the seaboard, Saxons of pure
blood, distinct in race, though not in speech, from the inhabitants of
the towns, for in the veins of the townsman there often flowed a strain
of Celtic blood, and at Bruges especially, where, as we know, at an
early date there was settled a colony of foreign merchants, the
population must soon have become one of mixed race.
The Karls then formed a class apart, a vast middle class of free
landholders, distinct alike from the Court nobility--the comrades of the
Count, his bodyguard, the great feudal lords who knew no trade but
war--from the _vilains_ or serfs who were their retainers; and from the
inhabitants of the towns. But the Karl was not only a farmer, he was
sometimes also a fisherman, often a merchant, and always, and above all
things, a soldier. If it had been otherwise, he could never have
preserved either his own personal freedom or the freedom of the soil he
tilled. To him toil was no disgrace. The greatest of their chiefs, even
those among them in whose veins ran noble blood, were not ashamed to
dig.
Herred Krangrok, who dwelt along with his wife Ethel, a niece of the
Bishop of Térouane, in the impregnable Castle of Salvesse in the midst
of the marshy forest land, which in those days stretched away beyond
Furnes, was a typical Karl of high degree. This man seems to have been a
brewer by trade, and they gave him the surname _Krangrok_ from a habit
he had of throwing his cloak back over his shoulder when he was driving
his own plough.
The home of the Karls was a long strip of territory stretching along the
coast from the great Abbey of Muenickereede to the marshes of
Wasconingawala in the county of Guines--a strip of territory of unequal
width, of which the northern boundary would now be difficult to trace,
but which certainly included within its borders the townships of Ardres,
of Alveringhem and Furnes--the vast forest of Thorout, and all that
district which was later on submitted to the jurisdiction of the Liberty
of Bruges.
This land was divided up into a number of districts called circles or
guilds, which the inhabitants themselves administered by means of their
own elected chiefs, who were at the same time their magistrates and
their legislators.
The ties which bound them to the sovereign were of the loosest nature,
amounting to little more than this--personal service for the protection
of the Fatherland, and the payment of a voluntary tribute which they
themselves assessed.
Certainly up to the end of the tenth century, and perhaps for a century
later, the Karls were still a fierce, wild race, much given to
hereditary feuds and private warfare, still infected with Pagan
superstitions, and still occasionally practising Pagan rites.
The vast majority of them were poor, but a certain number, especially
after the triumph of Robert the Frisian, succeeded in amassing wealth,
and of these not a few filled high positions alike in Church and State.
Under the sovereignty of the early Flemish Counts the Karls had little
to complain of, and though doubtless the feudal tendencies of their
rulers were fostered by the _rapprochement_ with Normandy under Baldwin
le Barbu and Baldwin of Lille, the Karls were still so independent of
their princes, that whilst Baldwin, for a consideration, was helping
William in his projects against England, the Karls were straining every
nerve in behalf of their Saxon kinsmen on the other side of the water,
and it was not till the regency of Richilde of Hainault, the widow of
Baldwin the Good, that any systematic attempt was made to bring them
under subjection.
In the neighbouring States of Guines and Normandy, Northern freedom and
Northern notions of liberty had long ago given place to a feudal
_régime_ of the sternest type, under which the freehold farmer of olden
days had rapidly sunk into the _vilain_. The untimely death of Baldwin
the Good, in 1070, afforded the Flemish barons, as they thought, a
fitting opportunity for reducing the Karls of Flanders to a similar
condition. Arnulph, the heir to the throne, was a youth of fifteen
years, and Richilde of Hainault, the Countess Dowager, had assumed the
reins of government and taken for her chief councillor Albéric de Coucy,
a man who, on account of his tyrannical tendencies, had experienced the
wrath of Baldwin of Lille. The first measure of her reign showed the
spirit by which she was animated--the imposition of a tax, an _inaudita
et indebita tributa_, as Lambert of Ardres describes it, the proceeds of
which were intended to defray the cost of maintaining town ramparts.
Since these had hitherto been kept in repair by means of forced labour,
and the _Böelfart_ was only to be levied on the Karls of the seaboard,
they naturally regarded the measure in question as a direct attack on
their liberty.
That the men now called on to pay for the work were henceforth to be
considered as of like condition with the slaves who had formerly toiled
at it, this for the Karls was the meaning of Richilde's decree--in the
bitter words of Lambert of Ardres, it was the outcome of the hatred she
bore them, 'and they murmured to one another and to God, and they
bethought them of the valiant deeds of Robert, the good Count's
brother.' Flanders was in a state of ferment, but the widow of Baldwin
was in no way daunted at the tokens of the coming storm. She had
inflamed the heart of a mighty champion, who had had experience in the
taming of Karls--William FitzOsberne, Earl of Hereford, the Conqueror's
right hand at Senlac, but lately his Viceroy in England, and the bravest
and the craftiest of all his knights. She had conciliated the good will
of Baldwin's kinsman, Eustace, Count of Boulogne, and for 4000 livres
she had purchased the help of Philip I. of France.
Confident in this added pillar of strength, Richilde made light of her
subjects' complaints, and answered their appeal to Robert the Frisian by
cutting off three-score heads and by invading his county of Alost.
But Richilde had reckoned without her host. Robert was away in Holland
at the time, but he was not a man to tamely suffer an insult, nor to
despise the prayer of those who asked his help. He had inherited from
his Saxon forebears the courage, the daring, the generosity and the
violence of their race, and he no sooner learned what had happened, than
he set out for Alost, drove out Richilde, and made haste to occupy
Cassel, an old Roman camp on the top of a solitary hill a thousand feet
high, some three leagues south of Dunkirk. Cassel was in the heart of
the Karl country, and the Karls from all sides flocked to his standard.
The towns, too, sent their contingents. From Bruges, from Thorhout, from
Furnes, from Courtrai, from Oudenburg, from Ypres, burghers came in by
the thousand, and soon Robert the Frisian was at the head of a mighty
host.
But Richilde and her allies had not been idle. FitzOsberne had summoned
his cohorts from Normandy. Eustace had set his fighting men in battle
array, all the chivalry of France was enrolled under Philip's banner,
and presently, from the height of his stronghold, Count Robert saw a
huge, disorderly rabble, knee-deep in snow and sand, slowly wending its
way through the plain stretched out before him. Men of a hundred races
were there, and may be as many motives had armed them, but the task they
had sworn to accomplish was one--to stamp out for ever the last torch of
Northern freedom.
On the evening of the 21st of February, shrivelled with cold and worn
out with bad roads and hard marching, these men at length reached
Bavichove and there made camp. From the heights of Mount Cassel, Count
Robert saw them. In the small hours of the morning he swooped down from
his eyrie, and when the sun rose the great Confederate host had melted
away; all that was left of it at Bavichove was a mire of red slush and
a heap of mangled corpses.
Richilde herself had escaped, and the swiftness of his heels had saved
Philip, her hired champion, by a hair's breadth, but William
FitzOsberne, the husband who had fought for love, was among the slain,
and--cruellest blow of all--young Arnulph, too, had fallen, cut down
when he thought the bitterness of death had passed.
Thus much had Richilde gained by mixing herself up in the conspiracy
against the Karls, but she had not yet reaped the full harvest of her
arrogance. The hour of their final triumph had not yet come. Immediately
after the death of Arnulph, Philip of France had received the homage of
his younger brother Baldwin, and it took five long years of fighting and
diplomacy to establish Robert on the throne of Flanders.
At length, in 1076, Richilde yielded to the inevitable, acknowledged the
pretensions of the rival of her son, and accepted from him as dower the
châtelaincy of Audenarde. Here she remained till the end of her days,
occupying herself with prayer and good works in expiation for the bloody
war which her disastrous policy had entailed. The life of the châtelaine
of Audenarde was one long act of contrition for the sins of the Countess
of Flanders. The conquest of Robert meant the conquest of the Karls, and
the effect of their triumph was immediately observable in the changed
policy of the government, not only at home but abroad. Their rights as
free men were now acknowledged throughout the country, and their chiefs
were received at Court on an equality with the feudal lords, henceforth
we find them occupying high positions alike in Church and State.
Erembald, a simple Karl of Furnes, was appointed Châtelain of
Bruges--the highest civil appointment in Flanders. One of his sons
received the provostship of the Collegiate Church of St. Donatian
(Bruges), the first ecclesiastical preferment in the county--not a few
of their daughters were wedded to the proudest of the feudal lords, and
Robert's own son, Philip, Viscount of Ypres, did not think it beneath
his dignity to take a Karline for his wife.
The same policy was pursued during the reign of the Frisian's successor.
Amongst the knights who followed Count Robert II. to Jerusalem were not
a few Saxon chiefs. The names of some of them have come down to
us--Siger of Ghistelles, Walter of Oudenburg, Engelram of Lillers,
Erembald of Bruges, the mightiest of them all, and Erembald's son
Robert, Count Robert's intimate friend and his most trusted servant. The
influence of the Karls is distinctly traceable in the changed attitude
of Flanders with regard to England. Baldwin had done all he could to
strengthen William, Robert strained every nerve to oppose him. He would
have brought back the line of Alfred, or restored the English throne to
the house of the great Canute, had not the Conqueror been wily enough to
circumvent him. Raised to supreme authority by the aid of Saxon Karls,
Robert the Frisian could hardly have done otherwise than show himself
friendly to the cause of their compatriots.
Although, as we have seen, the victory of Bavichove, 1071, or rather the
peace of Mayence five years later, had for the moment settled the
question of Karlish freedom, there were still not wanting among the
feudal lords men who envied the power and prosperity to which the Karls
had attained, and who wished to reduce them to slavery. Their plans had
been foiled by Robert I. and kept in check by Robert II., but when that
prince fell at the siege of Meaux (thrown from his horse in a narrow
lane and trampled
I.--Genealogical Table of the Counts of Flanders from Baldwin I. to
Baldwin V.
Osburga=Ethelwolf, King of Wessex (1)[7]=Judith d. of Emperor Charles the Bald=(3) =Baldwin I.= (Bras de Fer)
| _d._ 856 | _d._ 879
+--------+---------------+ |
Alfred the Great Ethelbald of Wessex (2)=Judith d. of Emperor |
|_d._ 901 _d._ 860 Charles the Bald |
+----------------------+-------------------------+ +-----------------------+-----------+
Edward Alfrida==Baldwin II.= (Calvus) Rodulph, Count of Cambrai
_d._ 924 | _d._ 918 |
Edred =Arnulph I.= (the Great) = Adela of Baldwin Baldzo, Regent
_d._ 955 _d._ 964 | Vermandois of Flanders during minority
| of Arnulph II.
|
=Baldwin III.= (reigned during = Matilda of Burgundy
the life of his father from |
957 to 961) _d._ 961 |
+----------------------------------------+
=Arnulph II.==Susanna
_d._ 988 | of Italy
=Baldwin IV.= (Longbeard)=Eleanor of Normandy
_d._ 1036 |
=Baldwin V.= (of Lille)=Ethel of France
_d._ 1067
to death by his own knights as they were pressing on to victory), the
rights of the Karls of Flanders were once more called in question. His
son and successor, Baldwin Hapkin, a youth of eighteen years, was
entirely under the influence of the stern preceptor, whose iron will had
trained him, his father's nephew, Charles of Denmark. In this man's
veins flowed the blood of Canute the Great; the violence and the virtues
of that redoubtable monarch were all his. Added to this, his whole being
was tinged by the ghastly tragedy which had deprived him of a royal
heritage and driven his trembling mother to flee with her infant boy to
Bruges.
He had always before his eyes the murder, or, as he himself deemed it,
the glorious martyrdom of his father, who was literally hacked to pieces
as he was praying before the altar in the Church of St. Alban at Odensee
(1086) by a band of rioters lashed to fury by his rigorous method of
exacting tithe. Such being the man, and such his antecedents, it would
have been surprising indeed if he had shown any sympathy for such
bloodthirsty folk as the Karls. But if he hated the lawlessness of these
men, he hated no less the lawlessness of the barons, and throughout the
fifteen years during which he governed Flanders, first as Baldwin's
minister and afterwards, when at that prince's death he himself
succeeded to his inheritance, he never ceased to combat each of these
elements of disorder, and in so doing he hurled himself with such
violence against the rock of liberty, that at length he was dashed to
pieces.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER V
_The Murder of Charles the Good_
Among the tragedies enacted at Bruges--and their number is legion--not
one is so weird, so mysterious, so repulsive, and at the same time so
enthralling, as the blood-stained legend of Charles the Good.
It is the theme, as we all know, of Hendrick Conscience's _De Kerels van
Vlaanderen_, a romance which approaches nearer to the original legend
than almost any modern historical account that has come under our
notice. For although for his details Conscience has drawn to a certain
extent on imagination, the main outlines of his story coincide exactly
with the main outlines of the legend handed down to us by writers
contemporary with Charles himself.
Of these contemporary lives of the murdered Count we still possess at
least three. The first is by Walbert, Court Notary, or, as we should
say, Registrar of Bruges. He was a personal friend and staunch adherent
of Count Charles, and, as he himself avers, an eye-witness of much that
he relates. His evidence cannot, however, be regarded as altogether
trustworthy. He was naturally animated with the bitterest feelings
against the great house which compassed his patron's overthrow, and
against Bertulph, one of the chiefs of that house, he seems to have
nourished a personal grudge. On more than one occasion he contradicts
himself flatly, and he is an inveterate backbiter and gossip. From his
direst enemy to his dearest friend there is hardly a man in his crowded
canvas whose character he does not directly or indirectly asperse.
Indeed, in the case of his enemies, when he can find nothing to say
against them, he not unfrequently hints that, in his opinion, their good
actions were inspired by unworthy motives. For the rest, the story of
this twelfth-century Saint-Simon is replete with the most interesting
details, rich in local colour, and almost as thrilling to read as one of
Wilkie Collins's novels. The second life is by Walter, Archdeacon of
Tournai. It was written at the request of 'Blessed' John, who ruled the
united churches of Noyon and Tournai from 1127 to 1130, and is dedicated
to him. Walter, like Walbert, was personally acquainted with Charles. He
was with him at Ypres three days before his death, but was not at Bruges
when that event took place, and his narrative is based on information
furnished by certain trustworthy clerks and citizens of Bruges who
vouched for the truth of what they told him.
In some respects Walter's narrative is a work superior to Walbert's.
The whole story hangs together, his language is often dignified, and
generally temperate, nor are the judgments which he forms, on the face
of them, inaccurate.
The third life is contained in the Acta of Louis the Fat, compiled by
Suger, Abbot of St. Denis, who died in 1142. It must have been written,
therefore, not later than this date, and not earlier than 1137, the year
in which Louis died, from ten to fifteen years, that is to say, after
the death of Charles. As for this account, there is only one thing to be
said about it. Suger held a brief for Charles's avenger, Louis the Fat,
and he did the best he could for his client.
In compiling the following narrative we have made use of these three
lives, of the Danish life by Wegener, of the Bollandist's life, and of
the notes and contemporary documents collected by Vredius in his
_Flandrica Ethnica_. We have also consulted Gaillard, Gheldorf, Kervyn
de Lettenhove, and various other modern Flemish historians.
When Count Charles assumed the government of Flanders the Erembalds were
a power to be reckoned with. Their political influence was unrivalled,
the number of their retainers was legion, their wealth was immense, by
their marriages they had allied themselves with the first families in
the county.
Desiderius Hacket, the head of this house, was Châtelain of Bruges, and,
as such, second man in the realm; Bertulph, his brother, as Provost of
St. Donatian's, was the greatest churchman in Flanders, and, as
hereditary chancellor, chief of the Count's household, whilst other
members of the family held honourable and lucrative appointments about
their sovereign's person. Notwithstanding, however, their great
position, the Erembalds were never included in the ranks of the feudal
nobility. They were originally simple freeholders or Karls, perhaps
hereditary chiefs of some circle or guild, who by commerce, and may be
also by plunder, for the Karls were lawless folk, had amassed vast
wealth, and thereby been enabled to climb to the high places they now
held. That they could by the same means, if they had been so minded,
have also been ennobled, there can be no doubt, but the Erembalds, like
all Karls, despised feudalism and all its works and all its pomps; in
their eyes the title of Freeman was a nobler one than any which princes
could bestow.
Tancmar, the head of the great feudal house of Straten, was the owner of
the lordship of Straten, in the neighbourhood of Bruges, where he had
built himself an impregnable fortress, a wealthy devotee who had gained
no little renown for piety and good works, the great Abbey of St.
Andrew, hard-by his own domain, was the especial object of his
munificence. He held high office in the Count's household, was a member
of his Privy Council, and, what was worth more to him than anything
else, his sovereign's confidential and devoted friend.
Tancmar himself had no children, but he had adopted two nephews, sons,
perhaps, of his brother; Giselbert, or, as we should say Gilbert, and
Walter, whom men called the Winged Lie.
Between the families of Erembald and Straten there had gradually grown
up a deadly feud. As to the first cause of it both Walter and Walbert
are silent, but the former writer tells us that, like many other great
quarrels before and since, it arose out of a very small matter.
Wegener, indeed, comes to the conclusion that the primary quarrel was
between Charles himself and Bertulph, that it sprang from the Count's
hatred of the Erembalds, whose pride and lawlessness were marring his
projects of reform, and that the Stratens on the one side, and
Bertulph's kinsfolk on the other, were mere tools in the hands of these
two wire-pullers, who themselves at first remained in the background.
Certainly all the facts of the case, taken together, go to show that if
Charles himself was not its first instigator, he at all events exploited
the quarrel for his own political ends.
In the early years of his reign, he had issued an edict by which he
forbade all men save his own officers to go armed in time of peace--an
edict particularly galling to the Karls, who regarded the bearing of
arms as the inherent right of a freeman, and to deprive them of it was,
in their estimation, and perhaps also in the estimation of the Count, to
deprive them of their personal liberty. The Karls, it is true, were a
cruel and a quarrelsome race. The territory in which they dwelt was
often drenched with blood. Scenes of rapine and murder were with them
matters of everyday occurrence; their hereditary feuds and petty wars
were a constant menace to the State. Charles was determined to put an
end to all this, and he knew of but one way of doing so--to submit the
territory of the Karls to the tender mercies of feudalism, for, in his
estimation, law and order were matters of far greater moment than mere
personal freedom. This, however, was not the opinion of the Erembalds.
Although they themselves, as officers of the Count, were in no way
touched by the edict in question, they opposed it with all their might,
and from that moment Charles determined to crush them.
To attack his old friends openly was an undertaking too hazardous. It
was to the Erembalds, as Bertulph used to boast, that Charles owed his
crown, and he had repaid the debt with gold and favours. Their power
was now as great as his own, and their popularity perhaps greater.
Moreover, to strike at them was to strike at the Church, for Bertulph,
their chief, was chief also of the clergy of Flanders. It behoved
Charles, then, to be very wary. He determined therefore for the moment
to keep himself in the background, to bide his time, and when the plot
was ripe to act through trusty agents. He had not long to wait, the
crisis came early in 1126. It happened thus.
Richard of Raeske, one of the many barons allied by marriage to the
house of Erembald, and a man of no little repute in Flanders, fell out
about this time with Walter of Straten and defied him in the Count's
presence to mortal combat. To the surprise of every one the challenge
was refused, and the ground of the refusal was still more astounding. "I
will never measure my sword," hissed 'the Winged Lie,' "with any but a
free man, and the Lord of Raeske, by wedding a serf, has forfeited his
right to that title." He was alluding to one of Charles's own edicts,
perhaps made in anticipation of the quarrel, by which it was decreed
that 'the freeman (_liber_) who married a slave (_ancillam_) should,
after a year's wedlock, cease to be free, and sink to his wife's
condition.'
The calumny, as Archdeacon Walter calls it, came like a bolt from the
blue. The Erembalds had been châtelains of Bruges for well-nigh a
hundred years, and no man heretofore had ever ventured even to hint at
the possibility of a flaw in their escutcheon. Walter had aimed his
shaft well, it had flown far and pierced deep. By it was threatened not
only the honour and the liberty and the purse of every man in whose
veins flowed the blood of an Erembald, but alike the honour and the
liberty and the purse of each one of the score or more of proud barons
allied by marriage to the dishonoured race. The Erembalds were cut to
the quick, and the words of defiance which Bertulph himself hurled
back, words which in the light of after events seem almost prophetic,
voiced the indignation of the whole clan. 'I am a free man,' he
thundered out; 'my forefathers were free men, and no one shall be found
mighty enough to take away my freedom.' Strange as it may seem, the
aristocracy, almost to a man, rallied round the attainted house, whilst
almost alone at the side of his friend stood the Count.
He still hesitated, however, to show his true colours; he would himself,
he said, in no way interfere, but leave the matter in the hands of his
judges--a commission should be appointed to examine the affair, and he
would abide by their decision. But Bertulph was not to be hoodwinked,
and spread it abroad that the Count was plotting his ruin:--'This
Charles of Denmark, whom I made, would fain through his judges reduce me
to slavery. Let him try.' Nor did he hesitate to fling back in Charles's
teeth the retort that he himself was illegitimate, aye and a bastard,
too, base born. 'This Charles of Denmark!' he contemptuously
cried--Bertulph, who was a true Fleming, could never forget or forgive
his master's foreign extraction--'This Charles of Denmark, who boasts
that he is a king's son! In good sooth, a scullion begat him! By what
right doth he torment us?' Truly Provost Bertulph had a bitter tongue.
But neither scorn nor threats nor bitter speech could turn the Count
from his purpose. The promised commission was duly appointed, and after
a lengthy inquiry made its award:--Let the Lady of Raeske swear that she
is of free birth in the presence of twelve nobles who shall confirm her
oath with their own; but with no little inconsistency a proviso was
added that this decision concerned only the case of the Lady of Raeske
personally, and in no way derogated from the Count's right, if he would,
to proceed against any other member of the Erembald family. This
compromise Charles accepted, and, partially laying aside the cloak of
neutrality which hitherto prudence had bade him assume, lost no time in
claiming the Erembalds for his serfs, nor until the day of his death,
more than a year later, did he cease so to regard them.
They no less persistently repudiated the claim, and Charles either could
not or would not enforce it, and for the moment was fain to content
himself with slighting words and half-veiled threats. Meanwhile the
Erembalds and the Stratens were flying at one another's throats. Cattle
were being looted, boundaries were being razed, and blood was flowing in
torrents. A hurricane of strife had been let loose on the land, and all
the efforts of the sower of the wind, now thoroughly afraid at his own
handiwork, and clumsily playing the double _rôle_ of peacemaker and
partisan, were powerless to quell it.
Suddenly, when the turmoil was at its height, Charles was called to
France. An intermittent warfare had for years been carried on between
the Count of Auvergne and the Bishop of Clermont, and things had at
length come to a crisis. The former had made appeal to his liege lord,
Duke William of Aquitaine, and the latter, by their united efforts,
driven from his See, had now invoked, not vainly, the aid of Louis the
Fat, who forthwith summoned his vassals (amongst whom of course was
Charles) and set out for Clermont.
The Count of Flanders was undoubtedly placed in a very awkward
predicament. To leave his realm at the present juncture was to risk
revolution, and by staying at home he would certainly estrange his one
reliable friend. The civil war at the beginning of his reign, and the
famine and pestilence which followed, had sown broadcast misery and
discontent, whilst the well-meant but arbitrary measures which Charles
had taken for the relief of the poor, especially his edict as to the
price of wheat, had alienated the rich, who openly accused him of
showing favour to the people at their expense. 'If it be so,' he was
wont to reply, 'it is because I know the misery of the poor and the
pride of the upper classes,' but, unfortunately for Charles, in his day
the classes alone counted, and the classes were in a high fever of
suspicion and unrest. The great purveyors of bread-stuffs had been
touched in their pockets, the free landholders of the sea-board thought
themselves already slaves, the honour of the first family in Flanders
had been trampled in the dust. No one was sure that it would not be his
turn next. Others besides Bertulph were questioning Charles's right to
torment them. The whole land was sick of foreign rule, and men were
beginning to whisper in corners of William of Löo. It was probably this
last consideration which prompted Charles to obey. If he had failed to
do so, his powerful kinsman might have veered round to the side of the
legitimate heir, and in that case he would in all probability have lost
his county.
Charles must have taken a heavy heart with him to Clermont, but his
biographers do not inform us that he was in any way disquieted.
Before starting, however, he seems to have summoned the Erembalds and
the Stratens to his presence and to have made them swear to a truce, but
to swear to a truce under existing circumstances was little better than
a farce. Such was the hatred of the belligerents for one another, that
even a temporary suspension of hostilities had become impossible, and
during the whole period of Charles's absence the land was a prey to
their mutual depredations.
It was not till the fall of the year that Charles came back to his
domains. At Ypres he was met by a deputation of peasants, retainers
seemingly of the Stratens, who made complaint that the Erembalds,
headed by the provost's nephew Burchard, had plundered their dwellings,
laid waste their land and driven off their cattle. Charles promised them
justice, and having taken counsel with his barons, decreed that
Burchard's house at Straten should be razed to the ground. The sentence
was promptly carried out, and Walter adds that the Count in person
superintended its execution. That this was only a prelude there can be
no doubt. Charles had returned to Flanders crowned with the laurels of
victory. His successes at Clermont had earned for him the gratitude of
Louis the Fat, who had most likely promised him help. The time had come
when he felt himself strong enough to carry out his plan against the
Erembalds. Nor were these last ignorant of his intentions. At length,
driven to bay, they were determined to make one desperate stand for
liberty. They would save their honour, even if the price paid for it
should be their sovereign's life.
Charles had arrived at Bruges late on the evening of 28th February, and
towards the close of the next day a deputation waited on him on behalf
of the threatened clan. There seems to have been little hope of bringing
about a reconciliation, but Bertulph had most likely insisted that no
effort should be left untried before having recourse to violence. The
accounts which the contemporary lives give of this interview do not
tally, but they are at one as to its issue--Charles was adamant. The die
was cast. That night the Erembalds met in secret conclave. Early next
morning Charles rose, feverish and ill at ease, from a couch
overshadowed by the wraith of his coming doom. His servants would have
had him remain indoors. Some rumour of the midnight meeting had leaked
out, and they suspected foul play, but Charles refused to listen, and
notwithstanding that the day had dawned so thick, 'that a man could see
no further than a spear's length before him,' betook himself almost
unattended to St. Donatian's, there to hear Mass.[8]
Hardly had the service begun than Burchard, accompanied by a crowd of
retainers, entered the church by a side door, and sheltering himself
behind the great columns of the northern aisle, stealthily crept up to
the place where Charles was kneeling before the Lady altar, and touched
him on the shoulder. The Count turned his head to see who was there, and
for a moment their eyes met, and then, quick as thought, a blow from
Burchard's sword felled him dead on the pavement.
'If this Dane should be cut down,' Burchard was reported to have said a
few days before the murder--'If this Dane should be cut down, who will
rise up to avenge him?' and now that the blow had been struck and
Charles was dead, it at first seemed that Burchard had accurately gauged
the situation.
Thémard, Châtelain of Brudburch, who was kneeling by Charles's side when
the fatal blow was struck, indeed made some show at defending him, but
he was quickly overpowered by numbers, and fell, mortally wounded,
beside the body of his master. As to the other members of the Count's
household, those of them who were not privy to the conspiracy were too
terrified to think of anything but their own safety. The Stratens and
their adherents had fled the county. William of Löo, the next heir to
the throne, sent letters of salutation and promises of help. Even the
clergy were silent, and the burghers, amongst whom the Erembalds had
always been popular, so far from showing signs of disapproval of the
crime, were working night and day at the fortifications of the town, in
order to enable it to withstand a possible attack.
For the moment the Erembalds had triumphed. The death of their sovereign
had brought them life.
After the long months of shame and suspense, during which wealth,
honour, liberty, all that makes life dear, were trembling in the
balance, it must have been no little consolation to these fierce, proud
Karls to know that their enemy, the man who had persecuted them, had
himself been brought low. But there was one thing which was a cause of
anxiety and of reproach--that thing which to many another murderer
before and after has been the source of no little embarrassment--the
body.
There it lay, in the place where the deed had been done, set out in
ghastly state amid flaming torches, a silent witness to their broken
troth. What should they do with it?
Bertulph and Hacket had indeed from the first disclaimed all knowledge
of the murder, and though perhaps their ignorance was wilful, in doing
so they probably spoke the truth; but the guilt of Burchard and of
several other members of the family was notorious and undenied, and so
strong were ties of blood in the eyes of the Karl, that when one of them
had sinned all his kindred deemed themselves not only responsible for,
but, in a certain measure, also participators in the crime.
The ghastly trophy, then, in the choir of St. Donatian's, was as dire a
reproach to Bertulph and his brother as to the blood-stained Burchard
himself.
Time pressed. Every moment that the mutilated corpse remained above
ground was increasing the risk that pity would goad men to rebellion.
What should they do with it? This was the problem which the Erembalds
assembled in Bertulph's house[9] had now to solve, and, if their
new-born hope was not to be stifled, to solve quickly.
There were several weighty reasons why the interment should not take
place at Bruges. To bury Charles in the capital, where the circumstances
of his death were notorious, were to indelibly grave their own ignominy
in the hearts of future generations. Perhaps, too, the presence of the
body would entail also the presence of an avenging shade. Moreover,
there was no precedent for a royal interment at Bruges, and the only
church in the city where such a function could be fittingly celebrated
had been defiled by blood, none but the Bishop of Tournai had the right
to reconsecrate it, and even if there were time to communicate with him,
it was in the highest degree improbable that old Simon of Tournai,
Charles's own brother-in-law, would consent to smooth the path of his
kinsman's murderers.
On the other hand, there was a strong feeling amongst the people in
favour of Bruges, and Bertulph was sufficiently acquainted with the
temper of his fellow-townsmen to know that any attempt to run counter to
their wishes would be hazardous. After much confabulation, it was at
length decided to request Arnulph, Abbot of Blandinium, a man whom
Bertulph could trust, to secretly convey the body of Charles to his
cloister and there give it Christian burial. Nor did Arnulph belie the
confidence placed in him.
Although it was the hour of compline when Bertulph's messenger reached
Ghent, on learning of his old friend's dilemma, he at once made ready to
start, and pushing on through the darkness, in spite of bad roads and
bad weather, made such expedition that he reached Bruges before
cock-crow. All was in readiness, the body had been prepared for
burial--the trusty abbot had secured a conveyance which was now drawn up
in a secluded corner hard by the cathedral, before daybreak he would
again be free of the town, and once in the open country there was little
fear of hindrance or detection.
All that remained of Charles had been placed on the bearers' shoulders,
and under the direction of Bertulph and the abbot, the weird _cortège_
was slowly wending its way down the nave of St. Donatian's, had indeed
almost reached the great western portal, when suddenly the stillness of
the early morning became a whirl of angry voices and tramping feet.
There could be no mistake as to its import. Somehow or other the project
had become known, and all Bruges had turned out to oppose it.
In order to understand the cause of this seemingly sudden revulsion of
feeling, a word of explanation is perhaps necessary.
The whole life of Charles of Denmark is wrapped and swathed from
beginning to end in mystery and contradiction. Half soldier, half saint,
with his Bible in one hand, and Charlemagne's sword 'Joyeuse' in the
other, he flits across the stage of European history like some pale,
crimson-robed phantom from another world.[10]
Was he a cunning schemer--a layer of deep plots which he never lived to
carry out, or was he only a dreamer of dreams, tossed about by wayward
impulses and passing fancies, this incomprehensible Dane, king's son or
scullion's son, as the case may be, who almost accomplished so much and
in reality achieved so little--this tissue of inconsistencies who
usurped for himself a petty principality and despised an imperial
diadem, who crushed his proud lords with a lion's fierceness, and went
barefoot to kiss the hands of beggars, this most marvellous devotee who
showed himself on occasions so generous and at times appears so mean,
who deprived himself of meat and raiment that he might have the more to
succour the needy, and spat on his best friends and trampled them in the
dust? This friend and father of churches, who all his life long lavished
on them wealth, honour, obedience, and whose end, by a strange irony of
fate, was at length destined to be the outcome of an unjust quarrel
which he himself had forced on his own ecclesiastical chief.
Questions difficult to answer these, with the evidence at present at our
disposal. Dr. Wegener thinks (p. 6) there is ground for believing that
the dream of Charles's life was to win his paternal heritage--the crown
of Denmark, and that if he had lived longer he might perhaps have
realized it. May be his hopes flew higher still, and that the ultimate
goal of his ambition was to carry out his father's darling project and
establish once more, in all its glory, the kingdom of Canute the Great.
But, however this may be, and whatever may have been Charles's failings
and his foibles and his faults, one thing is certain: his good deeds
alone followed him. The hospitals and asylums which he founded, the
churches and monasteries which he built, his courtesy and sweetness to
the poor and the simple, the sympathy and protection which he showed to
the oppressed, the lordly feasts which he made in his palace at Bruges
for the blind and the halt and the maimed--these are the things which
lived after him, and friend and foe alike agreed to forget the rest.
Prayers and Masses were everywhere offered for the repose of his soul,
perhaps even in his honour. Bertulph himself sang 'Requiem' for the foe
who had once been his friend, and when all was over and the poor had
returned to their houses enriched by his alms, his servants found him
weeping over the grave. Even Burchard sought reconciliation. Despite the
ban of the Church, Pagan practices died hard with the Flemish Karls of
the seaboard, and Burchard, who was a true Karl, would make his peace
with Charles after the manner of his forefathers. Accompanied by a band
of wild retainers from the Forest of Thor, he entered at midnight the
choir of St. Donatian's, where lay the body, and there, by the light of
flaming torches, celebrated the weird _Dodsisas_, or banquet of the
dead. Libations of wine and libations of ale were poured over the grave,
and as the loving-cup passed from hand to hand each man muttered, 'We
drink to thee, Count Charles,' and then Burchard alone knelt down on the
pavement and with his lips touched the marble slab which covered his
victim's remains, saying, as he did so, 'Accept, O shade, this kiss of
peace and reconciliation, and, appeased by these our offerings,
vouchsafe to lay aside all thought of enmity and vengeance.' In a word,
owing to the tragic circumstances of his death, the memory of 'this
Charles of Denmark' was clean wiped out. The citizens of Bruges were
only mindful, and to this day they are only mindful, of 'Blessed Charles
the Good.'
Such being the case, it is not to be wondered at that, in an age when
relics were prized above rubies, the burghers should be loth to part
with so precious a thing as the body of their martyred Count. At all
hazards they would keep it, thus they averred, and with much clamour and
a mighty rush they burst into the cathedral. In the midst of the uproar
rumour passed from mouth to mouth that a hunchback had been actually
healed, in the twinkling of an eye, there, in the midst of them all, by
simply touching the holy thing they were fighting for--fresh
confirmation, were any needed, of Charles's sanctity. Bertulph indeed
only laughed at the tale; that poor Charles should be able to work
miracles after his death seemed to him so very improbable. But Bertulph
was a sceptic, so it was said, and nobody minded him. Five hundred
unimpeachable burghers could vouch for the truth of the story, and the
tumult increased tenfold. The clergy themselves, either from fear or
conviction, now threw in their lot with the mob, and seizing on chairs,
stools, thuribles, candlesticks, anything that came to hand, laid about
them manfully. What did the provost mean by taking this step without
consulting their wishes? Was not St. Donatian's as great as Blandinium,
and were not the canons of Bruges as good men and true as the monks of
Ghent? By God and His saints the body of Charles should never quit their
cathedral! They would die first! In face of the opposition of his own
clergy and the increasing fury of the mob, resistance was impossible,
and Bertulph gave way, whilst Abbot Arnulph, giving thanks to God that
he had escaped with a whole skin, was glad to go back to his monastery
without the much-coveted treasure. This satisfied the people for the
moment and they returned quietly to their homes, but in public
estimation the crime of endeavouring to give Charles decent burial
outside Bruges was as great a one as that of his murder, and in the
sequel Bertulph had to pay dearly for it.
On the following morning (Friday, March 4), after a solemn Requiem Mass
had been chanted for him in the chapel of St. Peter outside the Bourg,
Charles was laid to rest in the place where he fell in front of the Lady
Altar in St. Donatian's.
[Illustration: Angle of the Rue de l'Ane Aveugle]
CHAPTER VI
_Vengeance_
Meanwhile Charles's friends had been scouring the country far and wide,
and wherever they went crying vengeance, and that not vainly. A bevy of
thirty knights at once took up arms and swore they would not lay them
down until they had washed them in the blood of the assassins,
and--ominous note of warning--these men were all of them, or nearly all
of them, partisans of the Erembalds. By common consent they chose
Gervais Van Praet for their chief, and at once began to lay waste and
plunder the lands and property of those who would not join them. Thus,
gaining fresh recruits wherever they went, the little band rapidly grew
into a vast army. Soon the town and fortress of Ravenschoot--a mighty
stronghold of the Karls which, through some unaccountable blunder, had
been left ungarrisoned--went up in flames; by the end of the week the
smouldering embers of his brother Wulfric's palace, not a stone's throw
from Bruges, warned Bertulph that the enemy was at his gates, and there
was no sign of the reinforcements which William of Löo, who was perhaps
in daily communication with the Provost, had promised to send from
Ypres. Next morning, therefore, his nephews made a sortie beyond the
ramparts, in the hope of putting the insurgents to flight, but after no
little hard fighting they were smitten hip and thigh and forced to lead
their shattered troops back to the city.
The burghers, however, still loyal to the cause of their châtelain, had
been hard at work night and day strengthening the fortifications--old
men, women and children, even the clergy themselves, had lent a willing
hand--and the town was said to be impregnable. Perhaps it was, but for
all that, on Wednesday the 9th of March, the enemy walked in at the
Sablon gate. There was a traitor within the camp. May be one of the
provost's own household. It was the hour of the evening meal, and so
confident were the townsfolk in the strength of their walls that they
remained quietly seated at table whilst the Isegrins[11] were marching
through their streets, and the insurgents were already in the heart of
the city before the news of their advent had reached Bertulph's palace.
The Erembalds then were had at an advantage, and though they fought
bravely--they always fought bravely--after a long and bloody conflict,
the chief shock of which was on the _Pont de l'Ane Aveugle_, they were
at last forced to retire to the Bourg, hoping against hope that they
would be able to hold out until William of Löo should arrive.
As for the burghers, when they saw how the land lay, and that the
insurgents would probably prove victorious, they either joined hands
with them or endeavoured to maintain a neutral attitude, awaiting the
issue of events--a prudent policy which their descendants have not
unfrequently followed. Some ten days after the night of the great
betrayal, the Isegrins approached their opponents with overtures of
peace--offers of life and liberty for all within the beleaguered
fortress who averred their innocence, if only they would come forth and
prove it.
In the turmoil and confusion incident on the flight to the Bourg not a
few of the attacking party were still within the fortress when the
gates were shut, and many plain citizens, who perhaps had little
sympathy with either side, but certainly had had no part in Charles's
death, were in like predicament. It was on behalf of these men that the
Isegrins now approached their foes. Still there is no reason to doubt
that the offer was made in good faith. 'Many who were innocent availed
themselves of it, and many also,' says Galbert, 'whose conduct was
suspected. Of their ultimate fate we know nothing, nor what proportion
the out-goers bore to those who remained behind. The number of these
last, however, must have been considerable, and among them were
Bertulph, Hacket and a nephew whom the contemporary chroniclers
invariably describe as Robert the Child. Not that these three
acknowledged themselves guilty--on the contrary, they stoutly maintained
their innocence, nor had they any sympathy with the murder--but for them
the bonds of kinship were indissoluble, and the guilt of Burchard and
some other members of the family was notorious and avowed. 'Not one
among ye,' cried Hacket, who was spokesman for the rest, 'not one among
ye bewails this bloody deed more bitterly than do we. Send into exile,
if ye will, all those who acknowledge their guilt. Impose on them what
penalty our judges and our bishops shall deem fit, provided that life
and liberty be respected, and that ye do them no bodily harm. Give us
some assurance of this, and that we, who declare our innocence, shall be
offered opportunity of proving it, each man as befitteth his
state--clerk according to Church law, knight in accordance with the laws
of chivalry--and we surrender, but if these conditions do not seem good
to ye, then will we remain here and defend this fortress. It is better
to live with our guilty kinsmen than to come forth and meet a
dishonourable death at your hands.' This extraordinary speech is given
by Walbert, who was at Bruges during the whole of this troublous period,
and avers that he noted down on his tablets each night the events that
had occurred during the day, but he adds that owing to the excitement
and turmoil that prevailed in the city it is not unlikely that some of
his statements are inaccurate.
Needless to say that the Isegrins turned a deaf ear to Hacket's
proposals. In the deliverance of their friends they had obtained all
that they wanted; the only answer they vouchsafed was from the mouth of
the 'Winged Lie' and the 'Winged Lie' breathed out threatening, and
slaughter, and curses into the bargain. All hope of conciliation was at
an end, and, says Walbert, 'the belligerents went their several ways
full of headiness and gall.'
All that day the fight continued without any marked success on either
side, but towards sunset the attacking party were beaten back with great
loss, and the Erembalds were left, as they fondly believed, at peace for
the night.
Worn out with hard fighting, and filled with an overweening sense of
security, inspired by their unlooked-for success, the whole of the
little garrison had retired to rest, save only a handful of sentinels
wearily straining their eyes over the dark city. All through the night
these men were content to freeze on the ramparts, chilled to the bone by
a cutting east wind, but towards the small hours of morning the icy
breath of coming day drove them into the great hall of Charles's palace,
where some one had kindled a fire. There they sat before the glowing
logs, dozing and drinking and chatting together in a fool's paradise,
and clean forgot the little western door by which their friends were
wont to come and go, and that a rusty lock and half-a-dozen nails alone
secured it. 'This one weak spot, when we were freezing on the
battlements, some prowling Isegrin smelt out, and whilst we are rubbing
a little life into our poor numbed limbs before Charles's fire, a host
of them swarm round it. Some one suggests an axe, it yields at a blow,
and the rabid pack rush in so swiftly and so suddenly, and with so
little noise, that their cruel fangs are at our throats almost before we
are awake. The whole Bourg is alive with men--they seem to spring up
from the earth, every crevice and every corner bristles with them, and
so dark is it that we cannot distinguish friends from foes. Panic lays
hold of us, we lose our heads, turn cowards and sue for mercy, or leap
in despair over ramparts as doth poor Giselbert, whose bruised and
bleeding body they tie to a horse's tail and drag all round the
market-place. The bravest of us take to our heels, and trampling one
another down, crush through the narrow bridgeway which leads from
Charles's palace into St. Donatian's church, determined there to make
our last stand, and then, O wonderment! the howling pack draw off and
leave us for a little space at peace.'
Such was the scene in the Bourg on this momentous night. All that was
left of the Erembald host was huddled up in the cathedral, too much
shattered in mind and body to be a cause of present disquietude; their
opponents were free to do what they would, and they were more eager for
plunder than revenge. They had come to a conglomeration of palaces, to a
region abounding in treasure, to a place where much corn and wine and
oil were stored up; their mouths watered for these things, and the word
was given to plunder, and like a flock of locusts they carried off
everything. Charles's palace, containing also Hacket's apartments; the
provost's palace, and the palace of the canons of Bruges, all of them
were stripped; from the bed and the underlinen in Bertulph's sleeping
apartment to the gridirons and saucepans in his kitchen, and from the
mead and ale in his cellar to the leaden gutters of his roof. Nor had
they any greater respect for the property which had once belonged to
Charles. They carried off even the meat hanging up in his larder, and
the bed on which he had slept. Disappointed at not discovering the
much-coveted treasure in his strong-room, they consoled themselves by
wrenching off the wrought-iron doors, and bearing them away on their
shoulders, nor did they despise the chains and manacles and other
instruments of torture that they found in the dungeons under the palace,
though the rich hangings and tapestry which they tore from the walls of
his state-room, and the great store of wheat heaped up in his granary
were doubtless objects more to their taste. The canons' dormitories in
the cloister contained great treasure. So well stocked were they with
rich and costly apparel, most likely ecclesiastical vestments, that
though the marauders began to carry them off early in the morning, it
was not until nightfall that the task was complete.
Galbert, who gives a detailed account of all this, concludes his
observations with this quaint remark: 'Our citizens,' he says, 'in
acting thus, were fully convinced they were doing no wrong.'
Meanwhile the men of Ghent were secretly negotiating for Charles's body;
it was arranged that it should be handed out to them through one of the
windows in the choir, and early next morning they proceeded to put the
plan in execution. 'Our burghers, however, got wind of it, and they
being as keen to retain the relics as the Ghenters were to carry them
away, infinite tumult ensued, which was only quenched by the stones and
arrows and boiling pitch which the Erembalds, who had by this time
shaken themselves together, were hurling down from the battlements.
Thus rudely brought to their senses, the contending factions came to
terms, joined forces, took the church, and drove their opponents into
the tower. Fortune had once more almost smiled on the Karls, and again
that day the cup of hope was destined to be dashed from their lips. It
happened thus:--
When the Bourg was taken, Bertulph's palace had been allotted to the
Stratens as their share of the plunder, or rather they had allotted it
to themselves, and that very morning had 'insolently and vauntingly and
vaingloriously' run up their standard over the roof, at sight of which
all were filled with disgust, for the provost and his household, before
the betrayal, were in sooth devout and courteous men, held in high
esteem by the whole city. 'The hearts of our burghers swell against them
and we lust for their blood, the more so as they are actually carrying
off corn and wine which is our property, for it was we who bore the
brunt of the battle whilst these men were snoring in bed. At all costs
this pilfering must be stopped. We break into the courtyard, and one of
us with his sword staves in a cask of wine--signal for infinite uproar.
The Stratens take to their heels. Our men outrun them, and slam the
gates of the city so that none shall escape. Hacket rushes out on his
tower and frenziedly exhorts the mob to slay his foes--calumniators for
whose sake Count Charles was slain. The market-place bristles with armed
men, a waving forest of spears. All Flanders is in town to-day. Greed,
vengeance, lust for relics, itching ears--a hundred wayward impulses
have drawn them here, but one are they, at least, in this one
sentiment--old Tancmar and his nephews merit hemp. Of all the blood and
all the tears which have been shed these scandalmongers are the cause,
these backbiters, these intriguers, these liars, who, with false, foul
tongues, for sordid ends, moved Charles to spurn our noblest men and
stung them on to slay him. Thus we murmur, thus we declaim, and the
whole town roars with the thunder of our indignation, until pressing
onward to the Bourg, where rumour says young Walter lies concealed, for
we would fain have him out and hang him, there at the very gates, upon
the bridge which spans the Boterbeke,[12] we meet our new-made châtelain
Gervais Praet, who with his ready tongue doth still the storm. 'Yon
vaunting ensign shall be furled--see, friends, it is even now
furled--nor shall this Tancmar lord it in your provost's house; he and
his kith and kin shall forthwith quit the town. I pass my word, and as
for the liquor and the grain, the men who took the citadel shall have
the eating and the drinking of it.' So we disperse, and whilst old
Bertulph's choicest wine is gurgling down our parched-up throats or we
are hurrying on to grab what share we may of his great store of
wheat--in this pinched time of dearth no little boon--the trembling
Tancmar and his nephews skulk away, each one of them empillioned behind
a stalwart knight, so timorous are they of the men of Bruges; and
darkness falls upon the town, shrill with the blaring trumpets of the
Erembalds, who all night long sound signals of distress, for this day
arrows winged with lying script have brought to them assurances of help.
The day before the Bourg was taken Bertulph managed to effect his
escape. He was let down by a cord from the battlements, and safely
conducted by a friend in the Isegrin camp, whom he had heavily bribed,
out of the town and three leagues further into the open country beyond.
Here left to his own devices, walking by night and sleeping where he
could by day, he at length reached the manor of Alard van Woesten, who
had married one of his nieces, and was lord of the little town of
Woesten on the French frontier in the neighbourhood of Ypres.
In this stronghold he lay in hiding for about three weeks, after which
time, the rumour of his arrival having somehow or other leaked out, it
presently reached the ears of William of Löo, who was keeping his Easter
in the city hard-by. Upon receipt of this important news William at once
took horse, and with 'much noise and great expedition' began to make
inquiries concerning the provost's whereabouts.
Having searched Alard's house, and the house of his daughter hard-by,
and not finding the object of his quest, he was beside himself with
rage, fired both houses, seized the girl, swore that he would put her to
torture if Bertulph were not produced before the morrow, and rode off.
Alard, therefore, having to choose between his daughter and his uncle,
revealed the place where Bertulph was concealed, and he was at once
taken prisoner by William's officers.
Well knowing that his days were numbered, and that he had nothing to
hope from the gratitude of the man for whose sake he had risked so much,
and at whose hands he had received so little, the aged prelate prepared
himself to face death with what courage he could. He was a dying man, he
said, and he wished to see a priest. His captors granted the request,
'and there, in the sight of all men, he confessed his sins, and
prostrate on the ground smote his breast and prayed God to have pity on
him.' Next morning they would have taken him on horseback to Ypres, but
he refused to ride, and though it was freezing hard persisted in
walking there barefoot. 'This soft, luxurious prelate,' comments
Walbert, 'who in the days when fortune smiled on him used to shrink from
a flea bite as from a dagger thrust!'
A certain priest from whose lips Walter learned the details here noted
down, walked by Bertulph's side and, as they went, they intoned
alternately verse by verse the Lady Office and the _Te Deum_. Thus,
martyr-like, with a song of triumph on his lips, this staunch old man
went forth to die. 'As they drew near to the gates of the city a great
multitude came forth to meet them, crying aloud and clapping their hands
and leaping for joy, and they struck the provost with their fists, and
beat him with staves and pelted him with the heads of sea-fish (of which
very many are taken in these parts), and heaped every kind of insult
upon him, all of which he bore with patience, speaking never a word.'
This was all the more remarkable, says Walter, because the provost was
naturally a proud man who could ill brook ridicule or insult of any
kind; and he adds:--_Apropos_ of this, I remember a story which was told
me by one of his own servants. Upon a certain occasion when the provost
was seated before the fire in his great hall, with his household around
him, the discourse turned to the Passion of Our Lord, and of the insults
which He suffered with so much meekness in the house of Caiaphas. 'For
my part,' quoth the provost, 'I can never understand that portion of
Scripture. If low fellows of that kind had struck me I would at least
have spat in their face.'
The remaining portion of the story of Bertulph's execution is told for
us by Walbert. It reads like some breviary legend of a martyr's death.
There he stood in the midst of the market-place, surrounded by a ribald,
jeering throng, with countenance unmoved and eyes turned heavenward as
though invoking God's pity. Then one of those who were standing by
struck him on the head, saying, 'O thou proud man, why dost thou not
deign to sue for mercy, seeing that thy life is in our hands?' but the
provost opened not his mouth. And for his greater ignominy they stripped
him of his clothes and hanged him naked on a cross in the midst of the
market-place, as if he had been a thief or a robber.
Then drew nigh unto him William of Löo, and thus addressed him, 'Tell
me, O provost, I conjure thee, on the salvation of thy soul, in addition
to those whose names we already know, who are they who are implicated in
Count Charles's death,' and Bertulph made answer, and said before all
those present, 'Thou knowest, O Burgrave, as well as I.' William,
hearing those words, was transported with fury, and commanded stones and
mud to be cast at the provost and that he should be put to death. Then
those who were assembled in the market-place to sell fish, tore his
flesh with their iron hooks and beat him with rods, and thus they put an
end to his days.
'William at once sent a herald to Bruges to inform the Isegrins of what
he had done, and we in our turn,' says Walbert, 'handed on the news to
the Erembalds in their tower, whereat terror and despair pressed them
closer than the generals of our army, and naught was heard but the sound
of their lamentations.' Thus Walbert. Nevertheless, they held out
bravely until the 20th of April, and that, notwithstanding that they
were besieged by Louis the Fat and a great army of French knights; by
William Cliton, the newly-elected count, and a horde of Normans; by
almost all the chivalry of Flanders, and a host of burghers from Ghent,
who still hoped that they would be able to obtain Charles's body for
Blandinium.
The great army, which six weeks before had taken refuge in the Bourg,
was now reduced to a mere handful. Of the rest not a few must have died
in battle, others perhaps of wounds and wretchedness and want, but in
all probability the vast majority had made their escape, hoping perhaps
that they would be able to raise a sufficient force to effectually
succour those of their comrades who remained in Bruges, and afterwards
place on the throne a sovereign who would respect their liberties. Be
this as it may, by the 20th of April but thirty worn-out men remained in
St. Donatian's, who continually straining their eyes over the vast
expanse of flat country surrounding them, descried there no token of
hope. Moreover, the Isegrins were battering in the tower--at each thrust
of the ram it trembled to its base. Instant surrender or instant death
was the only alternative, the Karls chose the first, and young Robert
cried out, in the name of the rest, that if his personal liberty were
guaranteed they would lay down their arms. Louis accepted the condition
and they prepared to descend. One brave fellow indeed, preferring death
to disgrace, would have leapt over the ramparts had not his comrades
held him back. 'At sight of which,' says Walbert, 'our burghers shed
tears,' but their sympathy led them no further.
One by one the little band of heroes came forth, the lean men through a
narrow aperture giving on the stairs, those who were too corpulent
through a larger window near the summit of the tower, and these men let
themselves down by ropes.
'Pale they were,' says Walbert, 'and livid and ugly with hunger, and
they bore on their faces the stigma of their crimes; but our citizens
wept when they saw those who had once been their leaders led away to
prison.' No wonder; the dark fetid hole into which they were huddled was
of such narrow dimensions that the inmates were not even able to sit
down, and after a few days' detention there, only three or four of them
had strength to stand.
From this wretched fate young Robert alone was exempted, but Louis
thought that his promise not to cast him into prison was sufficiently
respected by giving him into the custody of a citizen of Bruges. Of
Robert's entire innocence there can be no doubt. Even Walbert, the enemy
of his race, bears testimony to his noble qualities. He was most
popular, not only in Bruges, but throughout Flanders. Again and again
the burghers had petitioned Louis in his favour. Even some of the
Isegrin leaders had followed their example, but for all of them the
French king had one answer. He had sworn to take no step without the
consent of his Council, and Robert remained in custody.
As to the other prisoners, their captivity lasted only a fortnight. It
was then (4th May) determined that they should be thrown from the tower
which they had so bravely defended, and the same day the sentence was
carried out.
The soldiers entrusted with this odious task had received strict orders
to complete it with as little noise as possible, and with brutal levity
they told their victims that the King was about to give them proof of
his mercy.
The prisoners were then led one by one to the scene of execution, not by
way of the _Place du Bourg_, which then, as now, was open to the public,
but secretly through the Loove and across the covered bridge uniting it
to the cathedral.
On more than one occasion the townsfolk had shown marked sympathy for
the Erembalds, and Louis feared that if his project was generally known,
or if the victims were afforded an opportunity of appealing to them, an
attempt at rescue might be made, which would perhaps end in revolution.
The first to suffer was Wulfric Cnopp, the brother of Bertulph and
Hacket. Until a few moments before his death he was ignorant of the fate
in store for him. He had just time to take one last look at his beloved
city, and then with a mighty effort, for Wulfric was a man of gigantic
stature, the executioners threw him over the ramparts. There is reason
to believe that this man was really guilty of the crime imputed to him.
Then came young Walter, the son of the Châtelain of Ardenburg, a noble
and a comely youth. 'For the love of God,' he cried, when he reached the
summit of the tower and the executioners were about to complete their
task, 'for the love of God let me say a prayer first.' They granted him
a moment's respite, and then like a flash of lightning he fell down
headlong and dashed all the life out of his beautiful body.
The next to die was one Eric, a knight of noble birth. Though he had
been hurled from so great a height, and though in the fall his body had
crashed against a wooden staircase with such violence that a step
secured by five nails had been thereby wrenched off, he was still
breathing when he reached the ground--had strength even to make the sign
of the Cross. Some women of the people would have staunched his wounds,
but one of the King's household heaved a great stone and drove them
away. Better so--'the little life that was left in him was but a
lingering and a cruel death.'
The rest suffered in like manner. Some were innocent, some were guilty,
seven-and-twenty of them all told. Their names are not recorded--this
only we know of them. They faced death without flinching, and died like
Christian men. His Saviour's name was the last word which passed the
lips of each of them, and each of them made the sign of the Cross
before he fell. By a refinement of barbarity they were not permitted to
receive the consolations of religion under pretext that they were
excommunicated. This was in direct contravention of Charles's own
ordinance concerning criminals. Their bodies were denied Christian
burial. They were thrown into a marsh beyond the village of St. André,
and for years afterwards no man after nightfall would willingly pass
that way.
'On Friday, May 6, King Louis resolved to go back to France, and the
same day he left Bruges, carrying away Robert with him.' Great was the
lamentation of our citizens when they saw him depart, for this noble
youth was beloved by all of them, and they knew he would never return.
"Good friends," said he, on seeing their grief, "my life is not in your
hands. Pray God to have pity on my soul." Louis did not dare to execute
his victim at Bruges, nor indeed here offer him any indignity, but no
sooner had they quitted the outskirts of the town than he gave orders
that his legs should be tied under his saddle, and when they reached
Mont Cassel he cut off his head.
Burchard too had paid the penalty of his crime. The Karls said that,
having quarrelled with Robert, he had been slain by him in a duel,
during the time when they were besieged in the tower, but Walter and
Walbert affirm that in this they lied, and that in reality he had made
his escape, and that he was afterwards captured and executed; and there
is also a tradition that he succeeded in escaping altogether from his
native land, and after many wanderings at length found refuge in the
south of Ireland.
Be this as it may, he had disappeared from Flanders, and thus the great
house of Erembald was all but wiped out. Of those who traced their
descent in the direct male line to its mighty founder, only Hacket and
his little son Robert, a child of tender years, remained alive. The
châtelain made his escape from the tower a few days before the
surrender. Whether he purchased the good will of one or other of the
Isegrin leaders, or whether he had succeeded in hoodwinking them, is
uncertain. All we know is that he escaped from Bruges, and, wandering
alone across the great salt marsh at the north of the city, presently
reached the impregnable stronghold of his son-in-law, Walter Cromlin,
the mighty Lord of Lisseweghe, a mere village now, but in those days an
important sea-coast town. Here he lay concealed until Dierick of Alsace,
more than a year later, brought peace once more to Flanders.
Hacket was shortly afterwards placed on trial, and the fact that he
succeeded in clearing his character is proof presumptive that Bertulph,
who like his brother Hacket had all along protested his innocence and
his capability of proving it, would have likewise been able to make his
words good.[13] Immediately after the trial Hacket was restored to his
former rank and possessions, we hear nothing more of the charge of
serfdom, and for many generations his descendants were mighty men in
Flanders. Amongst them note the magnificent Louis of Gruthuise, Peer of
Flanders, France and England to boot--Edward IV. created him Earl of
Winchester--who in the fourteen hundreds lived in royal state in the
beautiful palace on the banks of the Roya, which still goes by his name.
Of Hacket's subsequent history little is certainly known, but if the
conjectures of Olivier de Wree are well founded--and the evidence which
he adduces in their support is surely worthy of consideration--the life
and career of Desiderius Hacket was indeed a strange and chequered one.
Briefly the facts are as follows. In 1135 Rodolphe of Nesle, a scion of
the house of Erembald, was appointed Châtelain of Bruges; the name of
Hacket does not cease to appear at the foot of official documents until
nearly fifty years later, but whereas previous to 1135 the writer of
this signature invariably describes himself as châtelain, subsequent to
that date he signs as Canon of St. Donatian's, later on as Dean of the
same church, and later still as Abbot of Dunes.
Bearing in mind the uncommonness of the name, and the fact that we lose
all trace of Hacket the layman when Hacket the churchman appears, it
would seem in the highest degree probable that the signatures before and
after 1135 were the handiwork of one man. That this was certainly the
case after that date the testimony of the monastic chroniclers clearly
shows. They also tell us something more. The ecclesiastic in question,
before he was appointed Abbot of Dunes, for a short time governed a
branch house which he himself seems to have founded at Lisseweghe.[14]
He was reputed in his day a famous preacher; he was living and signing
documents in 1183, and died at an advanced age and in the odour of
sanctity. It would seem then that the bellicose Châtelain of Bruges
ended his days as a monk.
Strangely enough Hacket's sworn enemy and rival, the man to whose enmity
was due all the misfortune that befell his house, the treacherous
Tancmar of Straten himself, towards the close of his life also donned
the cowl. He became a monk in the great Benedictine house of St. Andrew
hard-by his own estate, and tradition says that he too died a saint.
Surely it is not a little significant that three of the chief actors in
this bloody drama should have been numbered by their contemporaries in
the ranks of the blessed. Charles, that hero of blood and sentiment, of
violence and delicate emotions, who firmly believed that he was dying
for justice sake; Straten, the devotee, who for his own ends fanned the
flame of his master's wrath--and poor Hacket, who was accused of murder,
escaped by the skin of his teeth, and at length proved his innocence,
most probably by the rite of ordeal. The age in which these men lived
was an age of contrasts, an age of clashing tones and inharmonious
tints. In those days it was the fashion to be devout, and the shibboleth
of the fine gentleman was the fervent expression of his unwavering
faith.
CHAPTER VII
_Bruges in the Days of Charles the Good, etc._
Of the actual buildings of Charles's day only a few fragments remain:
the Chapel of St. Basil, the lower part of the tower of the present
cathedral, and perhaps some portion of the Church of Notre Dame; of
those associated with his tragic end or the bloody scenes which
followed, in all probability no stone is left.
His palace, called the Loove, which he himself had built, has long since
been swept away; its site is now occupied by the Palais de Justice. The
old Church of St. Peter, where his funeral Mass was celebrated, was
pulled down at the close of the seventeen hundreds, of the church which
took its place only the chancel now remains, and even this no longer
serves its original purpose. Some years ago it was converted into a
tavern, and it is now a warehouse. St. Donatian's, the scene of
Charles's death, and of the Erembalds' last stand for life and liberty,
was destroyed at the Revolution. It stood just opposite the Hôtel de
Ville, on the site where now, under the shade of spreading sycamore and
chestnut trees, the flower market is held, and the statue of Van Eyck in
the centre of this square marks the spot where Charles is said to have
fallen.
The débris of the cathedral was carried all over Flanders. A portion of
it is said to have been used for the construction of a château which
stands some little way off the high road on the right-hand side between
Steenbrugge and Lophem, about three miles from Bruges. It is a pleasant
enough place to look at in its beautiful wooded grounds, but the country
folk will tell you that ill fortune has always followed those who have
dwelt there.
Charles's name is also associated with the beautiful Church of Notre
Dame. Here, in 1091, a chapter of secular priests was installed, Charles
provided for the endowment of half the canonicates, and when, in 1116,
the building was destroyed by fire, it was he who restored it.
Tradition says that the main portion of the present church was
constructed in 1180 or thereabouts by Gertrude of Alsace, the widow of
Rodolphe de Nesle, Châtelain of Bruges, and curiously enough a scion of
the house of Erembald, but as Charles's church was only completed in
1120, and it is not likely that a comparatively new and probably
magnificent structure would have been deliberately pulled down--and
there is no record of its having been accidentally destroyed by fire or
otherwise--it may well be that Charles in reality only built a portion
of the new church, perhaps the nave and the adjoining aisles, and that
what Gertrude did, sixty years later, was to complete his unfinished
work. If this be so, the greater part of the present building owes its
origin to Charles the Good.
In the Church of Notre Dame we perhaps also get a glimpse of the
magnificent Bertulph himself. Of its chapter a certain Germanus was the
first provost, who in all probability at the time of his appointment was
quite a youth, for shortly afterwards he went to reside at Louvain, in
order to complete his theological studies, and one Bertulph was
appointed to act as superior during his absence. What we are told of
the character and disposition of this ecclesiastic coincides so nearly
with the character and disposition ascribed to the redoubtable Provost
of Bruges, that, bearing in mind the identity of their name, not a
common one in those days in Flanders, and the intimate connection which
we shall see each of them had with Eeckhout Abbey,[15] it is difficult
to believe that the Bertulph of Notre Dame and the Bertulph of St.
Donatian's were different persons. In each of them we find the same
fiery temper, the same overweening pride, and the same indomitable will,
the same exaggerated devotion and the same harshness in their dealings
with their fellow-men. Walbert has left us a graphic picture of the
receptions this 'proud prelate' held in the great oak-roofed hall of his
sumptuous palace on the Bourg. Swelling with pride, there he used to sit
on a stately throne placed underneath the huge beam which broke and fell
with a mighty crash on the throne itself three weeks before his
death--portent of coming ill, had he but taken it to heart, but Bertulph
was too stiff-necked for that, says Walbert. There a crowd of knights
and clerks and burghers were daily wont to jostle one another in their
quest to pay homage to, or perchance seek favour from, the great man who
was all-powerful alike in Church and State. When any one approached whom
this proud prelate knew quite well but did not wish to recognise, he
made pretence that he had never seen him before. 'Who is this person?'
he used to ask of one of his attendants, and then, when he had been
informed of the name and rank of his would-be interlocutor, if he were
in the humour to do so, he would vouchsafe to salute him. And, blurts
out Walbert with much feeling and inappositeness, 'he was very hard on
his clergy.' Walbert was one of them, and he, if any one, should have
known.
The canons of Notre Dame would certainly have given their Bertulph the
same character.
Hardly had he been installed provost than he sent them all about their
business and filled their places with monks. The irregularity of their
lives, he alleged, was scandalous. Irregular lives in those days, if we
may trust Walter, were far from uncommon alike amongst layfolk and
clerics, and that was one reason why men thought so highly of Charles.
Amidst so much wood, hay and stubble, Charles appeared pure gold. It is
not unlikely then that Bertulph's accusations were well founded.
Radbode, Bishop of Tournai, presumedly thought so, for he had authorised
what had been done. Not so Germanus. Immediately on his return to
Bruges, he petitioned Bishop Baldwin, who meanwhile had succeeded
Radbode in the See of Tournai, to revoke his predecessor's decision,
alleging that the changes at Notre Dame had been made without consulting
him, the lawful superior, and in opposition to the wishes of the secular
canons, and thereupon the bishop gave orders for their reinstatement.
This was on March 31, 1101. Bertulph was furious and appealed in vain to
Rome. By letters, dated April 1102, Pope Pascal II. confirmed Baldwin's
decision, and presently Bertulph's monks were forced to quit the canons'
cloister. After several peregrinations they at last built themselves a
habitation hard-by the Church of Notre Dame in the great oak wood which
at that time fringed the left bank of the Roya and stretched far away
into the country beyond.
This was the origin of the Abbey of Eeckhout (oak wood) famous in the
annals of Bruges.
This abbey was destroyed during the French Revolution, and only the
gateway now remains--No. 40 _rue Eeckhout_. Part of the grounds are
included in the gardens of the Convent of St. André in the same street;
part in a lovely old kitchen garden and orchard at the back of the
houses on the Dyver. As Eeckhout Abbey was associated at its birth with
Notre Dame, so was it at its death.
[Illustration: THE PORCH OF NOTRE DAME]
At the time of the Revolution Notre Dame was dismantled--the pavement
was torn up, the stained-glass windows were broken, and every kind of
havoc was made, but the bare walls were left standing, and presently,
when more tranquil times came, the old church was restored to public
worship. As the beautiful flamboyant stalls which had once lined the
choir had ere this been sold and carried away, it is said to England, it
became necessary to procure new ones. It so happened that just before
the French came, the monks of Eeckhout had ordered a new set of stalls
for their abbey church. These, owing to the fact that they had not yet
been erected, had escaped destruction, and by Napoleon's orders they
were set up in Notre Dame. The wood-carver, however, who had made them,
had not received payment, and protested that the stalls were his, and by
way of asserting his right, every Sunday and feast day, at High Mass and
Vespers, until the day of his death some years after, he persisted in
seating himself in the choir stalls at Notre Dame. Matter of little
moment; after the Revolution there were no canons to occupy them.
From an artistic point of view there is nothing very remarkable about
the stalls in question. They are sufficiently mediocre work of the
period, but the hand of time has mellowed them, and their associations
make them interesting. The carving of some of the _miserere_ seats is
very quaint, and is certainly ancient. Whether these formed part of the
lost stalls of Notre Dame, or whether the redoubtable wood-carver
employed some of the old Eeckhout work for his new stalls, it would be
difficult to say.
CHAPTER VIII
_William Cliton_
William of Löo, as we have seen, was the legitimate heir to the throne
of Flanders, and if, when Charles fell, he had acted with energy and
determination, there can be no doubt that he would have been able to
grasp the prize he so much coveted, and retain it in spite of his
enemies.
Fortune had been singularly kind to him. He was the only representative
in the direct male line of the dynasty of Robert the Frisian, he was the
favoured candidate of the great house of Erembald; his aunt, the
countess dowager, was his staunch adherent. He had the goodwill of her
second husband, his next-door neighbour, the powerful Duke of Brabant,
who had given him his daughter in marriage. In Henry Beauclerc, who had
married his wife's sister, and whose Norman duchy adjoined the realm to
which he laid claim, he had a friend who knew how to back fair promises
with English gold; and lastly, when Charles was slain, he was within a
stone's throw of the capital. But 'William saw a meteor on the horizon:
the sword of Gervais Van Praet,' and he was too dazzled by it to summon
up courage to help his nearest friends, and when the Erembalds fell, the
grandsons and great-grandsons of Baldwin the Devout took heart to
dispute his claim. The number of them was legion. There was Charles's
nephew, Arnulph of Denmark, and his first cousin Dierick of Alsace;
Baldwin of Mons, the representative of the dynasty of Baldwin the Good;
William Cliton; Stephen of Blois, and perhaps too Henry of England
himself.[16]
The Burgrave of Löo had sat with folded hands when the tide was at the
flood, and in doing so he lost his one opportunity. In vain he now posed
as Charles's avenger. All the world knew of his intrigues with the
Erembalds, and it was more than suspected that his own hands were red
with Charles's blood. His treachery gained for him no new friends, and
disgusted the remnant which in spite of all still clung to him.
On the very day when he was busy hanging poor Isaac of Reninghe[17]
whom, in spite of a monk's cowl, a long face and a book of psalms, his
blood-hounds had smelt out the day before in the Abbey of Terouane,
Louis the Fat disowned him.
'Have nothing to do with William of Ypres,' ran the French King's letter
to the barons and burghers of Bruges; 'have nothing to do with William
of Ypres, because he is a bastard, born of a noble father and a mother
of vile birth, who all her life was a weaver of thread' (it was the same
charge that had stung the Erembalds to revolt; William's mother was a
Karline), 'but come forthwith to Arras, and there choose in my presence
a prince worthy of Flanders.'
II.--Genealogical Table of the Counts of Flanders from Baldwin V. to
Baldwin VII.
=Baldwin V.= = Ethel, d. of Robert
(of Lille) | le Fort, King of France
_d._ 1067 |
|
|
+----------+---------------+----------------------+---+
| | | |
=Robert I.= = Gertrude Baldwin VI. = Richilde | Judith = Tostig, son of
(the | of Saxony, (the Good) | of | Earl Godwin
Frisian) | widow of _d._ 1070 | Hainault |
_d._ 1092 | Florence, | Matilda = William
| Count of | | the Conqueror
| Holland | +-------------------+
| and +------------------------------------+ |
| Friesland | |
+--------+------------+-----------------+---------------+ | |
| | | | | |
Robert II. = Clémence Philip = The Lady Adela = Canute, Gertrude = Dierick,| |
_d._ 1111 | of of | of Loo | King | Count | |
| Burgundy Ypres | | of | of | |
| _d._ 1093| | Denmark | Alsace | |
| | +----------+ | | |
| +----------+ | +-------+ | |
+------+ | +----+--+ | | |
| | | | | | |
Baldwin VII. *William Cecilia Charles = Marguerite--*Dierick--Sybil | |
(Hapkin) of Loo _m._ | (the of | of Alsace| of | |
_d._ a daughter | Good) Clermont | _d._ | Anjou | |
1119 of Godfrey | _d._ | 1168 | | |
of Brabant | 1126 | | | |
| | | | |
+--------------------------+ | | | |
| +---------------------------------------------------+ | | |
| | +------------------------------------------------------------+ | |
| | | +-----------------------------------------------------------+ |
| | | | |
| | | +----+--------+ +----------+-----------------+------------+
| | | | | | | |
| | | =Arnulph III.= Baldwin I. Robert, *Henry I. Adele = Stephen
| | | _d._ 1071 of Duke of of England, _d._ | of
| | | Hainault Normandy _m._ Adelicia 1137 | Blois
| | | _d._ 1102 | of Brabant | _d._ 1102
| | | | | |
| | | | +----+ |
| | | | | |
| | | *Baldwin II. *=William Cliton= *Stephen
| | | _d._ 1133 _d._ 1128 of England
| | | | _d._ 1154
| | | |
| | | Baldwin III.-------------------------------------+
| | | _d._ 1171 |
| | +------------------------------+ |
| | | |
| +------------------+ +---+----------------+ |
| | | | |
*Arnulph Lauretta = Ivan, =Philip= = Elizabeth =Marguerite= = =Baldwin IV.=
of Count _d._ of of =Hainault=
Denmark of 1191 Vermandois and =VII.= of
Alost =Flanders=
[*] Claimants to the County of Flanders on the death of Charles the
Good.
Louis had already determined who should be the new count, but he was
wise enough to gild the bitter pill, and when the barons reached Arras
he adroitly persuaded them to elect William Cliton, and to secure also
the acquiescence of the burghers. William was only fourth in the order
of succession, but he and Louis had married two sisters, and the French
Queen naturally enough desired to befriend a kinsman on whom fortune had
never yet smiled. Besides, the arrangement fitted in exactly with
Louis's own views. The friendship of Flanders was to him a matter of far
greater moment than the law of primogeniture, he had known William all
his life, and he felt that he could trust him. His young favourite would
doubtless, too, prove a dangerous rival to Henry Beauclerc, the one man
whom Louis feared; with the aid of his Flemish vassals he would be able
to wrest his Norman inheritance from the English King, and perhaps also
the crown of England itself.
When the burghers of Bruges learned what had happened, they were cut to
the quick. That Louis should have offered the communes of Flanders a
voice in the election of their Count, and then presumed to foist on them
the man of his own choice, was something more than injury--it was an
insult. But the French King was backed by a great army; the burghers
were shrewd enough to see that it was more politic to obey, and thus
preserve the outward form of liberty, than to refuse to do so at a time
when opposition was certain to be barren of profitable results, and on
the evening of Tuesday (Easter Tuesday), the 6th of April, Louis and his
nominee were permitted to enter Bruges.
Next day, says Walbert, the King and the Count, with their knights and
ours, our burghers and the Karls of the seaboard, assembled in the
Sablon Field, and there the Cliton solemnly swore to respect the
privileges of the city and of the Church of St. Donatian, and to abolish
the house tax and market dues, so that the citizens of Bruges should be
for ever free. At the same time he acknowledged their right to modify
and correct according to circumstances their own laws and customs. Then
the vassals of Charles paid their homage to William, the mightiest
putting their hands in his, and receiving in return the kiss of
investiture, those of less degree simply bending while the Count touched
them with his sceptre. All the great officers were confirmed in their
rights and privileges, save only the Erembalds, who were declared
incapable of holding office or property in the county.
Although William Cliton was thus legally invested with the sovereignty
of Flanders, his right to govern that province was far from being
generally recognised, and the whole land was rent by factions. William
of Löo was still Count for the men of Ypres; St. Omer acknowledged
Arnulph of Denmark; Audenarde, Baldwin of Mons, to whose standard had
rallied Dierick of Alsace, who for the time being seems to have
relinquished his own claim, whilst the Erembalds, as we know, were still
holding out in their tower at Bruges and still receiving from the great
freeholders of the seaboard assurances of support and help.
Nevertheless, if William could have given his subjects good government,
if he had known how to exercise his new functions with a little tact and
discretion, above all, if only he had been true to his word anent the
abolition of taxes, in all probability things would have gradually
settled down, and little by little men would have acquiesced in his
rule. But William was a Norman, and the Normans had now become more
French and more feudal than the French themselves. A man of this stamp
was little likely to find favour with the Flemish people, who still
retained, along with their rude Northern speech, their ancestors' love
of freedom and justice, and the first incident of his reign was to them
like salt on an open sore.
It happened thus. Shortly after the Count's arrival at Bruges, a certain
citizen, who had married a sister of one of the Erembalds, crept up
secretly, as he thought, to the tower of St. Donatian's, with a view to
a little business talk with his brother-in-law, who owed him a
considerable sum of money. One of Praet's men saw him, and, as all
communication with the besieged had been strictly forbidden, the fellow
was arrested and brought before the Count.
The news of what had happened spread like wildfire, the burghers flew to
arms, and crying out that they would suffer tyranny at the hands of no
man, that the prisoner was a free citizen of Bruges, and that it was for
them to judge him, made a rush for the Loove. Fortunately for William
the doors and windows were barricaded before the mob had time to reach
the palace, and all their efforts to batter them in were fruitless. At
length, when the burghers had expended something of their energy in
red-hot threats and curses, that crafty old knight, Gervais Praet, went
down amongst them, made them a speech, called them friends and
fellow-citizens, bade them bear in mind that it was at their own request
that the Count had appointed him châtelain, averred that in the matter
which had called forth their wrath he had only acted in accordance with
the law, but if they were not satisfied with what he had done, he had no
wish to exercise authority over them, and was quite ready to resign his
châtelaincy. In a word, the oil of his eloquence soothed the burghers
for the moment, and they dispersed to their several homes.
Similar disturbances, arising out of incidents as trivial, occurred
shortly afterwards at Lille and at St. Omer, and in each case they were
with difficulty suppressed after much blood had been spilt, whilst the
heavy fines in which William by way of punishment mulcted those towns
altogether alienated the goodwill of the citizens.
But this was only a beginning. After the conquest of the Erembalds and
the capture of William of Ypres, the Cliton grew bolder. On September
16, one hundred and twenty-five burghers of Bruges and thirty-seven of
Ardenburgh were condemned as Burchard's accomplices. In vain they
protested their innocence and demanded a legal trial before their own
judges. William, in spite of his oath, refused to listen, and all who
were suspected of having given assistance to Charles's murderers were
treated in like manner. Stronghold after stronghold was razed to the
ground, and the Karls of the country-side and the free burghers of the
Flemish cities went forth from the land in thousands.
William's empty purse could not satisfy his rapacious followers. This
was probably the cause of the violent measures he took to discover
Charles's treasure, and of his attempt to re-impose the house tax and
the market tolls. From time immemorial these dues had been granted in
fief to sundry great nobles, who were now clamouring for compensation;
and hence the oath, which he had too inconsiderately taken when first he
undertook the government of the country, only gained for him the
ill-will alike of the knight and the burgher. Thus was he set betwixt
two foes, without the means or the ability to withstand them. At Ghent
the citizens and nobles joined hands, and with stinging words the great
imperial vassal, Ivan of Alost, voiced their common indignation. 'Sir
Count,' he cried, 'if you had intended to deal righteously by this city
and by us who are your friends, instead of authorizing the most odious
exactions, you would have treated us justly and defended us against our
enemies. But, on the contrary, you have violated all your promises and
broken all your oaths, and every obligation arising from our common
plighted troth is thereby cancelled. We know how you have treated Lille
and we know how you have treated Bruges, and we know, too, in what
manner you would like to treat Ghent. 'Let the barons and the burghers
and the clergy of Flanders judge betwixt us, and if it be found, as we
allege, that you are without faith and without loyalty, a perfidious and
a perjured man, then renounce the office you now hold, and we will
choose a worthier Count to govern us.' Cut to the quick, the Cliton
sprang forward. 'Hold,' he cried, 'I free you, Ivan, from the homage
which you have sworn to me, and with my sword I am ready now to prove to
you, my peer, that in all that appertaineth to the government of this
realm I have acted righteously.' But the voice of Ivan was the voice of
the people, he refused the challenge, and it was at length decided that
a great Council should be held at Ypres on the eighth day of the ensuing
month, for the purpose of deliberating on the affairs of the country;
and that all delegates should come unarmed. Meanwhile, determined to rid
himself of his turbulent subjects by stratagem, William, before the
appointed day, betook himself to Ypres accompanied by a large band of
armed retainers, and an armed rabble of the lowest class, so that the
town was filled with soldiers, purposing, when the delegates arrived, to
take them all prisoners. But these last getting wind of the plot, halted
at Roulers, and presently two heralds rode into the market-place at
Ypres, and thus made proclamation:--
'Be it known to you, Sir Count, that Ivan of Alost and the men of Ghent
by our lips proclaim that henceforth they renounce that homage which
hitherto they have faithfully kept to you, because they are well aware
that you have come hither to destroy them by ruse and naughtiness.'
From that moment William's cause was lost. On the 11th of March, Dierick
of Alsace entered Flanders. The great imperial vassals, Daniel of
Termonde and Ivan of Alost, at once rallied to his standard, Ghent
received him with open arms; a little later (March 27), when he reached
Bruges, Gervais of Praet declared in his favour, and three days
afterwards the nobles and burghers assembled in the Champ de Sablon
solemnly deposed William Cliton, and declared Dierick his successor, and
he in his turn solemnly confirmed and increased the rights and
privileges of the city, and made proclamation that henceforth no man
should be condemned on suspicion and without trial for complicity in
Charles's murder.
By this just and politic proceeding he gained the goodwill of the Karls,
and thus supported alike by the nobles, the burghers, and what we should
call the yeomen farmers of the sea coast, nothing could arrest his
progress. Neither the threats of the French King, nor the spiritual
thunder of Archbishop Simon of Tournai, not even the victory which
William and his Normans gained at Axpoel Heath, where so great was the
slaughter that on Dierick's return to Bruges the whole city was filled
with lamentation.
Nothing shows more clearly the unpopularity of William than the barren
results of this victory. Not a single city opened its doors to him.
Presently, when he was laying siege to Alost, he received a mortal
wound, and his death on August 4, 1128, left Dierick master of Flanders.
The night that William died, says Ordericus Vitalis, Duke Robert (his
father), who was in prison at Devizes, and had been there twenty-two
years, felt in a dream his own right arm pierced with a lance, whereupon
he seemed to lose the use of it, and when he awoke in the morning, he
said to those about him, 'Alas! my son is dead.'
Walbert, though he enlarges at considerable length on the iniquity of
'our burghers' in rebelling against their lawful sovereign, gives
William but a poor character. In my opinion, he says, the Almighty
removed this man by death from the county, because he had laid waste all
the land, provoked the inhabitants thereof to civil war, and set at
naught alike the laws of God and of man. Nor did God suffer him to go
the way of all flesh until he had first endured the chastisement due to
his misdeeds. For in sooth Count William will confess amongst the shades
whom he sent before him to the Infernal Regions that, of all those
things he possessed in life, this alone now remains to him--his military
reputation.
Ordericus Vitalis, who represents the Cliton in much more favourable
light, bears witness also to his prowess in battle. 'Ad militare
facinus,' he says, 'damnabiliter promptus.'
[Illustration: A Renaissance Gable]
CHAPTER IX
_Dierick of Alsace and the Precious Blood_
It was to the cities and to the people of Flanders that Dierick of
Alsace owed his crown. When Ivan of Alost and Daniel of Termonde
renounced their homage to William Cliton, they did so in the name of the
burghers of Ghent. When Louis interposed on behalf of his kinsman, it
was the burghers of Bruges who hurled back the proud reply,--'Be it
known to the King and to all princes and peoples, and to their posterity
throughout all time, that the King of France hath no part in the
election of a Count of Flanders.'
When William persuaded Archbishop Simon to lay Ghent and Bruges under
interdict, it was owing to the fear inspired by the people that 'no
clerk was found hardy enough to proclaim it,' and when Dierick repaid
him in his own coin by sentence of excommunication, the bolt was hurled
by all the clergy of Bruges, assembled together in the Church of Notre
Dame, in the presence of all the burghers.
The triumph of Dierick then meant the triumph of the people, the triumph
of liberty, the triumph of nationalism as opposed to the centralizing
and imperialist ideals of France. In a word, the triumph of all that was
good in the great cause for which Bertulph and his comrades had died.
The new Count was a Fleming of the Flemings. He had been brought up
amongst them; their habits and customs were familiar to him, his speech
was their speech, his thoughts were their thoughts, and his ways were
their ways. 'Men called him wise,' says an ancient chronicler, 'and he
was all his life kindly, upright, loyal, brave, and great withal in the
art of governing men.' Indeed, his whole career shows what skill and
tact he possessed alike in conciliating the goodwill of his own
opponents and in settling the disputes of others.
As early as May 31, Arnulph of Denmark resigned his claims in his favour
(_see_ Wegener, note on p. 169), later on he purchased the acquiescence
of another rival, Baldwin of Mons, by giving him his daughter to wife.
Even William of Ypres in the end acknowledged his right to the throne,
and was content to end his days obscurely as simple Lord of Löo. His
first act as prince was to bring about peace between the Isegrins and
the free landholders of the seaboard, and by his reconciliation with
Hacket, whom he again reinstated in the châtelaincy of Bruges, the legal
right of the Karls under his jurisdiction to the title of freemen was
publicly acknowledged. Henceforth, until the Revolution, they were the
_Francq Hostes_ or _Francons_ of the Liberty of Bruges. At his
coronation, Dierick had solemnly sworn to respect the lawful rights and
liberties of all his subjects, and he loyally kept his word. Throughout
his long reign of forty years he always showed himself a good friend to
commerce, a staunch upholder of popular institutions, and a generous
supporter of the down-trodden and the oppressed. To him, says a Flemish
writer, the greater number of the communes of Flanders are indebted
alike for their origin and their development. During his reign were
inscribed in the charters of the Flemish cities the germs of those
rights and liberties which are to-day guaranteed by the Belgian
Constitution.
Like all good and wise men of his day, Dierick was profoundly impressed
with the truths of Christianity, and after the manner of his age, he on
more than one occasion took up the sword of the Crusader. On his return
from one of these expeditions, he brought back with him to Bruges a
treasure which has had no little influence on the architectural, and
artistic, and religious development of the city; a vial of dark,
ruby-coloured fluid, which tradition said was some of the water in which
Joseph of Arimathea had once washed the blood-stained body of Christ.
The early history of this precious memorial of Our Lord's Passion is
veiled in mystery, but from the day when Dierick of Alsace brought the
famous relic to Bruges the thread of its story is unbroken. The
circumstances which led to his possession of it are well known. It was
the time of the second Crusade. Dierick, roused perhaps by the preaching
of St. Bernard at Furnes, or possibly moved thereto by reason of his
kinship with Baldwin, King of Jerusalem--they had married two
sisters--resolved to serve under the banner of the Cross, and in the
month of June 1147, along with the Emperor Conrad and Louis VII. of
France, set out for Palestine; but the campaign was almost barren of
results. What with the perfidy of the Greeks, and the pettiness and
jealousy of the European leaders, it could hardly have been otherwise.
The little that had been accomplished, however, was due to the courage
and perseverance of Dierick, and by way of recompense King Baldwin
bestowed on him the relic in question.
It was enclosed in a tube of crystal, with chains of silver and stoppers
of gold, and Dierick received the gift on his knees from the hands of
the Patriarch of
[Illustration: Hôtel de Ville and the Chapel of the Holy Blood]
Jerusalem, but he said that a rough soldier like himself was not fit to
be the bearer of so holy a thing, and hung it round the neck of his
chaplain, Leo of St. Omer, who never parted with it, night or day, until
on the evening of April 7, 1150, he returned with the Count to Bruges.
Then, with much solemn pomp, the relic was consigned to the Court
chaplains, who placed it in the old chapel which Baldwin of the Iron
Hand had built, adjoining his palace in the Bourg, where it still
remains, and is still preserved in the same crystal vial in which
Dierick of Alsace received it. The burghers of Bruges have on more than
one occasion been near losing their much-prized treasure, but somehow or
other it has always come back to them.
During the troubles with Ghent in the days of Van Artevelde, the relic
was one May morning being carried in solemn procession round the
ramparts. Presently the band of monks and friars encountered a band of
soldiers; the two processions became entangled, and during the confusion
some one cried out, 'the Ghenters are upon us.' Panic followed, and when
the panic was over the relic had disappeared. Three days later some nuns
from the Beguinage saw something shining at the bottom of the stream
which runs through their cloister. It was the reliquary of the Holy
Blood. Then again, during the troublous times which closed the fifteen
hundreds, when Calvinism triumphant held the town, and churches and
monasteries were sacked, it was only through the prudence of Juan de
Malvenda that the precious treasure was saved. Malvenda, who was one of
the church-wardens of St. Basil's, secretly conveyed the relic to his
own house--an old-fashioned, red-brick turreted mansion, still standing
in the rue _aux Laines_ (No. 18), where he concealed it in the cellar
till the storm had passed. Again, for over twenty years, from October
13, 1799, till April 20, 1819, the relic was hidden in the houses of
various citizens, in order to preserve it from the fanaticism of the
Jacobins. For the same reason the annual procession on the Feast of the
Precious Blood had to be discontinued, and it was only resumed in 1819.
This procession was first instituted in 1303, in memory of the
deliverance of the town from the French by Breidel and De Coninck. At
first it was of a grave and solemn character, the faithful of both sexes
following chanting litanies and psalms. Little by little it grew
spectacular. In 1395 the apostles and evangelists were introduced, the
next year King Herod and his Court, in 1405 the Nativity, the tree of
Jesse, and so forth. At length, in the fifteen hundreds, the profane and
the sacred were mingled together, giants, clowns, jugglers followed, the
corporation of Bruges thinking by this means to give the procession a
popular character, and thus to draw visitors to their town.
The great procession of the Holy Blood has long since resumed its
decorum, and thousands of strangers from all parts of Europe annually
throng the town to witness it.
Like the Sainte Chapelle at Paris, and the old city church of St.
Etheldreda (Holborn), the Sanctuary of the Precious Blood at Bruges
consists in reality of two distinct churches, one set over the other.
The lower storey, dedicated to St. Basil, was founded, as we have seen,
by Baldwin, Bras de Fer, and is in all probability the most ancient
building in the city. There can be little doubt that this chapel was
originally the private oratory of the Counts of Flanders, adjoining
their primitive palace. The four great columns which support the vault,
the western and southern walls, and the annex, erroneously called the
Baptistry Chapel, with the adjoining buildings,
[Illustration: The Minne Water Bridge and Round Tower]
none of which were originally included in the chapel but formed part of
the Count's palace--these are the oldest portions of this most
interesting structure. In 1095 Count Robert of Jerusalem, on his return
from the Holy Land, placed here the relics of St. Basil which he had
brought with him from Cæsarea in Cappadocia; hence the dedication. Later
on, his nephew, Dierick of Alsace, in gratitude for some marvellous
answer to prayer obtained through the intercession of the saint,
restored and embellished the church; hence the erroneous tradition which
makes him its founder.
Such as Dierick left St. Basil's in 1150, so it is to-day. It has
recently been carefully and conscientiously restored, and it is perhaps
the most beautiful and perfect specimen of Romanesque architecture in
Flanders. During the work of restoration, when the pavement was renewed,
an interesting discovery was made:--the vault in which had lain, since
1412, the mortal remains of Ian Van Oudenaerde, the architect who
restored the belfry in 1396 or thereabouts, and who added the four
beautiful turrets at the angles of its second storey. The _Porte de Ste.
Croix_ and the _Porte de Gand_ are also his work, as well as the massive
round tower at the head of the Minne Water. The nave of St. Basil's has
from time immemorial been known as the Masons' Chapel. Here, until the
Revolution, the members of the Guild of Masons were wont to perform
their devotions and to celebrate annually, with great pomp, the feasts
of their patron saints, and it was doubtless on this account that Ian
Van Oudenaerde, that great Master Mason, was laid to rest in St.
Basil's.
The upper chapel, which is probably the place where Dierick enshrined
his priceless relic, was almost entirely rebuilt towards the close of
the fourteen hundreds, and of the original Romanesque structure little
now remains save the two round-headed bays which separate the naves. The
work of reconstruction was not yet finished in 1482, but as during the
following year the first stained window was put in, it would seem that
it was at this time approaching completion.
Both the upper and lower chapel suffered much during the religious
troubles under Philip II., and again at the time of the French
Revolution. Indeed, when the _Septembriseurs_ had sated their fury on
the old building, there was little left but the bare walls, and into
such a state of decay had it fallen that when Napoleon visited Bruges in
1810, the civic authorities were thinking of pulling it down.
[Illustration: Crypt of the Chapel du Saint Sang]
'That,' said the Emperor, 'shall never be,' when the question was mooted
in his presence. 'When I look at those graceful minarets, I fancy myself
in Egypt. To destroy a monument like that would be a sin crying for
vengeance.' Thus the old church was saved. Presently it was restored to
public worship, for from the time of the riots until 1818 the lower
chapel had been used by the police as a prison for drunken and
disorderly persons, and a place in which to confine stray
[Illustration: PORCH OF THE CHAPEL OF ST. BASIL]
dogs, and during the same period the upper chapel, roofless, windowless,
a veritable wreck, had served no purpose whatever. The present elaborate
scheme of decoration was carried out in 1856 from the designs of two
English architects, William Brangwyn and Thomas Harper King, and the old
church is now gorgeous with colour and gold. But though the general
effect is on the whole pleasing, the details are not happy. Thanks to
the late Baron Béthune's _Lucas Schoolen_, native artists could by this
time do something better, and it is much to be desired that the wealthy
confraternity of the Holy Blood would undertake the redecoration of
their chapel. The lower sanctuary was restored only two years ago and,
as we have already noted, most successfully.
_La Noble Confrérie du Précieux Sang_ consists of a provost and thirty
titular members, all of whom must be Flemings of noble, or, as we should
say, gentle birth, in memory of Count Dierick and the thirty Flemish
knights who in 1150 brought the precious relic to Bruges. In addition to
these there are a certain number of honorary members of other
nationalities, for the most part great ecclesiastics, amongst them Pope
Leo XIII., whose name was enrolled in the 'golden Register' on May 5,
1844, at which time he was Nuncio to the Court at Brussels. In addition
to these, some thousands of persons of every nationality and of all
classes are united to the confraternity under the title of affiliated
members.
The management of the confraternity, the churches, and all that
appertains thereto, is entirely in the hands of the provost and titular
members, who are laymen, but other members, of whatsoever degree,
participate equally in the Masses and devotions which are celebrated in
the Chapel of the Precious Blood.
We are indebted for the above details to the kindness of Canon Louis
Van Haecke, chaplain-in-chief of _La Noble Confrérie_. If any of our
readers should desire to know something more concerning this subject we
would refer them to his interesting work--_Le Précieux Sang à Bruges_.
[Illustration: Godshuis near the Pont des Lions]
CHAPTER X
_Philip of Alsace and the Charter of the Franc_
Philip of Alsace reigned over Flanders from 1168 till 1191, and
notwithstanding his frequent wars the land prospered under his rule. In
his method of government he followed the policy of Dierick his father.
Like him he was a builder of cities--Nieuport and Damme, at least, owe
their origin to Philip of Alsace--and like him he was a promoter of
popular liberties and popular institutions. It seems to have been the
mission of the princes of the House of Alsace, as Kervyn justly
observes, to proclaim the rights of the communes of Flanders, and their
fulfilment of it is their greatest glory. Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, Furnes,
Gravelines, Nieuport, Dunkirk, Damme, are among the famous cities to
which one or other of them granted municipal charters. But the charter
which will interest the reader most was conceded to neither city nor
town, but to the inhabitants of that vast irregular-shaped tract of
country in the neighbourhood of Bruges which went by the name of its
Franc, or, as we should perhaps say, its Liberty, and comprised within
its borders no less than ninety-one parishes, and the towns of Ostend,
Blankenberghe, Eccloo, Dixmude, Lisseweghe, Ardenburgh and Sluys--all of
them in these days centres of no little importance. Though from time
immemorial, as we have seen, the yeomen who inhabited this district had
been to all intents and purposes a free and independent people, who
elected their own chiefs and lived under their own laws, it was Count
Philip of Alsace who first gave legal sanction to their political
constitution, and the instrument by which he did so was the famous
_Keurbrief_ of 1190.
As with the first Flemings, with our own Saxon forefathers, and probably
also with the ancestors of all nationalities of Teutonic origin, the
Wehrgeld, or, as Green calls it, 'the Blood-wite,' or compensation in
money for personal wrong, and mutual responsibility were the mainspring
and corner-stone of the judicial code which Philip's charter sanctioned.
Eye for eye, limb for limb, life for life, or for each its equivalent in
current coin, this is the rough-and-ready theory which runs through the
whole of this remarkable piece of legislation. But it was not only for
personal injury that punishment in kind or an allotted fine was exacted;
it was the penalty also attached to other offences. Thus the man who had
been convicted of breaking down a dyke was condemned to suffer the loss
of the hand with which he had broken it, and probably, by way of
compensation for the damage which he had thereby entailed, to forfeit
all his goods; and it was a penal offence in the Liberty of Bruges to
marry an infant without the consent of her heirs-at-law. 'Whosoever,'
runs this curious enactment, 'shall be convicted of wedding a girl who
has not yet arrived at years of discretion, without the consent of those
of her relations who are her heirs presumptive, shall be liable to
forfeit all his goods, and if such an one shall have carried his infant
bride out of the realm, her heirs may lawfully take possession of her
goods; but if the aforesaid girl, repenting, shall presently return
home, and be willing to quit her unlawful spouse, her property shall be
restored to her; but if, on the contrary, she will not leave him, then
shall she in no wise recover it.'
The life of each man had its allotted value, which varied according to
rank and station, and curiously enough, in days, when throughout Europe
the priesthood was held in high esteem, the clerk's life was valued at
only one half the price of the life of the Karl. Just as the Salic law
fixes the composition for the murder of a Roman proprietor at the half
of that payable for the murder of a Frank, so the law of the Liberty of
Bruges valued the life of a clerk, who was considered as a Roman, at
only half of the value of the life of a Karl.
As to the fines imposed, the _Keurbrief_ ordained that they should be
levied in the first place on the property of the offending party, and if
this were too inconsiderable to realise the required sum, that his
fellow guildsmen should make up the deficiency.
Bearing all this in mind, Hacket's demand that the limbs and lives of
Charles's murderers should be spared becomes intelligible. It simply
meant that the usual fine should be imposed in lieu of the death
penalty, which, under the circumstances, was not unreasonable.
Some of the enactments contained in this remarkable code are
sufficiently curious. Take, for example, the following: 'Whosoever shall
harbour a _scurra_[18] for more than one night, may lawfully duck such
an one on the morrow if he or she refuse to quit his abode.' Others are
no less remarkable for their practical common sense. For example the
prudent regulation anent weights and measures. 'All weights and
measures,' runs the article in question, 'shall be the same in the
villages as in the towns. Any headman convicted of falsifying weights
and measures shall pay a fine for each offence of three livres, any one
found in possession of false weights shall forfeit a like sum, and
double the damage caused thereby.'
The game laws of the Liberty of Bruges were singularly oppressive.
Perhaps Philip stipulated for their insertion in the _Keurbrief_ as the
price of the large concessions he had made. In a country well-stocked
with stags and boars, to say nothing of ground game, the following
enactment must have been an intolerable burthen:--Whosoever shall be
prosecuted for fencing in his property against game, if he refuse to
undergo judgment by red-hot iron, shall submit to an inquiry by the
Count, and if he be found guilty, all his goods shall be at the
disposition of the Count and the châtelain, but his life and liberty
shall be safe. The Flemish did not obtain complete redress of this
iniquitous law until 1477.
If the reader should wish to know something more of this interesting
document we would refer him to Gheldorf's _Histoire Constitutionelle de
la Ville de Bruges_, where the original text is given, together with a
French translation and explanatory notes, p. 465.
The magistrates of the Franc administered justice to those submitted to
their jurisdiction in their _Landhuus_ on the west side of the Bourg.
The building of Philip's day has long since disappeared. It was replaced
in the early fifteen hundreds by Van den Poël's sumptuous _Palais du
Franc_, of which a remnant is still standing, and still forms one of the
most picturesque groups in the city of Bruges. The most charming view of
its quaint turrets and gables is from the great fish market along the
Quai Vert.
Count Philip of Alsace was not only a builder of cities, a promoter of
democratic institutions, the friend
[Illustration: THE PALAIS DU FRANC]
of the manufacturer and the merchant, he ever showed himself a generous
patron of letters and of art. So, too, his countess, Elizabeth of
Vermandois. She delighted in the company of minstrels and troubadours,
and herself presided over a Court of Love. To Bruges, in the days of
Philip and Elizabeth, flocked half the literary men in Europe. Grave
theologians like Andreas Silvius, or Philip of Harveng; historians like
Lambert of Ardres, or Hugh of St. Victor; poets like Chrétien de Troyes,
or Colin Muset, and a host of the most famous authors of the day. Here,
in the Loove Palace, or in the pleasaunce of Winendael hard-by, they
were wont to read aloud to the assembled Court the romances of chivalry
then in vogue. _Erec_, _Enide_, _Clegès_, _Le Chevalier au Lion_,
_Yseult_, _Tristan de Léonnois_, and the rest. The nameless authors of
these two last dedicated their works to Philip himself, and Chrétien de
Troyes wrote his famous _Saint Graal_--'the Church's counterblast,' as
Green calls it, 'to the whirlpool of Arthurian romance'--
Por le plus preud homme
Qui soit en l'Empire de Rome
C'est le quens Philippe de Flandres.
That the Count himself was a man of some literary attainment, the
following interesting letter seems to indicate: 'Knowledge is not the
exclusive privilege of clerks,' writes Philip of Harveng to his friend
and patron, Philip of Flanders. 'It is well to be able to lay aside
strife and politics, and go and study in some book, as in a mirror. The
lessons that illustrious men find in books, add to their nobility,
increase their courage, soften their manners, sharpen their wit, and
make them to love virtue. The prince who possesses a soul as lofty as
his dignity loves to hear wise counsel. How thankful you ought to be to
your parents that from your childhood they had you instructed in
letters' (Epist. XVI., p. 81).
There is another circumstance in connection with Philip which it will be
interesting to note. When St. Thomas à Becket fled before the fury of
Henry II. he for a time found shelter at the Flemish Court. The memory
of his sojourn there still lingers at Bruges. The chapel which he
consecrated in Philip's château at Maele is still standing, and the well
at Tilleghem, where legend says he once slaked his thirst, is still
called by the country folk St. Thomas's Well.
CHAPTER XI
_Baldwin of Constantinople_
Upon Philip's death in 1191, without children, the country finally
devolved on his sister Marguerite, who, as we have seen, had married
Baldwin of Mons, the representative of the dynasty of Baldwin the Good.
She only reigned three years, and was succeeded by her son Baldwin of
Constantinople, who thus united the rival dynasties in his person.
The old Flemish chroniclers linger lovingly over the story of Baldwin of
Constantinople, the last representative in the direct male line of the
house of Baldwin of the Iron Hand, and the last Fleming who ruled over
Flanders. They like to represent him as a prince of unblemished
character, devout, austere, and adorned with all the virtues befitting
his state. His figure is undoubtedly a picturesque and an interesting
one. He was a man of brilliant parts--shrewd, quick-witted, eager,
possessed of no ordinary mental activity and of a wonderful aptitude for
business. During the short period of his reign he found time to reform
the criminal procedure of his own patrimony--Hainault; to readjust the
tolls and custom tariffs of Ghent and of Bruges; to abrogate in the
latter city the iniquitous law '_de vino Comitis_,' which ordained that
the town should furnish wine for the Count's household at a fixed price,
often below the market value; to concede to Bruges, on August 14, 1200,
the right to annually hold, during the month of May, a fair--a greater
boon in those days than it is now; to busy himself with compiling
sundry histories--really the chronicles of his native land--which
afterwards went by the name of _Histoires de Baudouin_; to abolish many
abuses; to cut the claws of usurers, and to purge, alas! by fire, his
domain of heresy. He was not only a lover of learning and of learned
men, but a ready writer himself, as witness the letters he addressed
from Constantinople to the King of France and to the Pope--letters
replete with valuable information concerning the Latin Conquest of that
city.
His career as a soldier, too, was not inglorious. He made successful war
on the French King and wrested from him the greater part of the province
of Artois, and his brilliant action in the East led to the fall of
Constantinople and to his own election to the throne of the Greek
Empire; but the glory of his purple robe, and the glory of his sword,
and the glory of his achievements as a citizen and a prince, pale before
the weird legend of love and crime and Nemesis which chronicles his
latter days. It reads like a fairy tale and comes to us on the authority
of the last and greatest of our monastic historians: Matthew Paris, the
famous scribe of St. Alban's.
On the morrow of Ash Wednesday, 1199, a great multitude thronged the
Church of St. Donatian's at Bruges. Count Baldwin was to take the cross.
The scene in the old church, old even in those days, was a solemn and a
striking one. Within those walls which had witnessed so many tragedies
and stirring deeds was gathered the _élite_ of Flanders--the flower of
Flemish chivalry was there, the household of the sovereign and of his
consort, Marie of Champagne, and a host of wealthy citizens in holiday
attire. Ranged on each side of the altar stood the famous canons of
Bruges, in their long white linen rochets and purple veils, in front of
them two choirs of singing boys from St. Donatian's school. The great
bell tolled as if for a funeral, perhaps that same great bell which five
centuries later fell from its lofty tower, and for fifty years lay
buried beneath the débris of the cathedral, and now sends forth its
melodious voice from the steeple of Notre Dame.
'O God, the heathen are come into Thine heritage, Thy Holy Temple
have they defiled. Jerusalem is an heap of stones.... Help us, O
God of our Salvation and for the glory of Thy Name deliver us, lest
haply they should say among the Gentiles, where is now their God.'
Thus plaintively the first choir, and then with a shout of triumph the
men and boys on the opposite side of the chancel made response:--
'Let God arise, and let His enemies be scattered, and let them that
hate Him flee before His face. Like as smoke vanisheth, so let them
vanish away, and as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked
perish at the presence of God.'
'Receive this symbol,' murmured the Archbishop of Tournai as he fastened
to Baldwin's breast a white linen cross embroidered with threads of
gold, 'receive this symbol in memory of the Passion of Jesus Christ, and
of the cross on which He died.' When Marie of Champagne besought the
aged prelate to place also on her breast the Crusaders' sign, a shout of
admiration, and perhaps too of dismay, burst from the crowd. Marie was
so tender and so beautiful, and the way of the Cross was so hard--pray
God that her end be not like that of the ill-fated Countess Sybil.
Baldwin set out for the East in the spring of 1203, Marie, who was then
laid by in childbed, followed towards the close of the month, but she
never saw her husband again. It happened thus. That shrewd old fox,
Dandolo of Venice, taking advantage of the poverty of the Crusaders,
compelled them to undertake for him a campaign against Zara, by way of
payment for their transport to Palestine. Then came the conquest of
Constantinople and the founding of the Latin Empire, and the elevation
of Baldwin himself to the imperial throne (April 9, 1204). Meanwhile
Marie had gone on to Syria and was there awaiting her lord. Presently,
with the summer heat, plague swept the land, and Marie herself fell
sick. When she was lying at death's door, the news of Baldwin's good
fortune reached the town, and it was perhaps in reply to some inquiry of
hers as to the cause of his long tarrying, that her attendants informed
her that the erst Count of Flanders was now Emperor of Rome, and then
the end came.
Baldwin was now at the zenith of his glory. From a petty tributary chief
of a tribe of semi-barbarians, he had been raised to the throne of a
great and civilized empire; but the tide of fortune was soon to turn,
and Marie's death was the first drop in the bitter chalice that fate was
mingling for him. In less than a year the discontent of the Greeks broke
out in open rebellion. Joannice of Bulgaria had promised them help, and
with a huge army, reinforced by a horde of Tartars, he laid siege to
Adrianople. Baldwin marched to relieve the town, and fell wounded,
perhaps slain, before its walls. Of what had actually befallen the
Emperor nothing was certainly known. Some of his comrades were sure they
had seen his dead body, others were equally sure that he had been taken
alive. The Bishop of Soissons set out for France to gather funds for
ransom. Henry of Flanders had recourse to the good offices of the Pope,
who at once sent an embassy to Joannice to treat for Baldwin's release.
Vain request. 'The Emperor,' averred the King of the Bulgarians, 'had
paid Nature's debt--_debitum carnis exsoluerat_.'
Twenty years later some wood-cutters of Plancques, a village in the
heart of the great forest which in those days stretched from Tournai to
Valenciennes, discovered in an unfrequented glade, by the banks of a
stream, a rude hut of osiers, thatched with turf, which they were sure
they had not seen there before. It was the home of a long-bearded,
white-haired old man, with a face covered with scars. Of his antecedents
they could learn nothing. 'I am but a poor Christian,' he said, 'doing
penance for my sins,' but there was something in his voice and bearing
which belied his words. Not a few of the Crusaders, on their return from
the East, had put on the black robe of St. Benedict or the brown frock
of the poor man of Assisi--some of them were known to have chosen a
solitary life, and to have hidden themselves in forests or caves, and
the village gossips, over their ale, whispered to one another that of
these the mysterious hermit was surely one. The peasant folk from the
neighbouring villages flocked out to visit him; some of them had in
their youth set eyes on the hero of Constantinople, and these men were
convinced that, in the garb of a poor recluse, they now beheld him
again, and presently it was noised abroad that Baldwin had come back to
Flanders. At length the rumour reached the ears of a former
comrade-in-arms, a friend who had known him well, Everard de Montagne,
the powerful Lord of Glançon. He at once set out for the hermit's cell,
saw the old man, and was convinced of his identity--so too Sohier of
Enghien, Arnulph of Gavre, Bourchard d'Avesnes (the ill-fated husband of
Baldwin's daughter, the future Countess Marguerite), and a hundred
others who had been intimate with him. But the hermit would vouchsafe no
answer, and when they pressed him, returned only evasive replies. 'Are
ye, then, like the Breton folk,' he said, 'who still look for the coming
of Arthur?' Presently a deputation of citizens went out to the
hermitage from Valenciennes; they greeted him with shouts of
acclamation. 'Thou art our Count, thou art our Count!' they cried, and,
in spite of the old man's protest, they carried him back with them to
the city. Then at last Baldwin declared himself. They had rightly
divined his secret; he was indeed the Count of Flanders.
The story of his adventures is a strange one. Wounded at the siege of
Adrianople and sick almost to death, he had been taken prisoner by the
Bulgarians. During the early days of his captivity a lady of the Court
chanced to see him, perhaps the King's daughter herself. She was
interested in his story, he was still young and handsome, and she gave
him her heart. The Emperor feigned to reciprocate her passion, and her
devotion knew no bounds; to save him, and, for his sake too, his
comrades, she was ready to risk her life. A plan of escape was devised.
By her aid it was successfully carried out and they all fled together.
Baldwin, however, did not marry the Bulgarian princess. The heroine who
had rescued him was a Pagan woman, he was a disciple of Christ; but
before they fled they had mutually plighted their troth--she to receive
baptism at the first opportune moment, he, when this had been
accomplished, to make her his wife.
When the time for fulfilling their pledges came, it found the infidel
true to her vow, the Christian eager to be quit of his.
Was there no loophole? He took counsel with his Flemish friends. The
Emperor was bound, they said, by his oath, but there was a gleam of
hope; haply this Gentile woman would go the way of all flesh before she
had accomplished hers.
Baldwin took the hint. On the eve of her intended baptism the hapless
princess died. Retribution quickly followed. The murderer was presently
entrapped by barbarians, who carried him off for a slave. Seven times he
was sold from hand to hand, kicks and blows were his portion and
indignities of every kind.
One day, when he was harnessed to a cart like some beast of burthen, he
fell in with a company of German merchants who, learning his tale, had
pity on him, and purchased his release. Filled with remorse at what he
had done, he at once set out for Rome and confessed his sins to the
Pope, who imposed on him a life-long penance. He then made his way back
to his native land, and went and hid himself in the forest of Glançon.
Strange as it may seem, the knights and burghers of Valenciennes
believed the old man's tale, and stranger still, in their pity for his
great misfortune, they forgot his great crime. They put on him a purple
robe and thrust a sceptre into his hand, and called him father and
chief. For them he was the hero of Constantinople, the sovereign who had
showered blessings on them all, the Christian who had suffered long
years of anguish at the hands of heathen men. In their eyes, the red
aureole of martyrdom already glowed about his head, and they begged
locks of his hair for relics, and treasured up the water in which he had
bathed.
It was the same throughout the realm. The men of Flanders everywhere
remembered that they had loved Baldwin and they all knew that they hated
Jeanne, and now Baldwin the beloved was in the midst of them again. The
evil days of his daughter had become as a tale that was told. Wherever
he went he was greeted with wild demonstrations of joy. The great towns
of Flanders received him with open arms. His journey from city to city
was one long triumphal progress. Presently he reached Bruges, and here
at Pentecost he held his Court, and, clad in imperial robes, with his
own hands armed ten knights.
But this was not all. The neighbouring sovereigns acknowledged his
claim. The ambassadors of the Duke of Limbourg and the Duke of Brabant
waited on him in the capital, and Henry III. of England (April 11, 1225)
sent to 'his very dear friend Baldwin' letters of greeting, of
congratulation, and of sage advice. 'Remember,' he said, 'that the King
of France hath despoiled both the one and the other of us; let us
therefore make a league together against him.'
If Baldwin had taken up the thread of his old policy, and allied himself
with England, his course of action would probably have been crowned with
the success of former days, but he was now a broken-down old man, cowed
with long years of servitude and the memory of a great crime, he had
neither the courage nor the energy to do so, but fatuously threw himself
into the arms of the very man against whom Henry had warned him.
In the midst of the unlooked-for good fortune which had up to now
attended the enterprise which the hermit of Plancques had been so loth
to undertake, one circumstance was a cause of no little grief and
disquietude; his daughter had refused to recognize him, and had fled to
France, and though the cloud on the horizon was no bigger than a man's
hand, it presaged, he foresaw, a deluge which would perhaps sweep him
away.
In his trouble and confusion he turned a willing ear to the false
counsel of his sister the Lady of Beaujeu,[19] who urged him to take the
wind out of Jeanne's sails by himself confiding in the French King, who,
thanks to her good offices, was disposed in his favour. Baldwin fell
into the trap. Louis sent him a safe conduct, and towards the close of
June he set out for Péronne, where Louis was at that time holding his
Court.
His entry into the city on the evening of July 4 was a vision of Eastern
splendour. All glorious in purple and gold, with his crown on his head,
and a white wand in his hand, they bore him aloft on men's shoulders in
a comely litter. Before him was carried the imperial cross, and a
retinue of over a hundred gorgeously-attired knights followed in his
train. At the palace gates Louis himself came out to greet him.
'Welcome, sire,' said the French King, 'if thou art indeed mine uncle
Baldwin, Count of Flanders.' 'Fair nephew,' quavered the old man, 'such
in sooth am I, but my daughter doth not know me, and would fain take
away mine heritage; prithee help me to keep it.' Louis had already
decided on the course he would pursue, and already agreed with Jeanne as
to the price of his championship, but he deemed it prudent for the
moment to disguise his intentions, and the Emperor was soon entertained
at a sumptuous banquet, during which he again recited the story of his
adventures, and with such good effect that many of those who heard him
were moved to tears.
Presently the royal Council was summoned, and Baldwin was invited to
plead his cause. He consented to do so, and it became clear that the
solemn reception accorded him had been from the first a solemn farce. In
inviting Baldwin to Péronne, the French King had but one object in
view--to separate him from his friends--and in now affecting the
appearance of a serious examination of his claim, his only desire was to
discredit it. At last, after having endured much brow-beating and
hectoring speech, the Emperor refused to answer any more questions; the
hour was late, he said, and he had that day been greatly fatigued; on
the morrow he would be ready to converse again. But the wary old man had
no intention of keeping his word; he now fully realized the danger of
his position. In coming to Péronne he had made a false move; his
liberty, perhaps his life, was in peril, and he cast about him for some
means of escape. Fortune was once more kind to him, and that very night
he took horse and fled the city.
When he reached his own dominions he was greeted with the same wild
demonstrations of joy which had at first hailed his coming. But if the
great heart of the people still throbbed for Baldwin, the classes were
no longer with him. He soon learnt that the sheriffs of Bruges and of
other great towns had accepted Jeanne's amnesty, and that even the
picked knights who had accompanied him to Péronne had played him false,
and he lost heart. There was no peace for him in this world save in a
life of penance. He had slain the woman who loved him, the woman who had
risked her life for his sake, and her shade would assuredly drive him
back to his hermitage or to the gallows.
The cause of this sudden _volte-face_ in favour of Jeanne is difficult
to surmise, but corruption had not unlikely something to do with it, for
we find in a treaty concluded, at Bapaume a few days later the Countess
of Flanders acknowledging that Louis, whose soldiers had not once drawn
their swords in her behalf, had expended ten thousand livres in
reinstating her in her dominions. Meanwhile Baldwin had disappeared.
Some of the few who still clung to him affirmed that he had fled to
Germany and had been received with hospitality by Archbishop Engelbert
of Cologne, who, they averred, had counselled him to go to Rome and lay
his case before the Common Father of the faithful. Be this as it may,
Baldwin was presently arrested by Baron Erard de Chastenay, at Rougemont
in Burgundy, who sold him to Jeanne for four hundred silver marks, and
she, filled with savage joy, hanged him in chains on a gibbet at Lille
between two hounds.
'Many of those who knew his story,' comments Matthew Paris, in his
delightful, gossiping way, 'were convinced that this lot befell the
Emperor in consequence of his sin.' 'And all those who had promoted it
by their advice,' he adds, 'in like manner came to a terrible end.' 'One
of these men, when he returned home to his wife, and had been recognized
by her, was cast headlong into a well. She privily procuring the same
because in her lord's absence she had wedded another man, and had borne
him children.' 'So too of the rest. By some mishap or other they all of
them perished miserably, for the wrath of God, who willeth not that evil
should be rendered for good, was fiercely enkindled against them.'
CHAPTER XII
_The Love Story of Bourchard d'Avesnes_
Before proceeding further with the story of Bruges, it will be necessary
to go back to the time when Baldwin first disappeared from men's view
(1205), blotted out by the thick mist of conjecture which clung round
the bastions of Adrianople, and to note the course of events in Flanders
from that date until the day of his unlooked-for home-coming twenty
years later (1225).
The mysterious exit of the Emperor had left his patrimony in hazardous
plight. Jeanne, his heiress and eldest daughter, was not yet fifteen
years old; her sister Marguerite was still in her cradle; Philip,
Marquis of Namur, whom Baldwin before setting out for the East had
appointed their guardian, was a man unworthy of trust, and the
redoubtable Philip Augustus was shaping the destiny of France.
Too shrewd to let slip so favourable a moment for strengthening his hold
on Flanders, the French King at once laid claim as suzerain to the
wardship of the infant princesses, and the Marquis of Namur,[20] bribed
by the promise of a royal alliance, fell in with his kinsman's designs,
and presently dispatched them to France.
In face of the storm of indignation aroused by so flagrant a breach of
trust, Philip was constrained to hand over the reins of government to
his co-trustee, Bourchard d'Avesnes, the son of the illustrious friend
of Richard Coeur de Lion, and the chief of the Nationalist or
anti-French party. But it was only after five years' negotiation, and a
threat to throw himself into the arms of England, that at length
Bourchard was enabled to obtain his wards' release, and before King
Ph
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/46552