_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]