_The Rise of Brussels and Louvain_
The cities of Belgium, unlike the cities of Italy or of the Rhine-land,
or of France, which often go back to Roman times, and trace their
descent to great administrative centres, date nearly all of them from
the Middle Age, and are the children of industry and commerce. Bruges,
Ypres, Ghent, the three _bonnes villes_ of Flanders, were not towns in
the modern sense of the word until the beginning of the ten hundreds,
and it was almost a century later before the farmers of Brussels and
Mechlin and Louvain became manufacturers and merchants.
Its geographical position between France and Germany, its long coast
line, its nearness to England, its numerous navigable streams--all these
things rendered the Low Country a region peculiarly adapted to
mercantile pursuits; nor was it less favourably situated with regard to
that industry which afterwards became, and for centuries remained, the
staple trade of the country: the herbage of the seaboard was naturally
suited to sheep, from time immemorial vast flocks of them grazed on the
polders, and their wool was of the finest quality; thus there was at
hand the raw material for the fabrication of cloth.
When the Danish incursion ceased and the land became comparatively
tranquil, men soon began to consider how best they might turn these
natural advantages to account, and presently along the waterways came
bands of wandering traders with rich cargoes from foreign parts: wine
from France and from the Rhine-land, silk and spices from Italy, furs
from the North--all kinds of merchandise destined to supply the growing
needs of the country, or to be exported to England or Denmark, or the
regions round the Baltic; and when they had disposed of their wares they
would return to the lands from whence they hailed with their barges
laden with woollen goods--product of the looms of Flanders. Coming and
going, they broke the journey at such places along stream as were best
suited to afford accommodation for themselves, their servants, and their
draught cattle, and where they would be likely to find a market for what
they had to sell: by some castle or abbey or collegiate church, around
which clustered the houses of clerks or Court officials, and the
homesteads and the hovels of yeomen and serfs. In these settlements,
too, they took up their winter quarters, and they often found wives
among the daughters of their hosts. When this was so, the place of
sojourning became a home--the permanent abode of their little ones and
of their women folk, the spot where they purposed to end their days when
they had made their fortunes, or, perchance, had been worn out by the
hardships of their calling.
Amongst these early traders, the first merchants and the first
commercial travellers who gained a livelihood in the Low Country,
foreigners there were no doubt, but by far the greater number of them
were natives of the soil, and they seem to have been recruited from all
ranks of society. Some were knights, who hoped to find the business of
buying and selling more profitable than the trade of war; some were
Karls from the seaboard, men who had lost their land, if they ever had
any to lose, but still retained their freedom, and some were runaway
slaves. Matter of little moment, they were birds of passage; no man knew
their condition or whence they came, or what lord, if any, claimed
their allegiance, and they were all of them treated wherever they went
as their own masters. The freedom which they enjoyed compelled
association, for since they were no man's vassals no man was bound to
protect them; what rights and privileges they possessed were necessarily
in their own keeping; hence the great merchant guilds famous in the
story of the Netherlands. Meeting together at night to discuss over
their liquor their own personal transactions, the guild brethren soon
began to consider the public affairs of the settlements in which they
dwelt or which they frequented, and little by little to busy themselves
with municipal administration, and presently they obtained the charters
which gave them a legal standing. Nor were they without funds: their
coffers were filled by self-imposed rates, and by fines levied by their
elected chiefs for infringements of their rules of association. The
money thus raised served for the erection of guild halls and belfries,
the building of town walls, the maintenance of waterways, and the making
of roads and bridges.
Another element was soon to be added to the population of these
river-side settlements of agriculturists and tradesmen: hard on the
heels of the merchant came the manufacturer. Thanks to the greater
security which the land at this time enjoyed and the consequent increase
in the number of its inhabitants, the fens were being drained rapidly,
and vast areas which had been lakes were already under pasture; this
meant an increase of flocks, and a wool crop so abundant that the
shepherds unaided were no longer able to convert the whole of it into
cloth. Hence the professional weaver, and the new commercial activity
made weaving a profitable profession. The men who adopted it--and their
name was legion--naturally flocked to the towns, where, in touch with
merchant and trader, they would be likely to find a more ready market
for their wares. Like them, and from like motives, they found it
expedient to band together, and soon the 'Draperie,' or Cloth Guild,
became an institution of mark in the Netherlands.
As for the original settlers--the serfs attached to the soil, the yeoman
bound by less stringent ties to the Church or the chief under whose
protection they dwelt, the _ministeriales_ who collected manorial fines
and dues, administered justice in their lord's name, and managed
generally his estate, and who were practically free men--living
alongside of the new-comers, often united to them by marriage ties, they
gradually adopted their manner of life, and themselves became merchants
and manufacturers. For a time they seem to have been submitted to the
old manorial _régime_, but they soon began to agitate for emancipation,
and presently they obtained the parchments which gave them complete
freedom.
The making of the great commercial and manufacturing centres of mediæval
Belgium was for the most part and generally speaking in this wise, but
they did not all of them come into being at the same time--not even in
the course of the same century. As a rule the towns of Brabant are less
ancient than the towns of Flanders, and most of them owe their
development less to the river than to the road. It was so with Brussels
and Louvain, and, to a certain extent also with Mechlin. Off the main
waterways, on the banks of tributary streams, navigable only by light
craft, what business they at first did was more or less of a local
character. It was not till the opening of the eleven hundreds, when the
great high road was made from Bruges to Cologne, passing through Louvain
and Brussels, and within easy reach of Mechlin, that these little towns
at last became places of importance.
The commercial movement reached Brussels earlier than it reached
Louvain. If we may trust St. Guy's anonymous biographer, who lived most
probably in the second half of the ten hundreds, there was a settlement
of merchants established there at the commencement of the century. He
tells us a curious story concerning one of them, a friend of Guy's, who
seems to have done a thriving trade.
But first a word as to Guy himself, the poor man of Anderlecht, as
people called him--a picturesque and interesting figure from several
points of view. To this man--the earliest private inhabitant of Brussels
whose name we know, the first of whose doings we have any record, the
only one who has ever attained the honours of the altar, the most
ancient sanctuary in the town, the crypt of Anderlecht, is dedicated. In
this church when he died they laid his body to rest; here his tomb may
still be seen, and his bones are still treasured; and strangely enough
it was in this same building that in his childhood he used to pray. Then
it was the Church of St. Peter; a hundred and fifty years afterwards the
dedication was changed, and henceforth men called it the Church of St.
Peter and St. Guy. Of this beautiful remnant of a forgotten age we shall
have much to say presently. Guy was born somewhere about the middle of
the nine hundreds. His parents were very humble folk, probably serfs
attached to the soil of Anderlecht. He himself began life as a farm
labourer, and his employer's holding seems to have been hard by the
Castle of Brussels. A beautiful legend has come down to us concerning
him at this time. It was his master's custom to provide the labourers
with a mid-day meal, served to them in the fields, and Guy's to carry a
portion of his each day to his parents at Anderlecht. One of his
comrades, a cross-grained, ill-conditioned fellow, took umbrage at this,
and accused him to their master of wasting his time. Next day, during
the dinner-hour, the farmer betook himself to the field which Guy was
tilling, determined, if his man had played truant, to rate him soundly
on his return, but though Guy, as usual, had gone to Anderlecht, when
presently he came hurrying back, with no harsh words was he greeted, for
during his absence an angel had taken his place at the plough. This
story is the subject of an ancient and very beautiful wall painting in
the upper church at Anderlecht.
And how many other fairy tales, some of them no less touching, have been
woven about the name of this popular hero, the only man of his day whose
memory is still green in the city of Brussels! And yet throughout his
whole career no deeds which the world calls great are recorded of him.
His life for the most part seems to have been an even and uneventful
one. He soon gave up farm labour, and for many years he was sacristan to
the little church at Laeken, now a populous suburb of Brussels, then a
hamlet just outside the town. The last ten years of his life he spent in
making two pilgrimages to Jerusalem and in travelling over Europe to
visit famous shrines. All these journeys were made on foot, and
doubtless they were not devoid of adventure, but his earliest
biographer, who wrote nearly a hundred years after his death, has little
to tell us on this head. In the fall of the year 1012 he returned to his
native village, and in pitiable plight, worn out with want and fever and
the wear and tear of the road. The canons of Anderlecht received him
into their hospice, where he was tenderly cared for, for nine days, and
then at last, on the 12th of September, he set out for Jerusalem the
Golden. He loved God with his whole heart, of his penury he ministered
to those who were poorer than himself, and he did what he could in his
small way to sweeten and soften the hard lot of his neighbours. Even
during his lifetime he was regarded as a saint: his anonymous biographer
informs us that when Dean Wonedulph of Anderlecht and a company of
pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem encountered him unexpectedly at Rome
'they fell down on their faces and adored him,' and when he lay dying in
the hospice of the canons of Anderlecht, Heaven itself, so runs the
legend, miraculously proclaimed his sancity. A heavenly light filled the
room in which he lay, a white dove hovered over his head, and a voice
was heard saying: 'Veniat dilectus meus ad percipiendam æternæ
jocunditatis coronam.'
[Illustration: Subterranean Church of St. Guy at Anderlecht]
Strangely enough 'the poor man of Anderlecht' at one time seriously
thought of embarking in trade. Satan, in the guise of a rich Brussels
merchant, would fain have persuaded the saint, then sexton of Laeken, to
enter into partnership with him, cunningly representing that by so doing
he would soon make a fortune, and thus be the better able to help the
poor, and Guy fell into the trap; but it was not God's will that His
servant should imperil his soul in so hazardous a calling, and hardly
had he started on his first journey down Senne, when his craft grounded
on a sandbank in mid stream, and, notwithstanding all their efforts, the
boatmen were unable to float it; and, worse still, when the saint
himself vainly seized the barge-pole it miraculously adhered to his
fingers, nor could he unclasp them until he had made a solemn vow to
utterly eschew commerce.
'Mercatura raro aut nunquam ab aliquo diu sine crimine exerceri potuit,'
shrewdly notes his biographer, who was most likely a clerk of
Anderlecht, and that seems to have been the general opinion of the
ecclesiastical authorities of the day. The Church looked askance at
trade, the methods of the merchant were too nearly allied to the methods
of the usurer, as she knew very well to her cost. When she wanted a loan
she sometimes had to pay him fifty or sixty per cent. Yet, strangely
enough, it was on Church land, and under the auspices of a collegiate
chapter, that the most flourishing of the great commercial centres of
Brabant gradually grew up: it was not by Lambert Longbeard's castle, but
higher up stream, alongside the Church of St. Peter, that the wandering
merchants who frequented Louvain first pitched camp.
[Illustration: At Mechlin]