The Story of Bruges E-Book

Ernest Gilliat-Smith

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

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

Leseprobe

The Story ofBrugesby Ernest Gilliat-Smith Illustrated by Edith Calvert and H e r b e r t R a i l t o n

1909

© 2023 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782383839392

PREFACE

F

EW 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

The Story of Bruges

CHAPTER IThe First Flemings

I

T 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 IIEarliest Bruges

F

ROM 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.

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

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.

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.

THE CHURCH OF NOTRE DAME

CHAPTER IIIArnulph the Great

S

OME 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 IVProgress of the City

T

HE 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.