[CHAPTER XII]
TOURNAI, THE OLDEST CITY IN BELGIUM
As the ladies were somewhat fatigued by our rambles around Flanders it was decided that they would spend two or three quiet days with la tante Rosa while the Professor and I made daily excursions into wonderland, returning to the home of our hostess every night. The nearest point of interest was the city of Tournai, the oldest city in all Belgium. There was no direct railway line, however, and—as on many other occasions during our pilgrimage—we had no little trouble studying out a correspondence, or set of connections, that would take us there and back without loss of time. We started each morning before six o’clock and found the trains at that time of day made up mostly of fourth-class coaches filled with working people. The Belgian State Railway sells billets d’abonnement for these trains at incredibly low rates—a few sous a month for short trips from one town to the next, and a few francs a month for rides half way across the Kingdom. I have known clerks residing in the extreme southern end of the Department of Hainaut, close to the French frontier, who ride every day to Mons, ten or fifteen miles distant, and there take a train for Brussels. The object of this low rate of fare is the paternal desire of the Government that labourers should be able to obtain work wherever it may be found and still retain their homes in the villages in which they were born and raised. Home ties are very strong in Belgium, and the people cheerfully travel considerable distances under this plan rather than move away from their relatives and friends. Economically it is a very good thing for the country as a whole, since it enables the labourer out of work to look for a place in a hundred different towns and the employer to draw his help from an equally wide area. Thus in times that are not abnormally bad there are very few industrial plants without their full quota of hands, and very few hands out of work.
The fourth-class coaches are built like the third-class, with cross divisions making several compartments, but the division walls do not extend to the roof so the passengers can toss things to one another over them. Separate cars are provided for men and women, many scandals having resulted from the promiscuous herding of both sexes which prevailed some twenty years ago. The occupants of the men’s cars are of all ages, from tiny lads who seem to be hardly more than eight or nine—but are no doubt older, as the Belgian laws no longer permit minors of that age to work—to grandsires of eighty. All are roughly clad, ready to take up their respective tasks the moment they arrive—no one thinks of having a separate suit for travelling as most of the workmen who commute to and from an American city would do. In the women’s car the occupants are mostly young girls from fifteen to twenty, with a sprinkling of little girls and some women up to thirty, but very few who appear to be older than that. They always seem to be happy, singing and “carrying-on” with the utmost abandon. They are ready to start a flirtation at a moment’s notice and occasionally, when their car halts in a station next to some other train in which there are young men near the windows, the whole bevy of charmers devotes itself to making conquests—opening the windows and shouting a volley of good-natured raillery to which, if they are natives and used to it, the youngsters retort in kind. Then, as the trains start, the laughing crowd throws kisses by handfuls and the flirtation is over.
As our train jolted along, with frequent stops to take on and let off fourth-class passengers, the Professor explained to me that to be consistent to his plan we really should have visited Tournai first. However, it was far out of the way as a starting point, and its history did not dominate that of all Flanders in the way that the early history of Bruges did. In fact, while in early times subject to the Counts of Flanders, it was often subject to the French Crown for generations at a time, and is usually regarded as a Walloon rather than a Flemish city. Its influence on Flemish art and architecture, however, led us to include this Ville d’Art in our itinerary.
According to the scholars Tournai is the Turris Nerviorum of Cæsar, the capital of the Nervii, and one of the oldest towns north of the Alps. In 299 it was the scene of the martyrdom of St. Piat, who founded a church on the site of the cathedral. As the visitor gazes at that magnificent structure he can reflect that the ground on which it stands has been consecrated to divine worship for more than sixteen hundred years. During the fourth and fifth centuries Tournai was the capital of the branch of the Franks that ruled over the greater part of what is now Belgium, but the history of these early days when the Roman Empire was tottering to its fall is very meagre, and more than half legend at best. The first kings of the Merovingian line are shadowy, mythical personages who stalk across the pages of history like the ghost in Hamlet—far off, dim, but awe-inspiring.
Childeric is one of the most picturesque of these early kings. Expelled from the tribe owing to his youthful gallantries, he fled to the court of Basinus, King of the Thuringians. The queen, Basina, welcomed him even more warmly than her husband, and hardly had Childeric returned home, on being recalled by the tribe some years later to rule over them, than she followed him. Arrived at his court, she announced that she had come to marry him because he was the bravest, strongest and handsomest man she had heard of. She added, naïvely, that if she knew of another who surpassed him in these particulars not even the sea could keep her from such a rival. Basina, who from all accounts should be the patron saint of the suffragettes, won her suit and they were married. On the night before the ceremony mony, according to an ancient chronicle, she bade Childeric go into the courtyard of the palace at Tournai to see what he might see. He went at her bidding three times. On the first occasion he beheld a long procession of lions, unicorns and leopards, struggling and snapping at one another, but all without a sound, nor did the beasts cast any shadow. The second time he saw huge bears shambling across the courtyard which vanished even while he was gazing at them. Then came packs of wolves which ran in circles and leaped, but silently. On his last visit he saw dogs of huge size and many colours, and innumerable cats which always looked behind them. From these portents Basina explained to him the qualities of the race of kings of which he was to be the ancestor. Clovis, one of the greatest of the early Frankish kings, was the child of Childeric and Basina.
In the sixth century Tournai figured prominently in the narrative of the furious wars between Fredegonda and Brunehault, one of the great epics of the early Middle Ages. Fredegonda, who was the daughter of a bondsman, became by virtue of her beauty and imperious will the wife of Chilperic, King of the Franks. Brunehault, equally beautiful, but a king’s daughter as well as the wife of a king—Sigebert, brother of Chilperic—began the contest to avenge the death of her sister Galeswintha, whom Fredegonda had caused to be slain. Chilperic and Fredegonda were besieged at Tournai in 575, but the latter caused the murder of Sigebert, upon whose death the besieging army dispersed. Incidents in this siege are depicted in the stained-glass windows of the cathedral. The contest between the two fierce queens lasted more than half a century, Brunehault at the last being torn to pieces by wild horses, when more than eighty years old, by the son of her life-long rival.
In 880 the Norsemen fell upon the city and its inhabitants fled to Noyon, where they remained for thirty-one years. In its subsequent history the old town sustained more than its share of sieges, the common lot of all frontier places, and changed hands oftener than any other European city. For many generations it was subject to the early Counts of Flanders. Philip Augustus then annexed it to France, to which it belonged until the reign of Francis I. In 1340 occurred the most famous of all its sieges. It belonged at that time to France and was attacked by the English under Edward III, a huge army of Flemings under Jacques Van Artevelde, the Duke of Brabant and the Count of Hainaut with their followers and many others—a host estimated by Froissart at one hundred and twenty thousand men. That delightful historian devotes more than a dozen chapters to a gossipy account of the siege, which lasted more than eleven weeks and was only raised by the approach of a French army when the supply of provisions was reduced to three days’ rations. In 1513 Tournai was captured by Henry VIII, who gave the see to Cardinal Wolsey, but soon sold it back to the French. The huge round tower a little distance to the right as one enters the city from the railway station was erected by the English King during his short rule. In 1521 the city was captured by Charles the Fifth, becoming a part of his domains, and in 1581 it sustained another famous siege. In common with the rest of Flanders and the Low Countries, the city had revolted against the atrocities of Philip II. It was besieged by the Prince of Parma and heroically defended by Christine, Princess of Epinoy, whose statue stands in the Grande Place. She was herself wounded and had lost more than three-fourths of the garrison before she surrendered.