The Story of Bruges

by Ernest Gilliat-Smith

When Count Charles assumed the government of Flanders the Erembalds were a power to be reckoned with. Their political influence was unrivalled, the number of their retainers was legion, their wealth was immense, by their marriages they had allied themselves with the first families in the county.

Desiderius Hacket, the head of this house, was Châtelain of Bruges, and, as such, second man in the realm; Bertulph, his brother, as Provost of St. Donatian’s, was the greatest churchman in Flanders, and, as hereditary chancellor, chief of the Count’s household, whilst other members of the family held honourable and lucrative appointments about their sovereign’s person. Notwithstanding, however, their great position, the Erembalds were never included in the ranks of the feudal nobility. They were originally simple freeholders or Karls, perhaps hereditary chiefs of some circle or guild, who by commerce, and may be also by plunder, for the Karls were lawless folk, had amassed vast wealth, and thereby been enabled to climb to the high places they now held. That they could by the same means, if they had been so minded, have also been ennobled, there can be no doubt, but the Erembalds, like all Karls, despised feudalism and all its works and all its pomps; in their eyes the title of Freeman was a nobler one than any which princes could bestow.

Tancmar, the head of the great feudal house of Straten, was the owner of the lordship of Straten, in the neighbourhood of Bruges, where he had built himself an impregnable fortress, a wealthy devotee who had gained no little renown for piety and good works, the great Abbey of St. Andrew, hard-by his own domain, was the especial object of his munificence. He held high office in the Count’s household, was a member of his Privy Council, and, what was worth more to him than anything else, his sovereign’s confidential and devoted friend.

Tancmar himself had no children, but he had adopted two nephews, sons, perhaps, of his brother; Giselbert, or, as we should say Gilbert, and Walter, whom men called the Winged Lie.

Between the families of Erembald and Straten there had gradually grown up a deadly feud. As to the first cause of it both Walter and Walbert are silent, but the former writer tells us that, like many other great quarrels before and since, it arose out of a very small matter.

Wegener, indeed, comes to the conclusion that the primary quarrel was between Charles himself and Bertulph, that it sprang from the Count’s hatred of the Erembalds, whose pride and lawlessness were marring his projects of reform, and that the Stratens on the one side, and Bertulph’s kinsfolk on the other, were mere tools in the hands of these two wire-pullers, who themselves at first remained in the background.

Certainly all the facts of the case, taken together, go to show that if Charles himself was not its first instigator, he at all events exploited the quarrel for his own political ends.

In the early years of his reign, he had issued an edict by which he forbade all men save his own officers to go armed in time of peace—an edict particularly galling to the Karls, who regarded the bearing of arms as the inherent right of a freeman, and to deprive them of it was, in their estimation, and perhaps also in the estimation of the Count, to deprive them of their personal liberty. The Karls, it is true, were a cruel and a quarrelsome race. The territory in which they dwelt was often drenched with blood. Scenes of rapine and murder were with them matters of everyday occurrence; their hereditary feuds and petty wars were a constant menace to the State. Charles was determined to put an end to all this, and he knew of but one way of doing so—to submit the territory of the Karls to the tender mercies of feudalism, for, in his estimation, law and order were matters of far greater moment than mere personal freedom. This, however, was not the opinion of the Erembalds. Although they themselves, as officers of the Count, were in no way touched by the edict in question, they opposed it with all their might, and from that moment Charles determined to crush them.

To attack his old friends openly was an undertaking too hazardous. It was to the Erembalds, as Bertulph used to boast, that Charles owed his crown, and he had repaid the debt with gold and favours. Their power was now as great as his own, and their popularity perhaps greater. Moreover, to strike at them was to strike at the Church, for Bertulph, their chief, was chief also of the clergy of Flanders. It behoved Charles, then, to be very wary. He determined therefore for the moment to keep himself in the background, to bide his time, and when the plot was ripe to act through trusty agents. He had not long to wait, the crisis came early in 1126. It happened thus.

Richard of Raeske, one of the many barons allied by marriage to the house of Erembald, and a man of no little repute in Flanders, fell out about this time with Walter of Straten and defied him in the Count’s presence to mortal combat. To the surprise of every one the challenge was refused, and the ground of the refusal was still more astounding. “I will never measure my sword,” hissed ‘the Winged Lie,’ “with any but a free man, and the Lord of Raeske, by wedding a serf, has forfeited his right to that title.” He was alluding to one of Charles’s own edicts, perhaps made in anticipation of the quarrel, by which it was decreed that ‘the freeman (liber) who married a slave (ancillam) should, after a year’s wedlock, cease to be free, and sink to his wife’s condition.’