_The Greater and the Lesser Folk_
The municipal organisation of the towns of Brabant was at first of a
very simple character. It consisted in every case of an unpaid
magistracy--a college of _schepen_ or aldermen appointed by the Duke for
life from among the chief freeholders of the city, of which they were
held to be its representatives--presided over by a paid officer, who
bore the title of Mayor or Ecoutête or Amman--from town to town the
title differed--was the sovereign's direct delegate, and in all things
the representative of his authority. He was not necessarily or even
usually a burgher of the city over which he presided. The Duke was free
to choose whom he would, and to revoke the appointment at will; and
though this officer held the first place in the civic hierarchy, he was
in reality nothing more than his master's hired servant.
Alongside of the College of Aldermen was the Merchants' Guild. Whether
this corporation had any legal existence prior to the institution of the
magistracy is a problem which has yet to be solved; but it is certain
that by the end of the eleven hundreds the guild was firmly established
in most of the towns of Brabant; that, including as it did all the
commercial and industrial capitalists of the city, it had exercised from
the first no little influence on public affairs, and that it contributed
in great measure to the full expansion of municipal self-rule.
The next century saw the birth of another institution, the Council of
Jurors, and there can be no doubt that it was to the Merchants' Guild
that the Jury owed its origin.
With the increase of the population, outcome of the commercial
development which signalised the opening of the twelve hundreds, the old
machinery no longer sufficed for the maintenance of public peace and the
regulation of trade. It became necessary to devise some new means to
check the growing disorder, and the burghers, united as they were in the
powerful organisation of their guild, were strong enough to take the
matter into their own hands. Hence the Council of Jurors, a subsidiary
body, annually elected by the people for policing the city and the
management of municipal affairs, and which also participated with the
College of Aldermen in the administration of justice.
So far from offering opposition, the sovereigns of Brabant from the
first showed themselves favourable to this development. Not that they
had any particular liking for democratic institutions, but because they
were sufficiently clear-sighted to see that, in the interest of their
revenue, it was incumbent on them to do so: they were well aware that
the towns of Brabant depended wholly on trade, and that this delicate
plant can only thrive in an atmosphere of freedom.
There is no record of the Jury at Brussels prior to 1229, at Antwerp
till 1232, at Louvain till 1234, and at Tirlemont till 1249, but it is
most likely that in all of these towns it dates from an earlier period,
and by the close of the first half of the century it had been granted to
almost all the communes of Brabant.
Its existence, however, as a body distinct from the higher magistracy
was nowhere, save at Louvain, of long duration. As early as 1274 the
Jury had disappeared at Brussels, and in hardly any of the great towns
did it outlive the century. From the first the relations between the two
corporations had almost everywhere been strained: they were the
embodiment of hostile ideals--oligarchy and popular rule. Presently the
burghers obtained a voice in the election of aldermen, and their term of
office was limited to one year. The Council of Jurors thus ceased to be
the sole expression of the will of the people; the higher magistracy had
become, not only in theory, as it had always been, but in fact,
representative of the city, and had risen proportionately in public
esteem. Thus protected by the mantle of popularity, it was able,
seemingly without opposition, little by little to itself assume the
functions of its rival, and thus, little by little, to absorb it into
its own bosom.
At Louvain, however, the case was different. In that city the
aristocratic element was all-powerful, and the jury was recruited from
the same families which furnished the College of Aldermen; from the
first the two corporations had worked together in harmony, and until the
end of the Middle Age they continued to exist as two distinct bodies.
For a long period after the municipal organisation of the cities of
Brabant had been definitely determined, all administrative and
legislative power remained in the hands of a narrow oligarchy of great
capitalists, headed by the old patrician families, which from time
immemorial had furnished the magistracy.
One was the source of their title to distinction--the ownership of land;
but the means by which the first patricians had acquired their
title-deeds were not in every case the same, nor were they all of like
origin. Some of them were the descendants of _ministeriales_ who, when
the township was a feudal domain, had levied their lords' dues for him,
and generally managed his affairs; others of yeomen of the same period,
whom thrift or good fortune had enabled to purchase the freehold of the
soil they tilled; others, again, were successful traders, or the sons of
successful traders, who, retiring from business, had invested the wealth
which commerce had given them in real property.
Together they formed a class apart, distinct alike from the feudal
nobility and from the general body of townsmen. They were divided into
groups in each city, which bore the characteristic title of _lignages_
or clans; but it is certain that many patricians were not the direct
lineal descendants of the houses whose names and arms they bore: the
status of patrician was transmissible in the female line, and patrician
daughters were not unfrequently given in marriage to prosperous
plebeians; moreover, some of the sons of the house were only sons by
adoption--the wealthy merchant of alien blood was not always refused
admission to the charmed circle, though as a rule the door of matrimony
was the only door open to him; and occasionally we find whole families,
sometimes sections of families, forsaking their original clan to enroll
themselves in another. Indeed, the great _lignages_ of Brabant, which
play so large a part in the stories of her towns, were, to a certain
extent, voluntary associations of aristocratic families banded together
for the sake of mutual protection and help, and with a view to securing
the election of their own nominees to the magistracy; and though, no
doubt, a considerable number of the members of each clan traced their
descent to one stock, it is certain that the ties by which they were
most strongly knit together were not those of blood, but of kindred
pursuits, and kindred associations and kindred political interests. It
is a significant fact, as Pirenne observes, that the number of
_lignages_ in each town corresponded to the number of their aldermen,
and that each _lignage_ had obtained a prescriptive right of
representation in the magistracy.
Though the patricians as a body were a wealthy class, all of them were
not rich men; some, indeed, were so poor that they were glad to earn a
livelihood by hiring themselves as servants to their more fortunate
kinsmen; others, on account of their poverty, renounced their
privileges, and sank back into the general body of the people. On the
other hand, the wealth of the patricianate was being constantly
augmented by the new men who found admission into its borders, and with
the increasing prosperity of the town, their land was becoming daily
more valuable for building purposes. Many of them were thus able to live
in luxury on the rents produced by their property, others increased
their revenue by farming the State taxes, others were engaged in banking
operations, others again in commerce. In that case they became members
of the Merchants' Guild, for the Guild, whose members were constantly
being enrolled in the _lignages_ was always ready to open its doors to
the son of the aristocratic house who wished to resume the calling by
which, most likely, his ancestors had attained wealth. Thus it was
growing daily more and more aristocratic, and at last nearly all its
members were patricians by birth or by adoption. Embracing as it did at
first traders of every kind, it now became an exceedingly close
corporation, and only admitted to its membership the sellers of cloth
and the sellers of wool, the cream of the commercial world.
Such were the men who owned the soil of the cities of Brabant, who had
endowed them, often at their own cost, with magnificent public
buildings,[7] who had won for themselves free institutions, and who for
the best part of two hundred years tyrannised over everyone else.
[7] The old Cloth Hall of Louvain, for example.
[Illustration: Cloth Hall Louvain]
Mightier than the feudal chiefs, whose fathers' swords had made the
evolution of the city possible, they had absorbed them into their own
ranks, or driven them forth from their borders, and now adopted their
dress and speech and manner of living. In time of war they wore coats of
mail like knights, and they alone of the civic army were mounted. They
lived in great houses of stone, whose turrets and battlements towered
above the thatched hovels of the helots who did their bidding:--weavers
who starved when work was slack, and in good times just managed to keep
body and soul together, the poorest and the most numerous of them all
were they, the most turbulent, too, and the worst organised, always
snarling at their hard lot and their impotence to better it, ready to
break out into rebellion on the slightest provocation, and never
content with their wages; dyers with blue nails--outward and visible
sign of moral degradation, for though it was owing to their skill that
the cloth of Brabant was more beautiful than that of any other land, and
sometimes, though not often, they obtained wealth, they could never hope
for the rights of citizenship until time had wiped out those fatal
stains; men of a hundred other callings, degraded creatures all of them,
who earned their bread by the sweat of their brow, mere human chattels
without heart and without soul, whom an honest burgher might cuff at
will, aye, and, if he would, carry off their daughters without fear of
incurring any legal penalty.
It was not always so. Before the year 1200 class distinctions were far
less marked. In the early days the weaver could sell his own cloth, and
even petty traders were admitted to the Merchants' Guild. The advent of
the middleman had changed all this, and as time went on the patricians,
the _majores et potentiores_, as an ancient chronicler calls them, grew
more and more exclusive and more and more overbearing. But though they
looked down on the 'lesser folk,' the bowels of their compassion were
not shut up against them: they built and lavishly endowed hospitals
where they might be tended when they were sick, refuges to which they
could retire when hard work and old age had worn them out, orphanages
for such of their children as had been deprived by death of their
natural protectors, and above all, churches, glorious without and
within--palaces of the people, where Lazarus and Dives knelt side by
side. Nor is the stream of their charity yet dried up: the rich
endowments of the _Bureaux de bienfaisance_ throughout Belgium are in
great measure due to the munificence of these merchant princes of the
Middle Age, who in turn cuffed and caressed the turbulent folk on whose
hardships they fattened, and whose poverty rendered their riches
possible.
No less inconsequent was the patrician burgher in his dealings with the
Church--with one hand he smote her in the mouth and with the other he
loaded her with benefits. And yet, after all, perhaps he was not so
inconsistent, for the soul of this man who possessed the faith, in his
way a devout Christian, was consumed by pride and the lust of power. He
would share his authority with no man, he would be master in his own
house, and so he ousted the noble, ground down the toiler, flouted the
clerk and set his heel on his neck. A firm believer in the rights of the
laity, he would never suffer priest or monk to meddle with his affairs,
but he did not hesitate, whenever it suited his purpose, to busy himself
with theirs. Thus, from time immemorial most city livings had been in
the gift of one or other of the religious houses which dotted the
countryside, but he quietly ignored their abbots' pretensions, and named
his parish priests himself, and never rested until he had obtained a
legal right to do so. So, too, in the matter of education: the
management of schools had been always recognised as the especial
province of the clergy, but he was not happy until he had succeeded in
placing them under municipal control, or, in other words, until he had
undertaken their management himself. Nor would he always recognise the
clerk's right to justice in his own courts, though when he himself was
technically a churchman, he never scrupled to make use of them if he
thought it would be an advantage to him to do so. Thus at Louvain, where
almost all the patricians were _Hommes de Saint Pierre_, the old
ecclesiastical courts, officered indeed by laymen, were maintained
intact for his behoof till the Revolution.
The peculiar circumstances of the Church in Brabant favoured these
pretensions. The one great ecclesiastical power in that province, where
no bishop had his See, was monasticism, and when the burgher was in the
heyday of his magnificence monasticism was spiritually and temporally at
a low ebb. The fiery zeal which characterised the days of the Cluniac
revival had long ago flickered out. Discipline had become sadly relaxed,
the monk had ceased to be the saint and the popular hero he had been in
days of yore, and the alms of the faithful no longer flowed into his
coffers. Another source of revenue, too, had all but dried up. Owing to
the fall in the purchasing power of money, the produce of his manorial
dues, which he had no power to raise, had diminished almost to vanishing
point. Thus was the abbot, at his wits' end how to keep order amongst
his rebellious family and make both ends meet, sadly handicapped in his
contests with his all-powerful foe, from whom, indeed, he was not
unfrequently constrained to borrow at usurious rates of interest. But
although the burgher looked askance at the old religious orders, for
some reason or other his antipathy to the monk did not extend itself to
the friar. He never quarrelled with the 'watch dogs of the Lord,' and
with the disciples of 'the poor man of Assisi' his relations were most
cordial. Perhaps as a practical business man the object of their mission
appealed more to his sympathies; perhaps he thought he had nothing to
fear from the children of the gentle saint who had taken for his bride
the Lady Poverty. But by a strange irony of fate it was not the monk but
the friar who hurled the first blow at his dominion. It was from the
lips of the friar who toiled among the poverty-stricken masses that
these poor folk learned, for the first time, the dignity of man, and no
teacher was needed to awaken in their souls the consciousness of their
degradation. They experienced it every day: when they lounged about the
market-place on Monday morning waiting, often in vain, for the supply of
labour generally exceeded the demand, for someone to hire them at wages
fixed by the town magistrates, men who themselves were employers of
labour and in whose appointment the people had no voice; when, working
at home at their looms, they received the visit of the guild inspector,
who had the right to ransack their hovels at all hours, with a view to
assuring himself of the excellence of their work, and who received as
his salary a portion of the fine imposed for any fraud detected. This
was their normal lot in times of prosperity, and when work was slack, or
when there was no work at all, as was sometimes the case when wool was
not forthcoming from England, the wounds inflicted on their self-respect
went deeper and smarted more: then were they constrained to choose
between two evils--either they must starve, and, worse still, see their
wives and their little ones starve; or they must band together and
parade the streets whining for that bread which they could no longer
win. Well might the friar preach to men set in such straits the beauty
of Christian humility and of Christian resignation, and bid them despise
as dross that gold which they could not obtain. The weavers and dyers
who hung on his lips possessed, of earthly goods, very often only the
rags they stood up in; and the wealth which they saw around them, and
which they could never hope to enjoy, they knew very well was in many
cases the fruit of their underpaid toil, and that the holders of it, of
like origin with themselves, were not only their rulers and taskmasters,
but corrupt stewards of the common-weal--the men who managed the city,
and managed it in their own interests.
What wonder, then, that they soon began to confound contempt for riches
with contempt for the rich, and that presently contempt engendered
hatred. Were not the oppressors of the poor the enemies of Jesus Christ?
Was it not easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for
a rich man to enter the kingdom of God? Had not one of their
preachers[8] told them that the rich man, even if he were righteous, was
less worthy of esteem than the woman of the street?
[8] Guillaume Cornelius of Antwerp. _See_ Thomas de Cantimpré (a native
of Brussels, born in 1201), _Bonum universale de apibus_, p. 433 (Duaci,
1605). 'Il importe de remarquer toutefois,' notes Pirenne (vol. i. p.
353), 'que ce Cornelius était hérétique, mais, même dans l'église
orthodoxe, des prédications analogues à celles de Lambert le Bègue
(_see_ 'Story of Brussels.' p 233) et l'ardent mysticisme des premières
béguines (_see_ pp. 228 and 233) devaient agir fortement sur le peuple.'
[Illustration]