accomplishment, for a strong guard of Flemings was posted outside each gate. All day long the work of destruction continued, and when at last, worn out with slaying, the Flemish sheathed their swords, the streets and lanes of the city were red with blood and filled with dead men, and so great was the number of corpses that it took three whole days to cast them into the adjoining fields, and there give them burial. And yet fortune had been kind to some of them; the lives of forty knights had been spared, and perhaps of three-score soldiers. These men had been cast into prison; others more fortunate still had saved alike their lives and their liberty. Amongst them note the authors of all the mischief, Jacques de Châtillon and Chancellor Flotte. The former, who, with all his faults, was no coward, at first essayed to stem the tide, but when his horse had been slain under him, seeing that resistance was hopeless, he endeavoured to slip away unobserved, and in the darkness and confusion succeeded in doing so. Presently, wandering about the mazy byways in search of some refuge, he fell in with Pierre Flotte in like predicament with himself. At last they discovered the place they were seeking, perhaps the garret or the cellar of some warehouse giving on one of the canals. Here these two friends, the one a prince of the blood royal and the other the bastard of a courtezan, each of them men of wealth and might, without victuals and without drink, lay huddled up in a frowsy corner, expecting each moment would be their last, until once more the shades of night fell on the town.
Then slinking forth, not without trepidation, Châtillon in the garb of a clerk, Flotte disguised in some other fashion, each of them presently made good his escape, and found an interval of breathing time, the first at Courtrai, the second at Lille, during which to recruit themselves for the great contest so soon to follow.
Truly the fourteenth century was a century of noise and adventure, and yet somehow or other in those days, so we are told, men had no nerves.
CHAPTER XV
The Battle of the Golden Spurs
THE victory was not yet won, Flanders was not yet free, but the massacre which took place at Bruges on Friday, May 13, 1302, and which the burghers for centuries after with brutal irony delighted to call their ‘good Friday,’ was the beginning of the end.
A few days before that event, William of Juliers had sought out the Lord of Moerseke and demanded of him the sword which Guy had entrusted to his keeping when he set out for France. At first the knight refused, but the war-like prelate seized it roughly from his hands, saying, as he did so, ‘This is now my pastoral staff; henceforth the battlefield shall be my school, and soon Philippe le Bel shall rue his treachery to Guy of Dampierre’; and William kept his word. Remaining at Bruges for a few days to recruit his forces, he sallied forth into the country round, and soon Ghent alone of all the towns of Flanders was in the hands of the French; and early in June Guy of Namur, a younger son of Guy of Flanders, reached the capital, where he was welcomed with costly presents and garlands and clashing bells, and appointed Commander-in-chief of the Flemish host and Regent of the county.
Meanwhile Châtillon had brought to Paris the news of the Bruges massacre, and by the end of June Philippe had gathered together an army to be wondered at. ‘So great was the number of chariots and horsemen,’ says Matthew of Westminster, ‘that the surface of the earth was hid by them.’ Every baron in France who could take the field was there, and mercenaries from Spain and Italy, and Hainault and Brabant. Their leader was the Count of Artois. Presently they set out for the Netherlands, and towards the close of June they reached Lille.
Nor was the army of resistance which the Regent had assembled one worthy of contempt. In addition to his own German auxiliaries and a handful of volunteers from Zealand, he had collected recruits from every commune and châtelaincy in Flanders. Even from Ghent, the only town which still held to France, came seven hundred men headed by two sheriffs. In the foremost rank were the burghers of Bruges, each man ranged under the banner of the guild to which he belonged and gorgeous in its rich livery—purple, blue, gold, or white embroidered with crimson crosses. Their leaders were Breidel and De Coninck and the redoubtable Provost of Maestricht. Hard-by, under Eustace Sporkin, one of the last of the old Saxon chiefs, stood the yeomen of the Liberty of Bruges; half naked, bare headed, sinewy of limb, carrying no weapon but the rude scharmsax of their ancestors, but for all that a force not to be contemned. From time immemorial the fathers of these men had borne the brunt of every foreign invasion and of every native tyranny. ‘So far as they are concerned,’ as Kervyn notes, ‘the history of the fourteenth century is the history of every century which had preceded it.’ Jacques de Châtillon, like so many tyrants before him, would fain have reduced them to slavery, and they had sworn to prevent it.